Free Cherry Violins

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 Margit Wolmut of Freiwald, dated 1913. No one had heard of Wolmut, 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.

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 Wolmut might have intended, adding a second violin section in contrary motion, exposing the original melody in a solo violin while the ensemble created shadows around it. Where Wolmut’s harmony stayed cautiously diatonic, he introduced microtonal inflections that made the piece feel as though it were being played in a room with shifting walls. The premiere at the Brucknerhaus in Linz in 1977 lasted eleven unbelievable minutes that sounded like a controlled chaos, as if birds trapped in a cathedral were begging for freedom, while the whole world had sagged beneath it. 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 Wolmut, 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’s left (and what you hear on this page) is a very approximate, most recent reconstruction made by AI from the verbal testimony in the memory for a woman who may or may not have known, in 1913, that everything including her own work was about to vanish, and who left behind only a melody as simple and persistent as a child’s song: free cherry Violins.