From Wergo 60072:

Konzert für Klavier und 19 Spieler (1972) 
"Meinem Lehrer Boris Blacher zum 70. Geburtstag" 
Basler Solisten-Ensemble 
Leitung: Francis Travis 
Solisten: Klaus Billing (Klavier), Heinz Holliger (Oboe, Englischhorn), Aurèle Nicolet (Flöte, Altflöte), Hanzheinz Schneeberger (Violine) 
UA 19.10.1973 Nürnberg

Engführung für Tenor und Klavier (1967) 
Text von Paul Celan 
"Meinem Lehrer Boris Blacher zum 65. Geburtstag" 
Ernst Haefliger (Tenor), Aribert Reimann (Klavier) 
UA 23.1.1968 Berlin

Concerto for Piano and 19 Players

The concerto for piano and 19 players has been commissioned by the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk and originated in March through August of 1972. My idea was not to write a piano concerto in the traditional sense but chamber music in which the combination of the 19 instruments with the piano was to change continually. Besides tutti passages there are passages with only a few instruments. Occasionally, they play solos with the piano having the function of a duet partner, e.g. of the alto flute and oboe in the first movement, the violin in the second movement, and the English horn in the third movement. The ensemble consists of 7 wood winds, 2 trumpets, trombone, percussion, 2 string quartets, and a contrabass. The concerto has three movements passing over one into the other, each movement being subdivided into smaller sections. The initial measures are a kind of front identification sound. By their reprise-like recurrence in the third movement (the close intervals at the piano are now expanded to large jumps) they connect the individual parts to a coherent form. The notes B - C sharp - B flat contained in the initial chord form a linear inverse tone sequence introduced in the first movement by the alto flute, played in the second movement by the violas as a canon, then by the violin as inversion of the first two notes (B so to speak remains the central tone), and in the third movement by the brass after the reprise-like beginning. The brass then triggers a far-flung passage of the strings which are counterpointed by chords of the wood winds, shortened small motif groups of the brass, and static chord clusters of the piano composed of the initial chords of the third movement. In between, e.g. in the first movement, there are variation parts, chord groups are jumbled, instrument groups change, in the third movement mirror effects of the two opposing quartets with the piano remaining constant in stereotype chord sequences accompanied by cadence-like playing of the oboes; passages of the second movement recur. Toward the end, the piccolo flute in low pitch from D to G sharp takes up the past events again, the interval shrinks to a minor second while the strings below pile up a chord of nine notes: no end in the sense of termination, rather a question mark, a new beginning in a different world.

"Engführung" for Tenor and Piano

Following the linguistic model of the poem I have divided the musical form into nine sections with each section connected to the next one by a sequence of six notes in the vocal part. At the second entry of the hosanna in the eighth section this "refrain" is processed by the piano into a fugue with contrapuntal subordinate voices of the first piano entry - which also recur as "counter motif" several times in the piece - with final "Engfuhrung" of the "refrain" theme. Not only by this strict form, but also by forms such as agglomerations and the piling of tone groups one upon the other I have attempted to investigate concept and situation of "Engführung" in all its mental and atmospheric interpretations.

The opus was composed in November of 1967.

Aribert Reimann was born in Berlin in 1936. Both parents were musicians, the father a professor and head of the Berlin cathedral choir, the mother a well-known oratorio singer and a singing teacher at the Berlin Academy of Music. He studied composition in Berlin with Boris Blacher and Ernst Pepping, and piano with Otto Rausch. In 1958/59 he attended the Vienna university. Aribert Reimann lives in his home town. He also has earned a reputation as an excellent pianist. As a highly-qualified accompanist he has worked with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Grümmer, Joan Carroll, Catherine Gayer, Barry McDaniel and others.

More Recent Compositions

"Verra la morte", cantata (1966) - "Spektren" for piano (1967) - "Engfuhrung" for tenor and piano (1967) - "Trovers" for speaker and seven instruments (1967) - "Rondes" for strings (1967) - "Nenia" for one speaking voice and orchestra (1968) - "Inane" for soprano and orchestra (1968) - "Loqui" for orchestra (1969) - "Melusine", opera (1970) - "Die Vogelscheuchen", ballet (1970) - "Zyklus fur Bariton und Orchester" (1971) - "Konzert fur Klavier und 19 Spieler" (1972) - "Lines" for soprano and string orchestra (1973) - "Wolkenloses Christfest", requiem for baritone, violoncello, and orchestra (1973).


