Ansichten eines Käfers

Heinrich Böll's "Views of a Clown" and Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (with the "beetle" Gregor Samsa) are interwoven here to create a grotesquely melancholy portrayal of a guitar virtuoso. Enormous efforts are made on six strings (which are tuned to give intervals of 33 cents) to produce at first a microtonal "prelude", but the chords are never the right ones. Microtonal scales are played up and down with enormous contortions on the fingerboard. The old mixes with the new: The moonstruck beetle's son (Pierrot?) plays "minimalist" canzona-like chords, but he doesn't get beyond an "accompaniment": he doesn't manage to play a love song. - And there are non-European elements: Gamelan scales, or African pulsations in the last movement, but the beetle never manages to travel properly to these regions in the world, but he strives for them.