Werk der Woche - Mendelssohn/Reimann: "...oder soll es Tod bedeuten?"

2009 marks Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s 200th birthday, and to celebrate, the Ludwigsburger Castle Festival 2009 will present eight songs and a fragment of the romantic Master on June 25th at the Ordensaal at the Residenzschloss. Aribert Reimann arranged these pieces, which draw upon stories by Heinrich Heine, for string quartet and soprano. With Reimann’s intermezzos composed to fill out his work, his complete cycle stands as “…oder sol les Tod bedeuten?”

 

This chamber work is presented by the Petersen Quartet, which consists of Conrad Muck (Violin), Ulrike Peterson (Violin), Andreas Willwohl (Viola) and Henry-David Varema (Cello). The soprano part will be sung by Claudia Barainsky, who is substituting for the renowned soprano Christiane Oelze.

 

The song cycle was originally created as a work commissioned by the Schwetzingen Festival in 1996, marking Reimann’s third encounter with adapting works by other composers after his transcriptions of Robert Schumann's "6 Songs" op 107 and Franz Schubert's "Mignon".

On composing this piece, Reimann writes:

"In the new piece ‘...oder sol les Tod bedeuten?’ (the last line of the song "In dem Mondenschein im Walde"), I have composed six intermezzi for String Quartet that bind the songs together: reflections in my musical language on a recently-heard Mendelssohn song, after-thoughts or hurrying-through, through which, in short audible progressing parts from the last song came to me, the fragment “Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass”, this time in the structural events weaving or breaking through or contrasting excerpts. To create a cohesive composition, I have selected eight songs and a fragment after poems by Heinrich Heine (“Was will die einsame Träne,” “Mein Liebchen, wir saßen beisammen” and the fragment “Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass“ have not yet appeared in print, and I have been supported by the State Library in Berlin to make these available). The processing of composing these for string quartet goes far beyond a mere transcription. In some songs, especially in the lyric songs “Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, “Allmählich im Traume,” and “Mein Liebchen, wir saßen beisammen,” I deviated greatly from the piano part and composed a lot, without encroaching on Mendelssohn’s harmony, separating his from my own thought-world, so that the fragments would always break open new parts of Mendelssohn’s music.”

As early as next year, the music world will celebrate the birth of another great composer: Robert Schumann was born on June 8, 1810. Read more in the new edition of schott aktuell - the journal under the headline "Remember Schumann ... 2010".