On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite work from our catalogs. This time: Hubert Stuppner writes about Inverno-in ver by Niccolò Castiglioni

Inverno-in ver by Niccolò Castiglioni

If you asked me, which works I would take on an ark in case of a flood, I would pick these compositions of contemporary music: Castiglioni’s Inverno in ver., Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie, and Gorecki’s Second Symphony.

Inverno in-ver is a work by the most naive and innocent composer in contemporary music. He was an Arte povera composer; he rejected all pomp; he spoke with birds like Saint Francis, and he lived a simple and modest life. This composition is like a love garden from the middle ages: it transforms all that is earthly; it paints all that is earthly in the brightest colors.

Castiglioni is Messiaen’s seraphic brother-in-faith, the Italian Fra Angelico, who adds a bright halo to all tones, always in a perfect mixture of consonant and dissonant sounds as if he sees angels singing in the highest registers.

Actually, Castiglioni only uses high frequencies: flageolets, Glockenspiel, celesta, and bells of any kind. “L’aigu“, as Messiaen would say. Messiaen, by the way, called him the most interesting Italian composers of his generation.

This music full of treble paints “Eisblumen”, frozen flowers, with notes. It covers triads with hoar frost and makes flageolets flying like snowflakes. It is a kind of Winterreise: the frozen flowers relate to Schubert’s dried flowers, which add a false bottom to the music.

When I hear this work I always remember a phrase from Mahler’s Lied von der Erde: “My friend, fortune was not kind to me in this world!”

Inverno in-ver is the work of a composer that did not get along in this world; he suffered at its coldness, and he expressed this coldness by composing frozen flowers.

Castiglioni spent the last months of his life in a silent place in South Tirol, in Brixen, where he had visions: he kept seeing ghostly balloons in the sky, and he was afraid of them.

“Even the beautiful must perish! That which overcomes gods and men.” (Schiller)

Stuppner's worklist


Castiglioni's worklist