Origins & Context

Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir)

Piano improvisation: 31 May 2024
Vocal improvisation: 29 August 2025

Almost fourteen months separate Durch Feuer wird die reine Natur erneuert, recorded on 30 March 2023, from the piano improvisation that would eventually become Das Siegel der Liebe.

During that period, my life changed again.

A relationship that had accompanied me through some of the preceding years gradually came to an end. At the same time, my professional situation, which had appeared increasingly stable in March 2023, became uncertain once more.

But something else began.

A New Relationship

In the summer of 2023, I decided to begin meeting people again.

At the end of June, I encountered a Ukrainian woman through a dating platform. We spoke for the first time by video call on 3 July and met in person a few days later.

The relationship developed quickly.

There were excursions, walks, concerts, dancing, weekends away and long conversations. Within a relatively short period, she became an important presence in my life.

I was deeply in love.

Looking back from a later point in life inevitably changes the way one understands a relationship. But that later knowledge does not belong here.

Ordo ab Chao has always been concerned with moments as they were experienced.

And in 2023, this was how I experienced it: I believed that I had encountered an extraordinary love.

Another Period of Uncertainty

Professionally, the situation was moving in almost the opposite direction.

The regulatory approval that had seemed such an important milestone in March 2023 did not ultimately produce the long-term stability I had expected. Changes in ownership and management meant that the professional position I had helped to build would not continue in its existing form.

I therefore began looking for another path.

A new professional collaboration appeared promising, and I entered 2024 expecting it to provide the next stage of my working life.

Instead, the first months became extremely difficult.

Expected income did not arrive when anticipated. For a period, my financial resources became very limited. There were ordinary living expenses, responsibilities towards my daughters and the continuing cost of education. After several years in which I had repeatedly rebuilt professional stability, I found myself once again confronting uncertainty.

At almost the same time, the relationship entered its first serious crisis.

For a while, I did not know whether either part of my life — professional or private — would develop as I had hoped.

She Stayed

Towards the end of March 2024, something happened that remained important to me.

I had been invited to join a short trip to Nice. I explained that I could not afford it. My financial situation at that moment was simply too difficult.

The response was uncomplicated: come anyway.

So I went.

What mattered to me was not the journey itself. It was what I believed it represented.

At a moment when I had relatively little to offer materially and considerable uncertainty around me, the woman I loved was still there.

I experienced that as loyalty.

I experienced it as love.

During the following weeks, we again spent considerable time together — walking, swimming, attending concerts and making excursions.

By the end of May, I wanted to return to the recording studio.

31 May 2024

On the evening of 31 May 2024, she came with me.

Unlike the previous recordings in Ordo ab Chao, the circumstances inside the studio were unusually intimate.

She sat beside me while I played.

She had a glass of champagne in her hand.

There was no composition and no predetermined duration. As with the other works in the cycle, I simply began to improvise and continued until the music no longer needed to continue.

Except that, on this occasion, the ending was not determined by me alone.

After approximately twenty minutes, her glass was empty.

She quietly put it aside, stood up and kissed me.

I stopped playing.

That is why the piano improvisation has the duration it has.

The kiss did not become a later story attached to the recording. It physically entered the circumstances of its ending.

At the time, I gave the improvisation the provisional title Liebesglut — the fire or glow of love.

It existed in that form for more than a year.

An Existing Musical Moment

The recording of 31 May 2024 was complete.

I did not return to the piano to rewrite it. I did not attempt to improve its structure or reconstruct its ending.

It remained a document of that evening.

This distinction matters because what eventually became Das Siegel der Liebe was not conceived in its final form from the beginning.

The piano came first.

Only later did the idea emerge of allowing another voice to encounter it.

The starting point was a poem written from the imagined perspective of a woman who loves a Freemason.

Its language moves through encounter, silence, intimacy, surrender and finally a declaration of love.

But I did not want the text simply to be recited over the recording. Nor did I want to compose a conventional vocal line and fit it to the piano.

The principle of improvisation had to remain.

29 August 2025

More than a year after the original piano recording, I returned to the studio on 29 August 2025 with soprano Marina Baertsch and sound engineer Etienne Schorro.

I had known Marina for approximately fifteen years. A professional opera singer and vocal teacher, she had performed on a number of occasions in a Masonic setting together with my piano teacher. I therefore knew her voice and musicianship long before the idea for Das Siegel der Liebe emerged.

The piano performance from 31 May 2024 remained unchanged.

Marina listened to it through headphones.

She had the poem, but there was no composed vocal score.

She listened — and improvised.

Two vocal takes were recorded. The second became the final version.

This created a form unlike any of the preceding works in Ordo ab Chao.

The piano belonged to one evening.

The voice belonged to another.

Approximately fifteen months separated them.

When I played the piano in May 2024, I could not know how another musician would respond to it more than a year later. When Marina entered the studio in August 2025, however, she could hear the entire musical world that already existed.