H. H. Stuckenschmidt, The World of Aribert Reimann

His father Wolfgang Reimann was a prominent Protestant church musician of the Leipzig circle with Max Reger and Karl Straube, his mother a concert singer: that is the familial environment in which Aribert Reimann grew up. Born in Berlin on March 4th 1936, he was still a child when the Nazi regime went through its climax and collapse. To him, music was the familiar language which he learned to master early at the piano. The dealing with vocal parts also occurred very early. Thus instrumental and vocal spirit hold the balance in his musical thinking.

After finishing school, Reimann studied at the Berlin Federal Academy of Music from 1955 to 1959. His teacher at the piano was Otto Rausch, who trained him to be an excellent pianist and extremely sensitive accompanist. His counterpoint teacher was Ernst Pepping, in whose spiritual world sacred music and symphonies coexisted. With him the twenty-year-old acquired the safe fundamentals of polyphonic instrumentation and the free treatment of dissonances. Then he joined the composition class of Boris Blacher. There the evolution of an individual language took place, the critical analysis of the styles and techniques of contemporary music. From the strictly dodeeaphonic work and Blacher's variable metra to serial and aleatory experiments everything now was thought through, tried, and made fertile that modern music of all trends had put up for discussion.

In 1957 Reimann began his career as composer and pianist. He accompanied singers like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Grümmer. Among his first widely noticed opera was a concerto for violoncello and orchestra (1959), the ballet "Stoffreste" with a scenario by Günter Grass (1958), and songs to lyrics by Paul Celan (1960), which were promoted by Fischer-Dieskau. The first piano concerto originated in 1961, a piano sonata in 1957.

In 1964 there followed a brief sojourn at Villa Massimo, the German Academy in Rome, as the holder of a scholarship. At that time, Bernd Alois Zimmermann also lived there. In the same year, Reimann was awarded the Robert Schumann Prize of the city of Düsseldorf.

In 1963 he began working on his first opera commissioned by Dr. Joachim Klaiber, manager of the Kiel opera. Reimann selected "The Dream Play" by August Strindberg, which Caria Hennius worked into a libretto for him. The play, written in 1901, has been an early model for the expressionistic, the surrealistic, and the absurd theater, related to Gerhart Hauptmann and Maurice Maeterlinck as much as to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. The relationsship with Strindberg is evident for a composer who had set to music lyrics by Hölderlin, Gabriela Mistral, Saint John Perse, Paul Celan, and a scenario by Günter Grass.

The opera had its world premiere in June of 1965. Within two-and-a-half hours, its 13 scenes interrupted by an entr'acte passed by. As to its music the opus has two mutually supplemental peculiarities. On the one hand the often hermetic seclusion of the musical language, the obstinate perseverance in fragmental, crumbling, ear-piercing sound, in vehement orchestra polyphony and agglomeration of the motives difficult to control by ear. On the other hand the static use of chord masses which rest like clouds above the action, becoming brighter or darker as if time would coagulate.

At the beginning a twelve-note basic form is exposed in wide octave intervals. The starting note B flat, the intervals of semitone and tritone have a predominant power without tonality ever occurring. There are rhythmic orders serialization of the timbres, permutations of chord groups. Sometimes the eye and the calculating intellect are assigned precedence over the ear. Puntual choirs allot the text to the parts syllablewise, e.g. in the quarrel of the deans. In Fingal's Cave of the second scene when Indra's daughter and the poet speak of dream and reality, the heavenly one beseeches God for redemption from the torments of the earth, an accumulating form builds up; note after note form an ascending dodecaphonic sound with each step having its own rhythm and timbre. And just as it grew, every chord is reduced again.

Traditional forms such as passacagliae and ostinatoes in the fourth and sixth scenes, such as the mighty variation series on the "Beach of Ignomy" are found next to new, "static" forms of chords held for a long time, which ground the advocate's domestic misery. There is high tension everywhere which sometimes leads to eruptions of the noise produced by the orchestra. And then there are points of rest such as the plaintive coloraturas of the discharged singer and the ugly girl or the short love scene of Indra's daughter and the advocate, which ends the first act.

