The central inspiration behind the works of The Welten Project is exploring the idea that we do indeed live at ‘a frontier between light and dark’. Gertrud Kolmar’s vivid reflections on human experience, set as they are among the unspeakable oppressions of 1930s Germany, offer a profound vehicle for exploring these themes. The Welten cycle presents a compelling opportunity for creating work of re-imagination and ekphrasis – plus, in addition, act as a springboard and inspiration for wholly original work. Despite being written in 1937, Kolmar’s Welten cycle offers a body of work of remarkable universality and abundant resonance with our world today.
Art’s remarkable ability to evoke the multi-hued ambiguities of experience, to lay bare the ‘radical mystery of existence’ as J F Martel puts it, speaks to qualities that, in my view, become immediately recognisable in Kolmar’s work – and throw down a most compelling gauntlet to any artist or composer following in her wake.

The Angel in the Forest, following on from Julian Marshall’s first Kolmar Cantata, Out of the Darkness, is also taken from the Welten cycle and serves as the text for Julian’s second Kolmar Cantata. It offers a disturbing if understated glimpse into the nightmare world about to engulf Europe.
As with Out of the Darkness, The Angel in the Forest suggests that a new life can be found in an escape from the city. But refuge is to be discovered not in the mountains but in the countryside which holds the promise of an innocent, perhaps even prelapsarian world, with its “musing fields”, flowers and grass: a place where the animals “don’t speak evil”. And yet at the heart of this poem, is something perhaps even more disturbing than Out of the Darkness because the early promise of hope bound up with the protagonists’ ability to escape, is slowly eroded at every turn.

The Angel in the Forest appears to offer its readers little or no solace other than the imagined possibility that comfort-from-hardship could still be found in a steadfast companion. But even that promise appears to be cut away at the end of the poem. “We will thirst and hunger, suffer together / Together, one day, sink down by the dusty wayside verge and weep…”. And yet this powerful ending seems also to suggest an allusion to the opening of Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon / There we sat / sat and wept / as we thought of Zion”. If this was Kolmar’s conscious intent, then it is precisely through this final reference that the poem succeeds in turning its moment of despair into yet another promise of something “other”. By transposing the allusion away from the waters of Babylon onto the dusty wayside of a seemingly infinite road Kolmar might well be suggesting that even at the depth of despair this place of the poem’s ending is, in fact, merely a resting place: a place to take stock, in order to remember “Zion”, to mourn for what is lost and thus, through renewed strength, continue onwards.

This is Julian Marshall’s second passionate engagement with another significant fragment from Kolmar’s neglected and often forgotten writings. As in his first cantata, Julian has again paid tribute to the poet’s remarkable and powerful feminine creativity and, in so doing, succeeds in commemorating Kolmar’s life so cruelly silenced at the very moment she seemed to be about to peer into and articulate its very depth.

© Philip Kuhn, September 2018 – abridged from programme note