Erdenschwere

Maren Gamper – piano

Swiss-French pianist and theatre artist Maren Gamper presents her first solo album, an intimate and deeply personal exploration of the writing of Swiss author, journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–1942). The album takes as its point of departure Schwarzenbach’s text Erdenschwere (“Earthly Heaviness”), transforming its language and emotional landscape into a free, improvised musical meditation.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach lived a remarkably intense and restless life. Born into one of Switzerland’s most influential industrial families, she studied history in Zurich and Paris before turning to literature and journalism. She travelled extensively through Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, the United States and Africa, working not only as a writer and reporter but also as a photographer. Her journeys became both geographical and existential explorations, and her writing repeatedly returns to questions of identity, displacement, freedom and the difficulty of finding a place in the world. A committed antifascist and a woman who challenged many of the social conventions of her time, Schwarzenbach experienced a profound tension between the desire to escape and the impossibility of escaping oneself. Her life ended tragically in 1942, when she died at the age of only 34 following a bicycle accident in the Swiss Engadin.

This tension lies at the heart of Erdenschwere. The notion of “earthly heaviness” evokes a state in which the desire for freedom encounters the weight of existence itself: melancholy, rootlessness, doubt and an almost physical sense of gravity. Yet Schwarzenbach’s writing is never simply one of despair. Beneath its darkness there is an intense longing for connection, beauty and transcendence.

For Maren Gamper, this inner movement becomes music. Rather than setting Schwarzenbach’s words to a predetermined composition, she responds to the text through improvisation, allowing sound to emerge in the moment and to follow the shifting emotional currents of the writing. Gamper is an experienced collaborative pianist whose work moves between classical song, contemporary music, improvisation and theatrical performance. Her long-standing musical partnership with Swiss soprano Viviane Hasler has resulted in performances and recordings that combine traditional repertoire with contemporary music and improvisation.

On this solo recording, however, Gamper turns entirely inward. Her playing is searching rather than demonstrative, creating an evolving sonic space in which silence, resonance, fragility and intensity become equally important. The piano is not merely an instrument here, but a medium through which Schwarzenbach’s words can continue to reverberate beyond language.

Recorded on a 1919 Blüthner piano in a quiet studio on the Baltic Sea, far removed from the noise and distractions of everyday life, the album creates a particularly intimate atmosphere. The age and character of the instrument become part of the musical experience, its resonances carrying the listener into a space that feels both fragile and timeless.

Maren Gamper’s intense and captivating performance transforms Erdenschwere into an inner journey: through pain and uncertainty, loneliness and longing, but also towards moments of light, tenderness and love. It is an album about the weight we carry, the freedom we seek, and the possibility that even within that weight, something can begin to move.