ZAMĀN
(2026)for contralto and orchestra
| Commissioned By: | Basel Sinfonietta, and Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik With the support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Art Council |
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| Instrumentation: | 2.2.2.2. - 2.2.2.1. - Timp. - 2 perc. - pno. - hp. - 8.6.5.4.3 |
Lyrics by Oscar Bianchi, based on the diary of his great-aunt (1943) and excerpts from Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg
29.03.2026, world premiere, Basel Casino
Zamān, the Persian word for “time”, was inspired by the diaries of my great-aunt Dora Polacco, a member of the Italian branch of my family, who sought exile in Switzerland with her family during the Nazi-Fascist occupation of Trieste.
However, Zamān is not a piece about exile as a historical event, but rather about the time when exile returns.
What Dora gives us is not only the story of a lived experience, but a condition that—as recent events show, from Palestine to Ukraine, from South America to vast areas of the African continent—recurs every time history forces human beings to abandon their roots, their loved ones, their land.
It is in this suspended time that the experience of exile ceases to belong to a single story and becomes a human condition: an open wound, but also a fragile—and often tortured—possibility of rebirth.
The destruction and reconstruction of life forms correspond, as Thomas Mann writes in The Magic Mountain, to a fever of matter.
It is this fever that Zamān is traversed by: an ambiguous force, capable of stunning and annihilating, but also—in the most fortunate destinies—of awakening, transforming, and transcending suffering.