The Album “Valkyrie”: Space Without Boundaries.
Space without borders.
The music reached its climax—thousands of sparks danced in the air, leaving trails of light in my eyes. For a second, I stopped hearing it. There was only the roar of the crowd, like wind rushing through the metal trusses of the stage.
Clara and I stood at the edge of the platform, holding hands. Behind us, the orchestra was still sustaining the final note, and it seemed as though it was not simply holding the sound, but holding the space itself together, preventing it from falling apart.
The sky showered us with stardust, and every particle seemed like an embodiment of the music.
Clara’s famous dress glittered, reflecting its light back toward the audience. It had waited a long time for its moment in the darkness of a wardrobe—and now it seemed eager to make up for lost time. I remembered how it had looked in the workshop under the cold lamp, too heavy for the stage. The fabric had lain motionless, the stones weighing down the hem, while the inner framework made it look like armor that had not yet found its wearer.
“You lightened it, ” I said quietly, more to hear my own voice above the roar than anything else.
Clara smiled slightly without taking her eyes off the audience.
“I just let it breathe. Now it moves with the music instead of against it.”
And it showed. She had reduced the number of stones and removed part of the inner framework. Now the fabric breathed, moving freely with the rhythm of the music. Hundreds of faceted crystals caught the spotlight and threw it back into the roaring crowd—cold, sharp beams like shards of ice.
Against the massive black steel trusses, Clara looked like a living fragment of the quartz abyss of the Iron Cathedral. Fragile at first glance, yet, like the colossal underground resonators, capable of refracting immense energy through herself.
I looked out over the audience and suddenly understood: the stage no longer ended at the edge of the platform. It extended beyond it—into the dark rows of seats, up to the highest tiers, beneath the roof, into the night sky beyond the arena. The roar of thousands of people was no longer noise. It had become a single vast hum—the continuation of the orchestra’s sound.
As though space had stopped resisting the sound.
As though it had finally agreed to become part of it.
And we stood at the very edge of that boundary, understanding that beyond it, this was no longer a concert.
Beyond it began the very thing all of this had once been conceived for.
The Wind of the Heights.
At that moment, I finally heard what we had been trying to capture from the very beginning: the feeling of wind at great height—that same wind that does not push you down, but tests you. The wind at the edge of the steel framework of a future skyscraper, humming through its taut cables like Jürgen’s bass. The wind at the summit of the Iron Cathedral, where stone resonates deeper than any choir. The wind atop an emergency radio-relay tower, where one step forward is no longer a metaphor.
That wind neither supported nor stopped you.
It only asked one question:
Can you hold your ground?
Now all those heights converged at a single point.
The stage.
The sound.
The night when that wind finally found its voice and ceased to be merely wind.
I turned my gaze toward Hans. His timbre—low, rough, carrying that inner rasp that spoke not of aggression, but of something lived through. He sounded like a step on a metal staircase, every flight already tested for strength. Beside him was Clara, her voice clear, almost luminous, as though she could already see the horizon the rest of us were only beginning to approach.
Their duet in the title track suddenly came together not as a struggle, but as a single monolith. When Hans’s muffled growl, like basalt grinding against stone, settled into the foundation of the riff, Clara’s voice rose from that granite ground and climbed into the stratosphere.
Earth and air.
Blacksmith and jeweler.
Strength and beauty.
They did not need to overpower each other, because they existed in parallel dimensions—and yet found a point of connection.
Jürgen and Konrad would sometimes enter that structure, adding depth and volume. My role was to bind it together: to hold the line when the music began to circle in the wind.
The orchestra did not hide behind a wall of sound—it soared along its crest. My guitar did not cut across the throats of the cellos; it wove itself into their low resonance, becoming part of a single vibrating monolith. We did not place classical music over industrial metal like some beautiful wrapping.
We made the orchestra part of our machine.
Whenever people called our music symphonic rock, I felt a slight misunderstanding. There was no “against” in Valkyrie.
Everything was moving in the same direction.
The composition “Sternenstaub in der Seele” (“Stardust in the Soul”) closed the album. It sounded almost like a hymn: a sweeping melody, powerful vocals, the feeling of light after a long journey. At first glance, it seemed out of place within the overall musical arc. There was so much movement in Valkyrie—the wind of the heights, the metal of the road, the tension of the guitars.
And this song was not about strength.
It was about balance.
Its foundation was Lena Liri’s poem “No Better Than You”. Like all the texts on the album Inspirïert von Lena Liri, it passed through the music and changed along the way: the song’s rhythm demanded a different structure, different accents. But its meaning remained almost untouched.
Perhaps that was why it stood at the very end.
Not as a finale, but as the quiet conclusion to the entire story.
Sometimes you need the height only to understand that we are all made of the same material.
The same light.
The same mistakes.
And perhaps the same stardust.
And somehow, that made the world a better place.
The orchestra fell silent. The last vibrations of the strings still hung in the air. I looked out over the audience and realized that everything that had happened to us—the Cathedral, the road, the wind of the heights—all of it had somehow found its way into this music.
Perhaps that was why it was called Valkyrie.
Not because it carried strength.
But because it lifts you.(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)
Listen to the song Sternenstaub in der Seele / Metallherz, read the lyrics and translation. Album “Inspirïert von Lena Liri” vol. 2 Valkyrie.