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H. E. ERWIN WALTHER SONGS
The much-quoted self-assessment of H. E. Erwin Walther that as a composer he is »a colorful bird«, applies in particular to his song composition. In his oeuvre for voice and piano, which spans a period of more than 50 years, romantic songs stand alongside the Tragedy of the Chicken and the Steeple Cock, there are Wilhelm Busch chansons as well as the settings by Spanish poets represented on the present recording, come in one and the same song (day is from the Emmerig cycle) twelve-tone process and (in the broadest sense) aleatoric elements are used. As the pieces selected here also show, Erwin Walther always focuses very precisely on the respective text - this can be a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann or a small rhyming joke in the form of a "rhyming song".
From there, the choice of means of expression is determined, be it in the piano parts that are sometimes closely oriented to the vocal line, sometimes in a highly independent form, be it in the vocal parts that often reach the limits of the vocal range and go beyond the limit of what is spoken. The stylistic range shows Walther as a composer who took very good note of the contemporary idioms, but who, on the other hand, with a certain obstinacy and subtlety, embarked on a path that cannot be firmly assigned to any particular trend. His confrontations with the stylistically diverse originals consistently benefit from this freedom of access.
With the Four songs based on Spanish lyrics (1989) Erwin Walther turned to four of the most important Spanish poets of the first half of the 20th century. The key term for his compositional adaptation was the name of the collection of poems, Federico García Lorca's Memento comes from: The »Poema del cante jondo« (composed in 1921, published ten years later) comes from the context of the revival of the authentic flamenco singing style, which Lorca had initiated together with Manuel de Falla.
»Cante jondo« means »deep singing«, which means the depth of the feeling, which is expressed in a metrically free, melismatic-expressive, sweeping vocal line oriented towards a central tone. Walter plays on this singing style, especially in "if one day I die" of the Memento and consequently attacks him in "When I Die" from Juan Ramón Jiménez' I'm not I up again.
Another design feature that evokes the flamenco tradition is the use of guitaristic elements in the piano part: the opening alternating note motif in Tour Locations (after Antonio Machado), the seemingly extemporaneous arpeggios at the beginning of the Memento (Walther prescribes »sounding caesuras according to feeling«) and the bass notes to be played »like plucked« to Rafael Albertis The dove was wrong.
However, the latter loses more and more of its folkloric coloring here, as does the chromatically revolving vocal motif for »has been deceived«. The precise, yet never rigid, treatment of the formal peculiarities of the lyrical templates and the melodic lines that repeatedly spread out into wide sequences of intervals give the sequence of songs its specific intonation.
Erwin Walther was connected to the composer and author Thomas Emmerig through the artist group »Eckiger Kreis«, which was active in the 1970s. In the 1979 based on his texts Six songs for soprano and piano On the one hand, Walther uses twelve-tone-based methods (day is), but on the other hand leaves the interpreters a certain amount of freedom in the design. This is the piano part at the beginning of The grassy ones to be realized in such a way that the given selection of six two-tone sounds (from the material of a twelve-tone series) is mixed “in the most varied order and temporal density”, over which the singing voice can move metrically independently.
In i hear you calling the freely rhythmic parts of vocals and piano are interlocked again and again. A broad ambitus (up to the treble E-flat) and spoken passages are also characteristic of the vocal part. On the piano, the spectrum ranges from pointedly placed individual notes to impressionistic sound effects and the muted cluster that is brought to life by a final bass note at the end of the cycle.
The five recorded here form a rather loosely arranged sequence Songs for tenor and piano. Are the English or French ballads That Nightfall and escaped (1953) in varied strophic form with a loose tonal orientation, the radius of expression is concentrated in the Three songs for tenor and piano (Settings from 1956). After a weighty piano introduction, the initially simple vocal line becomes Hermann Stahl's poem muggy day more and more expressively charged, before the pedal-covered piano arpeggios of »Gewitter Orgeln« announce.
Zu Star hangs close to the roof (based on a poem by Ernst Barlach friend and documentarian Friedrich Schult) the »well-meaning moon« draws a broadly sung streak of light over calm chord progressions until it is interrupted by blowing frogs and a trotting hedgehog. In Ingeborg Bachmann's fourth Psalm from the band The graced time Walther detects a word-sound analogy between the passages "Mulde meine Stummheit" and "Mein Munde Ganz im Schatten" and sets them to music accordingly, although in the second case a climax is reached. At the end, the piano counters the sinking in the "shadow" of the vocal part with an unreal pianissimo tone in the highest register.
They strike a deliberately unpretentious tone of voice Four cheerful songs for soprano and piano from 1960 onwards, in which the piano on the one hand supports the voice and on the other sets ironic accents. In Eugen Roths A Man After chromatic aberrations, the vocal part comes to terms with the final harmony in D major, Kästner's go into you illustrates a »walk« over two octaves, in Christian Morgenstern's Rabbit song After the dots of the hare and the man looking at him seem unable to count to three, a god "mild and dumb" looks down.
Delightful miniatures, oscillating between mischievousness and melancholy, form the Twelve spoken songs for speaker and piano from 1987. Over sometimes tricky piano character pieces, the spoken part, which is not metrically fixed and only rarely aligned with the accompanying rhythm, unleashes the charm of small rhymes and inconsistencies with holy irresponsibility.
