Franz Schubert, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Harald Bergmann

Scardanelli is a German-language audio book drawn from the soundtrack of Harald Bergmann's 2000 film of the same name, the last part of his trilogy on Friedrich Hölderlin. It follows the poet through the 36 years he spent in Tübingen in the care of the carpenter Ernst Zimmer. In those years he called himself Scardanelli and signed with that name the poems he gave to visitors. Texts, testimony and music are cut together into a radio play that stands on its own without the images.

Bergmann conceived and assembled the montage and produced it. The poems are read by Walter Schmidinger, recorded at the Riet-Studio and at Audio-Vision-Studios in Berlin. André Wilms voices Scardanelli and Udo Kroschwald plays Zimmer, with a large cast as witnesses and visitors. The music comes from Mozart, Schubert and Bach, with the Schubert String Quintet in the 1993 EMI recording by the Alban Berg Quartett and Heinrich Schiff. Peter Schneider's "Scardanelli piano" was recorded in May 1998 at Studio Babelsberg, and the pianists Noël Lee and Christian Ivaldi at IRCAM in Paris in December 1997.

The thirty tracks alternate poems, accounts by contemporaries and musical passages. It opens with Ich heiße Scardanelli! over Haydn. It then moves through the seasonal poems of the late period, Der Frühling, Der Sommer, Der Herbst and Der Winter, several of them in more than one version. The witnesses speak in broad Swabian dialect, describing Hölderlin's habits and his long fingernails, while the three parts of In lieblicher Bläue are set against Schubert. Near the end come the autopsy report by Dr. Gmelin and the account of Lotte Zimmer, before a short epilogue.

In Die Zeit, Wilhelm Trapp wrote that one needs to know neither the facts nor the film to be drawn into its atmosphere of voices and sound. He heard the music as "das sphärische Echo der Dichtung", the spherical echo of the poetry, and praised Schmidinger's childlike, self-forgetting reading. The Wolfsburger Allgemeine described a "hoch atmosphärische Collage" that hints at the full dimension of a tragic existence without claiming to capture it.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1761, first released in June 2004, with a German-language booklet of the poems.