A Christmas Fairy Tale: The Ice Princess and her Boy in a Tree

“All that we see or seem is but a dream, a dream within a dream” (Edgar Allan Poe).

Somewhere in a Nits album, a miniature universe lies hidden in a fragile, ethereal reality shaped in the unfathomable interplay of music and words. One I always love to return to. Everything always seems to fit into a world of music. Especially in this one. You can easily house a complete, boundless world made of fantasy in the one-dimensional world of musical time. Music is like a dream. When it escapes from its material source, it takes with it the amaranthine moments of an enduring past into the present. A sweet, flourishing youngness of the past for ever there… Music is like a friendly, familiar house in the dark, where the lights are always on (like the one Henk drew in the booklet accompanying Giant Normal Dwarf). It’s comforting, offering a constant shelter in a world where the light is often clouded by darkness.

I made myself a little fairy story triptych out of the album Giant Normal Dwarf. Although the whole work is a tender adventure of imaginative wonder, three songs stand out for me and make up my preferred Nits fairytale: “Ice Princess”, “Boy in a Tree” and “Moon Moon”. The opening notes of “Boy in a Tree”, but even more so, of “Moon Moon” sound like the most enchanting beginnings of a fairy tale ever… They are my “Sleeping Beauty”, “Cinderella” or “The Princess and the Pea” in grown-up days. “Ice Princess” is probably my favourite of them all, although it seems, at first hearing, an inconspicuous little song featuring a small trombone and a trumpet, animated music characters, the resounding noise of elephants, and an ice princess wandering and dancing around in a somewhat forlorn landscape of youth and coldness…The song is a beautiful mystery of the imagination for me.

I found this wonderful cover of it made by pianist Stefan Horlitz. This Nits Dornröschen is carefully awakened by sweetly echoing princess like vocals, a slow – as if in a snow covered landscape – treading piano, a deep wistful male voice and clear bells ringing with icy transparency. The thoughtful piano making its way through the echo and the ringing of time. The intriguingly evasive rhythm is one of an undefined place and time. Where are we? All the different times and places of memory crossing one another in a star-filled sky. Music is transformed into a twinkling space of the imagination. The boy in a tree with an unbridled fantasy feels like her perfect prince charming in this barren landscape of only a moon, the only element of romance in a world of chimneys and factories… Leaving together along that long, snow covered road with just a suitcase of dreams…

Don’t you wish that the ice princess and her boy in a tree would live happily ever after…?

Joke Roelandt, December 2020