Origins & Context

The period leading to Das verlorene Wort in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. Hoffnung! was one of the most uncertain periods of my professional life. I was not simply trying to earn enough money to support myself and my family. I was still trying to discover what my professional life after banking could become.

I had left an established career and entered a period in which there was no longer a predetermined path. I was building an independent existence, experimenting with different forms of business and advisory work, and trying to determine where my experience and abilities could create something sustainable. That freedom was exciting, but it also came with considerable uncertainty.

After leaving banking and becoming independent, I had been financing the development of my new professional existence largely from my own savings and pension capital. Alongside my advisory activities, I had become involved in the distribution of a high-quality European acupressure product.

My involvement in this business had originally developed through my mother. After retiring from a career of more than thirty years at the Swiss National Bank, she had trained in massage and begun working with clients. Through an existing business contact, she started distributing the product on a small scale in Switzerland.

In the summer of 2018, shortly after my father’s death, I was approached by the manufacturer and asked whether I would develop the Austrian market. I accepted. Over the following months, the activity expanded, and I also became involved with Germany and increasingly with Switzerland.

For a while, the development was encouraging. Sales grew steadily, and by the spring of 2019 I began to believe that the business might eventually become sufficient to stabilise my financial situation.

Then the momentum disappeared.

Sales declined during the summer, while my expenses continued and the capital with which I had financed my independence became progressively smaller. I tried to find additional sources of income. At one point, I was prepared to take almost any work available if it would allow me to reduce the rate at which my remaining capital was disappearing while continuing to build the business.

By October 2019, I could see the end approaching with uncomfortable clarity. On my calculations, if nothing changed, my remaining resources might last until approximately January 2020.

I had a family and two children. I was trying to establish an independent professional existence. And I had reached a point at which I genuinely did not know how I was going to make it work.

On 28 October 2019, I went into the studio.

There was no business reason for doing so. Recording a twenty-minute piano improvisation was certainly not going to solve my financial problems.

But I had reached a state in which, for a moment, I simply stopped trying to solve them.

I sat down at the piano and played.

The result was Das verlorene Wort in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. Hoffnung!

What happened immediately afterwards has inevitably become part of my memory of this recording.

Only a few days later, I attended a private networking event organised by friends. I almost went without expectation. 

During the evening, a long-standing personal acquaintance asked me how things were going. I told him quite openly that they were going badly: I had too little work and my money was running out.

His response was completely unexpected.

He told me that this was, in fact, fortunate timing. He had a company facing a situation for which he needed someone with precisely my professional background. I could start immediately.

The assignment involved a small M&A transaction in the Swiss insurance sector. It gave me both income and the opportunity to enter a field that was new to me.

At almost exactly the same time, the distribution business, which had struggled during the preceding months, suddenly began generating substantially stronger sales. Shortly afterwards, another professional assignment followed.

Within a matter of weeks, my situation had changed completely.

At the end of October, I had been calculating how many months remained before my resources were exhausted. By November, I was working on several projects simultaneously, sometimes sixteen hours a day, and earning enough to support myself again.

None of this should be read backwards into the music.

When I sat at the piano on 28 October, I did not know what was about to happen. The improvisation did not anticipate the events that followed, nor was it conceived as a musical programme describing my financial circumstances.

It belongs to the moment before the change.

That distinction is important to me.

The recording preserves a point in my life at which I had exhausted many of the solutions I could consciously construct. I could not know that, only days later, circumstances would begin to move in an entirely different direction.

In retrospect, that makes Das verlorene Wort in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. Hoffnung! one of the clearest examples of what these improvisations have come to mean to me: not compositions created to illustrate events, but documents of a particular inner state at a particular moment in a life whose next chapter was still unknown.

The Title

The title Das verlorene Wort in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. Hoffnung! did not exist when I entered the studio on 28 October 2019. As with several of my improvisations, the title emerged only afterwards, when I listened to the recording and searched intuitively for words that seemed to belong to it.

Not every title has a precise explanation. I do not begin with a concept and then construct music to represent it. The music comes first. The title is found later.

The language of this particular title emerged partly from my long-standing experience of Freemasonry and partly from the Christian triad of faith, love and hope. But in my own formulation, one word appears twice:

Hope.

