The Heavenly Ladder / Analysis of the Musical Cryptograms

One of the most intriguing artists of the early 20th century, Adolf Wölfli was a troubled autodidact whose vast and inscrutable legacy is still being untangled by scholars and critics. Wölfli suffered from psychosis, schizophrenia, and frequent hallucinations, and he created his obsessively intricate illustrations while interned at a Swiss psychiatric hospital. Though the multi-talented Wölfli had no formal musical training, he drafted musical compositions using a notation system of his own devising, often incorporating large swathes of his notation into his art. Several efforts have been made to decipher Wölfli’s highly esoteric compositions, but few have proven as successful as French composer Baudouin de Jaer on The Heavenly Ladder. Baudouin’s painstaking efforts at musicological decryption have resulted in a suite of fascinating interpretations of Wölfli’s work that are as beautiful as they are unsettling. In Baudouin’s hands, Wölfli’s compositions sound like the damaged fragments of some lost Schoenberg concerto or like Satie’s Gymnopedies as played by a disturbed and inattentive violinist. This music is often startling and disquieting, but moments of real beauty frequently emerge from the dissonance.