Like the piano piece Fortællingen om Adam Ruhani and the chamber work Prinsesse Atehs svundne digte , Khazarian Mirrors is inspired by the universe and the idiom of Milorad Pavic’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars. The mystic main figure of this book is princess Ateh from the 9th century, whose …
… name is interpreted as the term of the four stages of consciousness with the Khazars. At night she would have one letter on each eyelid … the letters were from the forbidden Khazarian alphabet, where each letter kills as soon as it has been read. Those who wrote the letters were blind persons; and in the morning she was tended upon by court ladies with closed eyes …
It is a wellknown fact that Princess Ateh never succeeded in dying … Daubmannus passes on this single and not very worth while believing story, not as a story about how Princess Ateh really died, but about how this might have happened, if, at all, she had been able to die: In order to divert the princess, two maids once brought her two mirrors …. one of them being a fast mirror, the other one a slow mirror … All that the fast one would pick up, while it mirrored the world as an advance of the future, the other slow mirror would give back …
When they brought the mirrors over to Princess Ateh, she was still lying in her bed, and the letters had not yet been washed off her eyelids. She saw herself in the mirrors with closed eyelids, and immediately died. She died, killed by the letters from the past and from the future simultaneously.
… spændstig, helstøbt og interessant.
(Fædrelandsvennen)
… fine kontraster mellem kraft og poesi.
(Bergens Tidende)
… uden der på nogen måde var tale om programmusik.
(Morgenposten, Fyn)