Reimann here shows his great art to write for voices, especially accomplished singers. The two principal parts, Indra's daughter and the officer, are composed in an ever dramatic style and frequent sudden movements. Just like the later opera of Reimann they are among the most difficult parts in any modern opera. The whining tone of the advocate, the enraptured tone of the poet, the resigned tone of the old doorkeeper woman have been caught with a fine ear.

Out of an orchestra with three- or four-fold wind instruments, harpsichord, celesta, harp, piano, strings, and battery Reimann obtains artfully combined timbres, a kind of continuum of the palette. Conspicuous as an episode is a piano fugue in the Play Bach style with bongo accompaniment. Much time is taken up by the symphonic entr'actes.

In 1968 a vocal opus of great peculiarity and dramatic character originated: "Inane", soliloquy for soprano and orchestra. It had been commissioned by SFB, a Berlin radio station, for Joan Carroll, the American opera singer living in Germany, who sang the part in the premiere in Berlin in January of 1969. The Latin title means "emptiness" or "cavity". The text by Manuel Thomas deals with a very serious subject: the psychic condition of a woman whose baby is removed before delivery. In its mixture of anguish, pain, rage, and remembrance it is a parallel to "Erwartung" by Arnold Schonberg to the text of Marie Pappenheim. And the score of Reimann in its expressionist spirit also is indebted to this monodrame of the year 1909. It obviously restrains in favour of the solo part the sound of the orchestra broken up in many ways, an emotional and strangely scanned prose of the winds and the multitone chords of the low strings. The two artists wrote: "Inane" would not have originated without Joan Carroll. Only her personality in which the most diverse inspirations and means of art coexist side by side caused us to write a piece for her in which all her capabilities were to be utilized."

The text with its alternating dramatic and lyric heights and lows has been set to music for her. In it there are naive folk tunes alongside with hysterical declamations, dramatic outbursts like the one in front of the empty bed and when seeing letters from the beloved, grimacing passages like the one spoken at a high pitch of the nocturnal thief with sustained chords and jazz-like pizzicati of the double-basses, powerful increases in volume and nuances fading away. In this pandemonium Miss Carroll raged and belcantoed with a convincing inner commitment. Opus and presentation made the impression of being inseparable; they represented a psychic documentation of an area that had not yet--with the help of the pill--degraded the relationship of man and woman to a sportive act.

A second ballet to scenic motifs by Günter Grass was completed by Reimann in 1970. The premiere took place during the Berlin Festival Weeks in October of 1970.

Die "Vogelscheuchen" (Scarecrows)--that is the name of the opus--were taken from the book "Hundejahre" of Günter Grass. In the plot, obscure in many ways, two antagonistic powers, the birds and the scarecrows, threaten two individuals: the gardener and his daughter. Flocks of birds imperil the order of the garden. The gardener drives them away, the girl fetches them back. Now he sets up a scarecrow out of whose rags the scarecrow prefect appears. The gardener's daughter likes him and lets him abduct her into his world. It is an eccentric world: the abbess, first lady of the rabble hostile to the birds, presents it to the horrified newcomer: knights in armor carrying their heads in their arms; black, epileptic nuns with coat hangers from which white shreds flutter; mendicant friars; Prussian grenadiers with naked abdomens; World War II soldiers in battle dress; three hallelujah scarecrows with many-colored rags.

The inhabitant of the earth is horrified. Crowned and decked out as underworld bride she leads the nuptial procession at the side of the perfect, the procession, that becomes a jumping procession: three steps forward, two steps backward. Horrified, she throws away the crown and flees. The father rejects her. Only when the scarecrows come to fetch her he tries to hold her back. Now the birds help their adversaries. Encircled between the combat lines, the gardener fights off the hated birds and thus becomes a scarecrow himself. In triumph the daughter is dragged to the underworld. The garden is in order because its owner has submitted to the law of the rabble.

To this scenario Reimann has mobilized an amazing sound from an orchestra with the strings subdivided in many ways, the wind instruments bracketed by solos or chords, and numerous percussion instruments handled by nine players.

Two types of sound prevail: the rustling and whispering of polyphonic string glissandi as a sonic symbol of the flocks of birds; a pandemonium of clattering, tinkling, hissing noises characterizing the soulless underworld.

From these two visions Reimann derives the ringing characters of the three acts in 25 scenes with a phenomenal accuracy of hearing. Sound and rhythm form shapes, thick clusters of notes obtain contours. Melody in the traditional sense does not exist. Yet, the timbres, clusters, glissandi, and sustained sounds form a kind of subcutaneous melodies. It is the basis of the choreography.

