When the premiere of novembrig hits the stage on Friday, 3 November 2023 at the TAK theatre in Schaan, Liechtenstein, two people in the audience will be more excited than anyone else. The first is Elsbeth Maag, the Buchs poet and author of the novembrig song lines, which have touched and moved so many people. «I will sit there in absolutely joyful anticipation and my heart will be pounding away,» she says on this mild morning in early autumn as we meet for a conversation in the Traube’s Gartenzimmer with the Gams entrepreneur and cultural patron Alois Bischof. This 3 November will be special for him, too. I’ll probably also experience a little fear as I sit there,” he reveals. «We have invested so much passion, time and work. I’ve heard it so many times now, but that evening I will experience it as though I were immersing myself in the words and sounds for the first time.»
But let’s start at the beginning.
Dear Elsbeth, you are the creator of novembrig. Please could you explain to us what it is and how it came about?
EM: In the late 1990s, I received a request from the Toggenburg musician and composer Peter Roth to write poems about life and death in my Werdenberg dialect. I took on the challenge. Living, dying, new growth, death – nature shows us the way. As I wrote, I myself became a leaf, the wind, a stone – I merged with nature. That’s how the novembrig cycle of poems came into being. In 1997, Peter Roth wrote a song-like composition for mixed choir, solo soprano, clarinet, violoncello and piano. Numerous concerts at various locations followed over several years – the scoring became a true success in the Swiss-German region. The countless responses from people for whom novembrig was a help in difficult times were overwhelming. Eventually, it fell asleep. But it did not die. Now it’s coming back. Differently. Wonderfully differently.