We began in the world that was-in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the "Fugitives" concept was inspired by Zemlinsky's "Meeraugen," or "Sea Eyes," which tells of a "person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean." You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history-war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism-made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths.
There is a specific high that comes with outrunning your own limiting beliefs - a chase that has previously landed me in an Austrian fasting clinic, on a half-marathon start line in Madrid, and sitting ten days of silent meditation in the English countryside. But even I, a glutton for punishingly offbeat wellness trends, would have laughed you out of the juice bar had you told me a year ago that I'd soon be yodelling my way to self-improvement.