Her improvisation therefore became a response to something that could no longer respond to her.

Two Moments

The period between the two recordings was not without further uncertainty.

My professional life continued to change, and the days immediately preceding the vocal recording were themselves unexpectedly turbulent.

But I did not enter the studio on 29 August to recreate the emotional circumstances of May 2024.

I did not play the piano again.

The moment had already happened.

What remained was the recording.

The second studio session allowed another human voice to encounter that preserved moment without changing it.

This is perhaps the essential circumstance behind Das Siegel der Liebe.

It is not the documentation of a single evening.

It contains two moments in time.

The first is an improvisation created in the presence of the woman I loved.

The second is another musician’s improvised response to that already existing musical document.

Neither was planned together with the other.

Yet they now exist together.

The End of Ordo ab Chao

When the final version was completed on 29 August 2025, seven years had passed since the first recording of Ordo ab Chao in February 2018.

I had never planned those seven years as a cycle in advance.

The recordings had accumulated.

Between them came professional beginnings and endings, financial uncertainty and recovery, the death of people close to me, separation, fatherhood, new relationships, friendship, love and repeated attempts to create stability.

Each time I returned to the piano, I was somewhere else.

The piano remained the place in which I did not have to explain any of it.

With Das Siegel der Liebe, something changed.

For the first time in the cycle, another human voice entered the musical space.

The final work had begun as a solitary piano improvisation.

It ended as an encounter between two improvisations separated by fifteen months.

And with that encounter, Ordo ab Chao came to an end.

The Title

Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir)

The title Das Siegel der Liebe — The Seal of Love — does not derive from a specific Masonic expression or tradition.

It emerged simply as the title that seemed right for the completed work.

The original piano improvisation of 31 May 2024 had carried the provisional title Liebesglut — The Glow of Love. When the vocal layer was added in August 2025, the work had become something different: the original improvisation remained unchanged, but it was now encountered by the voice of a woman singing from the imagined perspective of someone who loves a Freemason.

The Masonic dimension therefore lies not in the title itself, but in the perspective of the poem.

Das Siegel der Liebe became the title of this final form.

The subtitle, Erlösung in Dir — Redemption in You — belongs to the same language of love: the idea that, in another person, one may experience a form of release, refuge and emotional arrival.

The title was not intended as a code to explain the music.

It was a name for what the completed work had become.

Musical Analysis

Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir)

Piano improvisation recorded 31 May 2024
Vocal improvisation recorded 29 August 2025
Duration: 20:51

Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir) occupies a distinctive position within Ordo ab Chao. Unlike the preceding works of the cycle, it did not emerge from a single act of improvisation.

Its final form brings together two improvisations created approximately fifteen months apart.

The first is the piano improvisation recorded on 31 May 2024 and provisionally titled Liebesglut. It was conceived and recorded as an autonomous improvisation, without a predetermined vocal part.

The second layer was created on 29 August 2025. Listening to the existing piano recording through headphones, an operatically trained singer improvised a vocal interpretation based on a five-part poem. No vocal score had been composed in advance. Two takes were recorded, of which the second was selected for the published version.

The resulting work is therefore not a conventional composition for piano and voice. The piano does not accompany a previously conceived vocal line, nor was the piano subsequently altered in response to the singer.

The temporal relationship runs in one direction:

the piano cannot know the voice; the voice can hear the piano.

I. The Piano Improvisation

The original piano improvisation unfolds over approximately twenty-one minutes and develops through a succession of expansions, withdrawals and renewed accumulations of energy.

Its opening is comparatively restrained. Rather than immediately establishing the full dynamic range of the improvisation, the music allows activity to emerge gradually.

A first substantial expansion develops during the early part of the work. This accumulation does not lead to permanent intensification. The music subsequently withdraws, creating space from which another process of movement can emerge.

This relationship becomes characteristic of the improvisation as a whole.

Intensity is established, relinquished and rebuilt.

A further major expansion occurs later in the first half, followed by one of the most pronounced reductions of the recording. The music then begins again, moving through successive regions of renewed activity and further intensification.

In the later part of the improvisation, another substantial withdrawal is followed by a final resurgence of energy. Yet this resurgence does not determine the ending.

Instead, the closing section contracts.

Earlier reductions repeatedly contained the possibility of another beginning. The final reduction does not. The improvisation gradually relinquishes its accumulated energy and comes to an end without requiring a final overwhelming assertion.

At its broadest level, the piano architecture may therefore be described as:

emergence — expansion — withdrawal — rebuilding — renewed expansion — major reduction — renewed activity — successive intensifications — withdrawal — late resurgence — release

These should not be understood as predetermined sections. They are retrospective descriptions of a form that emerged through improvisation.

II. From Liebesglut to Das Siegel der Liebe

The provisional title Liebesglut is significant historically.