And the second time, it carries an exclamation mark.

That repetition was deliberate.

At the time of the recording, I had no idea that my professional circumstances were about to change. I did not know that only a few days later an unexpected encounter would lead to a new assignment, or that other sources of income would begin to develop at almost the same time.

On 28 October, none of that existed.

What remained was hope.

There is a saying familiar to me from Russian: hope dies last. That idea came close to what I felt at the time. When certainty has disappeared, when solutions seem to have been exhausted, hope may be the last thing that remains.

The repetition in the title therefore matters to me:

Faith, Love, Hope. Hope!

The second Hope is not merely one element among three. It is an insistence.

At that moment in my life, I was hoping for better times — professionally, certainly, but perhaps personally as well. I could not know what form such a change might take, or whether it would come at all.

The title was given to the work retrospectively. It should therefore not be understood as a programme for the improvisation, nor as a prediction of what happened afterwards.

It was simply the name that, when I later listened to the music, felt right.

And of all the words in it, the one that needed to be said twice was:

Hope.

Musical Analysis

Das verlorene Wort in Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung. Hoffnung! is a large-scale piano improvisation of approximately twenty-one minutes and forty seconds. Its musical architecture is not based on a predetermined formal scheme. Instead, the work develops through a long process of accumulation, intensification and eventual withdrawal.

The opening is remarkably restrained. Rather than immediately establishing a strong dramatic statement, the music begins with space. Individual gestures are allowed to resonate, and the relatively low dynamic level creates an atmosphere of concentration and expectation. The work seems less concerned with announcing its direction than with discovering it.

From this quiet beginning, the musical texture gradually becomes more active. Harmonic movement increases, gestures become more insistent and the density of the piano writing expands. This development is not linear in every detail: moments of greater activity are repeatedly followed by temporary retreats. On the larger scale, however, the direction is unmistakable. The first half of the improvisation constitutes a prolonged accumulation of energy.

Harmonically, the work remains fluid. G and C emerge as particularly important points of reference, surrounded by D, E, A and F. These relationships provide recurring areas of tonal orientation, but they do not establish a single key that governs the entire improvisation. Stability is repeatedly reached and then relinquished.

One of the most significant characteristics of the work is the relationship between tonal clarity and harmonic tension. More diatonic passages coexist with denser and less immediately stable harmonic regions. The transition between them is often gradual, giving the impression that the music is continually negotiating between orientation and uncertainty.

The central portion of the improvisation contains its greatest concentration of energy. Approximately halfway through the work, the dynamic weight and density increase substantially. The piano writing becomes more forceful and the succession of musical gestures more urgent. Rather than functioning as an isolated climax, this region feels like the consequence of everything that has accumulated since the restrained opening.

After this extended central intensification, the direction changes.

The music does not attempt to sustain its maximum energy. Instead, the second half increasingly becomes a process of reduction. The texture opens again, dynamic weight decreases and the spaces between gestures acquire greater significance. Material that previously seemed driven by accumulation is gradually allowed to dissipate.

This gives the overall work a broad arch-like structure:

emergence — accumulation — intensification — release — withdrawal.

The final section is particularly important to the form. The music becomes increasingly quiet and spacious, returning in some respects to the restraint of the opening but not simply repeating it. The listener has passed through the central intensity of the work; the quietness at the end therefore carries a different weight from the quietness at the beginning.

There is no conventional triumphant conclusion. Nor does the improvisation attempt to resolve everything through a final emphatic gesture. Its ending is achieved through relinquishment. Energy is progressively removed until the musical argument appears to have exhausted its need to continue.

This distinguishes the work from the forward-driving conclusion of Wohlauf Würdige Brüder, Schreitet Voran and also from the more compact, contrast-based structures of the two preludes of Aber im Vorhofe beziehet euren Lohn. Here, the considerably longer duration allows transformation itself to become the principal formal element.

The result is music whose structure appears to emerge from the act of improvisation itself. Rather than presenting a predetermined argument, the work discovers its proportions through time: beginning in restraint, passing through an extended region of increasing intensity, and ultimately returning to silence through a gradual process of release.