Free Cherry Violins: the Story

Here once
an endless sea was lapping
And the Spirit of God circled
above the crests of waves.
But now—forests are greening,
peaks have closed the horizon,
horses crop the grass,
tiled roofs washed clean,
And blossoming cherry trees
Rustle about nothing.

The manuscript arrived at the Bruckner Conservatory Linz in 1923, discovered during the demolition of a boarding house near the remains of an old city wall. Inside a water-stained portfolio lay a score in faded ink: Freie Kirsche Violinen by Adel of Freiwald, dated 1913. No one had heard of her, and the dwellers of millennia old Freiwald woods in between Waldviertel and Novohradsko had until the most recent times a no-records mindset. There was only the music itself: twenty-three pages of restless, circling string figures with an obsessive repetition of a melodic fragment that gave the piece its strange, chant-like title. The verse on the cover was written in a peculiarly archaic hand, as if the writer had learned penmanship in a different century altogether.

Gerhard Schwendener, an aspiring composer, discovered the manuscript in Bruckner Conservatory Library about 50 years later, while researching his dissertation. He spent that summer reconstructing what the composer might have intended, completing what was left unfinished. The premiere at the Brucknerhaus in Linz in 1977 lasted eleven unbelievable minutes—some listeners later swore they heard the title differently during the performance, as if the music itself were calling for something to be released. The piece sounded like birds trapped in a cathedral, begging for freedom. Had the audience been peasants or forest dwellers rather than modern concertgoers, they would have sworn they were hearing a spell. It was met with an emotional outburst nobody could restrain, as well as nobody was able to rationally explain later—the listeners gave the enigmatic piece a standing ovation, some with tears they didn’t even try to conceal.

Schwendener never discovered what happened to Adel, though he spent years searching, and his footprint is lost in the 1980s. Strangely enough, both the manuscript and the reconstructed piece disappeared during an exhibition in 1989 in Dresden, at the time of the Berlin Wall collapse. What remains is an AI reconstruction from fading memories—a melody as simple and persistent as a child’s song, or perhaps a plea: free cherry Violins.