MAKING OF

1990 . Storyboard

Scenes from the storyboard
EXCERPT: Key scene between the dying composer Bruckner and the unmusical abbot.

Everything starts all over again...

After the far too early death of my artistic patrons and musicological mentors, I reluctantly set about completely redesigning the storyboard, making sure it would be immediately understandable even to less gifted musicians. Moreover, I had realized that I would likely never again have such easy access to the elite of the classical music scene and would once again have to contend with the know-it-all prejudices of second- and third-tier musicological guardians. In short, I had to come down from my high horse (from where everything had previously seemed so clear and simple) and work everything out from scratch again.

With the extensive authentic material now available to me and my inspirational intuition, I first created a detailed storyboard for the first movement of the symphony—a useful basis for visualizing Bruckner's Ninth Symphony for both musicians and filmmakers—and had it bound in leather as a small edition workbook. My plan was then to visualize it movement by movement.

bar by bar
The notation of the Ninth Symphony in D minor from the original score*² This is the all-determining syntax of my Sinfonìa visìbile, a contrafactualized version of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. Together with excellent classical musicians, I worked out, almost bar by bar, Bruckner's imaginatively transmitted visual (and Catholic-connoted) creation story and freely translated it into appropriate storyboard images based on his suggested guidelines*. Thus, even those unfamiliar with Bruckner can now understand what is meant by "visìbile" in this adaptation of a symphony—and, above all, what an incredibly exciting story is explicitly hidden within Bruckner's Ninth Symphony.

* It must be said that Bruckner had already completely finished the exposition of the missing fourth movement at the time. However, half of the final sections of the original score are unfortunately no longer traceable. Nevertheless, music experts and AI computers can largely reconstruct the resulting musical gaps from slightly altered earlier versions of individual sections and extensive score sketches. I took this particular circumstance into account in the sequence of the final scenes.

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*2 Musicological Publishing House of the International Bruckner Society in Vienna

Exposed