In the Maze | The Musician Jörg Widmann

18 JUNE 2023: The film accompanies Widmann on this labyrinthine journey, from the very first drafts of the piece to the premiere performance.

Music takes on a life of its own in the moment of writing, believes Jörg Widmann. It assumes its own form, becoming a living being that forges its own path. As such, it remains a fragment, because it is not what he, the writer, had intended.

For Widmann, the image that best describes this progression is a maze. Today, it has become the theme that runs through his life’s work, one that he has explored musically over the course of six distinct pieces. In the maze, one gets lost and bumps into things. There are moments "where it doesn’t go any further. And that is something that I often experience as problematic and very painful in composing. As happy as composing is." Increasingly, he is led out of the maze of composing into which he has been drawn by his other role of clarinetist by his activities as a conductor.

We follow Widmann into his maze, reaching for the thread that runs through his life and work. Together, we experience the ups and downs, the euphoric moments as well as the moments of crisis that are brought about by the process of writing. We encounter him backstage and on stage. And we discover that it is in fact a bundle of threads that intertwine to form a tangle, whereby the composer without the clarinetist, the conductor without the composer, or Jörg Widmann without the human, is inconceivable. The film accompanies Jörg Widmann in the composition of his trumpet concerto “Towards Paradise (Labyrinth VI)”, commissioned by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Duration 52 min
Author Holger Preuße
Editor Ralf Streese
Producer Stefan Pannen
Executive Producer Theresa-Martina März
Original title of music work Jörg Widmann - Towards Paradise
Conductor Andris Nelsons
Production Company sounding images, BR/ARTE, 2022