It demonstrates that the association with love belonged to the piano improvisation before the vocal layer existed. The later poem and vocal performance therefore did not introduce the idea of love into otherwise unrelated musical material.

At the same time, the piano was not created as an accompaniment to the poem.

This distinction is fundamental.

The recording of 31 May 2024 existed independently for approximately fifteen months before the second improvisational layer was created.

Consequently, the final work preserves the original piano performance intact while allowing another musician, at another moment in time, to respond to it.

III. The Vocal Improvisation

The vocal layer begins from a fundamentally different condition.

The singer encounters music that has already happened.

She cannot influence its tempo, dynamics, harmonic direction or large-scale architecture. She listens to the existing recording through headphones and must find her own position within a musical structure that will continue regardless of what she sings.

The poem provides the verbal material. Its five sections — Der erste Blick, Dein Schweigen, Die heimliche Weihe, Ich gehöre dir and Das Gelöbnis — establish a textual progression from encounter through intimacy towards commitment.

But the poem does not constitute a composed vocal score.

Its words become material for a second act of improvisation.

The singer must decide in real time how language becomes sound: when to enter, how long to sustain a phrase, when to allow the piano to remain alone, how strongly to project a word or thought, and how her melodic line should relate to the musical environment she is hearing.

The vocal performance therefore exists simultaneously as interpretation and improvisation.

IV. Two Different Forms of Improvisation

The relationship between the two layers is unusual because their freedom is fundamentally asymmetrical.

On 31 May 2024, the pianist improvises into an open future. At every moment, the continuation of the work remains undetermined.

On 29 August 2025, the singer also improvises — but she improvises against a future that is already fixed.

For her, the piano recording cannot change.

This creates two different temporal conditions within the same work:

the first improvisation creates the musical landscape; the second improvisation moves through an already existing landscape.

The distinction prevents the relationship from becoming that of soloist and accompaniment in the conventional sense.

The piano retains its autonomy.

The voice retains its own improvisational agency.

Neither layer was composed simultaneously with the other.

V. The Poem as Structural Material

The text introduces something that had not previously existed in Ordo ab Chao: explicit language.

Earlier works leave their emotional and autobiographical associations outside the sound itself. Their titles and histories may provide contexts, but the recordings remain entirely instrumental.

Here, words enter the music.

The poem is written from the perspective of a woman who loves a Freemason. Its imagery moves between romantic intimacy and a more contemplative, at times almost sacred vocabulary: silence, light, dedication and devotion.

The five sections gradually move from perception towards surrender and finally towards a declaration of love.

Yet in the completed work, these words are not simply placed above the piano as an explanation of it.

The piano existed before them.

The voice therefore does not reveal what the piano had secretly “meant.” Instead, it creates a later perspective upon an already completed musical event.

VI. The Final Work

The published version of 29 August 2025 is therefore best understood as the meeting of two moments.

The first belongs to May 2024.

The second belongs to August 2025.

Between them lie approximately fifteen months during which the original improvisation remained unchanged.

When the vocal layer was finally added, the earlier recording was neither rewritten nor reconstructed. A second improvisation was allowed to encounter it.

This makes Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir) structurally different from the preceding works of Ordo ab Chao. It preserves the immediacy of improvisation while simultaneously introducing memory, distance and reinterpretation into the process by which the final work came into existence.

The piano is an event preserved from one moment in time.

The voice is a later response to that event.

The completed work contains both moments simultaneously.

Large-Scale Conception

The construction of the work can therefore be reduced to a simple sequence:

31 May 2024
Piano — improvisation

↓

Fifteen months of temporal distance

↓

29 August 2025
Voice — listening — response — improvisation

↓

Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir)

The piano does not accompany the voice.

The voice does not complete an unfinished piano composition.

They are two improvisations created fifteen months apart. The second listens to the first.

Poem

Das Siegel der Liebe (Erlösung in Dir)

I – Der erste Blick

Ich saß neben dir.

Nicht als Frau –

sondern als Frage.

Deine Hände kannten die Antwort,

lange bevor mein Herz sie wagte.

⸻

II – Dein Schweigen

Du hast nie gesagt, wer du bist.

Aber deine Stille war lauter

als jedes Bekenntnis.

Ich hörte den Ruf

in der Art, wie du nichts verlangt hast.
⸻

III – Die heimliche Weihe

Du hast mich nicht gebeten,

dir zu folgen.

Und doch bin ich dir nachgegangen

in den Raum,

den du nie betreten hast

mit Worten –

nur mit Licht.

⸻

IV – Ich gehöre dir

In deiner Nähe fällt alles ab:

Wille, Stolz, Widerstand.

Ich knie nicht aus Schwäche,

sondern weil ich bei dir

endlich nicht mehr kämpfen muss.

⸻

V – Das Gelöbnis

Ich liebe dich –

nicht wie man liebt.

Sondern wie man betet,

wenn niemand zusieht.

Wenn alles still ist.

Und wahr.