1. Symphonie

The prevailing mood of these poems selected from Walt Whitman’s famous collection Leaves of Grass can hardly be more disheartening and desperate, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann could not have found any more appropriate texts to describe his view of his own country in the year 1935. ‘I sit and look out on all the plagues of the world and the entire distressing and humiliating situation […]’ he wrote in his introduction. By this point in time, Hartmann had been long convinced that the seizure of power on the part of the National Socialists would lead to war and horrifying crimes. He himself was defamed and his works banned, meaning that he would not experience the first performance of this composition until 1948. The work, which had subsequently undergone substantial revision, received its final title Versuch eines Requiems [Attempt at a Requiem] in 1956 and reveals Hartmann as a self-avowed humanist like no other, as an intermediary between tradition and modernity, as the illustrator of internal and external musical processes and as a composer capable of taming extreme emotion in accomplished form.