Juan Martin Koch
program:
Four songs based on Spanish lyrics (1989)
Four Songs on Spanish Texts for baritone and piano
[01] Square (Antonio Machado and Ruiz) 02:02
[02] Memento (Federico García Lorca) 03:17
[03] The dove was deceived (Rafael Alberti) 03:05
[04] I am not me (Juan Ramón Jiménez) 03:37
Three songs for tenor and piano (1956)
Three Songs for Tenor and Piano
[05] muggy day (Hermann Stahl) 04:26
[06] Star hangs close to the roof (Friedrich Schult) 01:24
[07] Psalm (Ingeborg Bachman) 01:38
Six songs for soprano and piano (1979)
Six Songs for Soprano and Piano on texts by Thomas Emmerig
[08] Are there any flowers left? 02:56
[09] day is 02:12
[10] The grassy ones 02:15
[11] i hear you calling 02:21
[12] winter around us 02:50
[13] Waders 02:38
Two songs for tenor and piano (1953)
Two Songs for Tenor and Piano
[14] escaped (French ballad) 05:16
[15] That Nightfall (English ballad) 04:42
Four cheerful songs for soprano and piano (1960)
Four Cheerful Songs for Soprano and Piano
[16] Earlier since I'm inexperienced (William Busch) 00:48
[17] A Man (Eugen Roth) 00:29
[18] go into you (Erich Kastner) 00:32
[19] The rabbit song (Christian Morgenstern) 01:07
Twelve spoken songs for speaker and piano (1987)
Twelve Speech Songs for Speaker and Piano
[20] 1. Like that (Werner Durrson) 00:23
[21] 2. A tadpole (Michael Benke) 00:35
[22] 3. A mosquito (Michael Benke) 00:53
[23] 4. Through treetops (Charlotte Ueckert) 01:07
[24] 5. Confusion (Margaret Jehn) 00:48
[25] 6. In the garden (Alfons Schweiggert) 00:55
[26] 7. The Tooth (Gunter Spang) 01:03
[27] 8. A shudder (Jürgen Spohn) 00:57
[28] 9. The fog (Wolfgang Bachler) 01:31
[29] 10th story (Johannes Poethen) 02:39
[30] 11. The evening in tails (Wofgang Bachler) 02:02
[31] 12. Big city evening (Lisa-Maria Blum) 03:01
total time: 64:03
Yvonne Friedli soprano
Joachim Vogt tenor
Wolfram Tessmer baritones
Frank Gutschmidt piano
Press:
03/13
21.02.2013
Avant-garde artist from the Upper Palatinate
Music by the Amberg composer HE Erwin Walther, who died in 1995, is experiencing a small renaissance: his daughter presented two new CDs in her hometown
By Michael Scheiner, MZ
On the mountain. "He was grumpy, straight-forward, but for us also an outstanding pedagogue!" At the presentation of two CDs in the Amberg City Theater, Mayor Michael Cerny chatted a little out of the box. When he was still at school, he himself experienced the composer HE Erwin Walther, whose music was the subject of the performance on stage. As a music teacher who “was a little bit different”. "Notations?" asked Cerny mischievously, to add, "...we also learned them." He was addressing a very important element of the musical-artistic work of Amberger, who died in 1995: graphic notation. "We also drew a lot of music," Cerny reported, "and made music afterwards."
With this unusual method, Walther enabled his students to experience a different style. A style that music lovers and listeners sometimes still feel uncomfortable with today. Drawn scores, which do without notes and lie on a musician's music stand like a picture or a drawing, experienced their heyday in the 50s and 60s as a special form of contemporary, modern music. Walther was stylistically and artistically very versatile. In half a century he created an unusually wide-ranging oeuvre of songs, chamber music, orchestral and choral works, film music and stage works, including several hundred graphic works. These "fields of action" called "audiograms" were intended to "establish a relationship between graphics and acoustics", as he himself once noted.
Serious, cheerful, enigmatic
Four pieces from this rich estate have now been recorded – one twice – alongside nine conventionally notated compositions for clarinet and piano. Produced by the Bavarian Radio's Franken studio in Nuremberg's Meistersingerhalle, they were released under the title "Chamber Music" on Neos Music, a renowned Munich label for new music. Interpreters are the clarinettist Ib Hausmann, Peter Bruns on the cello and the pianist Frank Gutschmidt. The latter also contributed to the second album "Vocal Music", which was also recorded by BR in Nuremberg in February a year ago.
It contains 31 songs divided into five smaller and larger cycles, ranging in length from five minutes to sometimes as little as half a minute. Like the instrumental pieces, the sometimes serious, sometimes humorously cheerful and surreally enigmatic songs are stylistically motley. Walther confidently used stylistic forms from late Romanticism to Impressionism and twelve-tone music to the most advanced means of expression of the avant-garde of the time, used folk music elements such as the Zwiefacher, and jazz where it seemed appropriate. He wrote his songs about poems and texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Federico Garcia Lorca, Wilhelm Busch and Erich Kästner, the Regensburg musicologist Thomas Emmerig and many other authors. All this makes Walther's work - and with it the carefully edited and extremely appealingly designed sound carriers in excellent interpretation - extremely exciting and varied to this day. There is hard to digest next to cheerful, an airy piece next to highly demanding vocal parts. Soprano Yvonne Friedl, tenor Joachim Vogt and baritone Wolfram Teßmer, who were also present at the presentation, confidently mastered these pitch jumps and heights, which sometimes seem almost unsingable.
The daughter keeps the work alive
The art historian Michaela Grammer, daughter of the composer, played a large part in the fact that Walther's music is published and played today. In the Amberg City Theater she enthusiastically told how, after the death of her father, she and her mother viewed and sorted “baskets of reviews, sketches, scores and extracts from the archive”. A monograph (volume 1998) of the Bavarian Association of Musicians about HE Erwin Walther was published as the first documentation in 36. A little later, numerous scores and now the two recommended CDs followed in the Stuttgart Ikuro Verlag.