Only in the suite of the underworld does very personal music seek connection with models when themes by Johann Sebastian Bach, Francesco Antonio Buonporti, and Franz Schubert are quoted as sounding collages.

Half a year later, the Schwetzingen Festival was opened with Reimann's second opera "Melusine". The figure of the beautiful mermaid known from French myths, who is a woman for six days and a fish-tailed mermaid on Saturdays, has been given many forms in literature. The most recent one is by the Alsatian poet Iwan Groll, who used it for an expressionist play in 1922. All that his imagination incorporated into the mermaid's life has been taken over by Claus H. Henneberg in his libretto for Reimann. The opera plays in the present time.

Melusine, who loves Count Lusignan and comes to death with him through fire, has traits of Wedekind's Lulu; her father Oger resembles Wagner's Wotan as well as Wedekind's Schigolch; her aunt Pythia reminds of Brunhild of "Twilight of Gods" when she sets fire to Lusignan Castle in the end, while the burning castle reminds of Strindberg's "Dream Play" which shares unreality with Goll's "Melusine".

For the action between dream and reality Reimann needed an atmosphere of planned lack of definition from which the pseudo-real scenes protrude. This basic contrast predominates in the composition as well as in the apparatus that makes it sound.

The principal parts are written for six prototype voices. Melusine is a coloratura soprano and was sung at the premiere by Catherine Gayer, Pythia alto, Melusine's mother mezzo soprano, her husband Oleander tenor. Count Lusignan a lyric baritone, Oger bass. In addition, as complementary figure to Oleander, there is the architect, a light tenor with coloratura. A novel vocal style originated from the combination of these prototype voices with small spoken parts. Arias and duets are the predominant forms; only during the entry of the guests into the hall of the castle we hear a loosely polyphonic ensemble.

In "Melusine", Reimann also applies this principle of chamber music to the orchestra. Thirty-three players apportion the sound to two woodwinds of different pitch, two each F horns, C trumpets and trombones, celesta and harp as well as a string ensemble of soloists comprising eight violins, three violas, three violoncellos, and two five-stringed contrabasses.

The basic musical substance is a fluctuating fabric of closely dissonant chains of notes, each of which following its own metrum within the measure. Consequently, the ear registers a more "static" than fixed impression; clusters of semitones rhythmically canceling each other to the effect that no main points originate. What has been used experimentally only by other composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Krzysztof Penderecki becomes musical material here.

Such almost contourless and necessarily atonal texture is very atmospheric in character. Voices of nature seem to be at work, rustling leaves, rushing winds, chirping birds, and the rasping of grasshoppers. This is the sonic world of Melusine, and this rustling and rushing is recurrent throughout the score, tinged by flageolets of fourths, strokes col legno, dabs from the harp, celesta tingling, and the booming of kettledrums.

This note-clusters sound, an indisputable mannerism, prevails in modern music since the fifties. Yet, Reimann's sure feeling for forms, his substantial faculty, and his highly developed taste give musical meaning to the mannerism. Something apparently amorphous obtains form.

The voices float above this instrumental texture freely yet integrated. The part of Melusine, a firework of rapid, jerking melismas now running in close circles, then suddenly expanding to sevenths and ninths jumps, is among the most difficult coloraturas that have ever been dared. Thus the mermaid makes her appearance, infatuates the geometer, sings her inciting song to the trees, the plants, the animals on the shore of the lake, accompanied by a solo flute. Only in the second part when she has mat the rousing look of Lusignan her soliloquy of love becomes a flowing melody almost without any florid singing.

Her opposite is Pythia, the lowering, clairvoyant possessor of magic power, whose aria in great dramatic style opens the act in the castle: a piece of pathetic intervals characterized by broad accents and excited breath. And Madame Laperouse, mostly in duet with Melusine and Oleander, like the latter in free parlando, often psalmodizing on one note.

Similar conditions of vocal behavior are also found in the male parts. The count is the most rewarding part, lyrical and emotionally animated, of visionary beauty in the last duet, captivating by the warmth and broadly flowing melodies of the farewell.

Oger is a smaller parallel to Pythia, supplemented by flustering notes and grotesque falsettos, often slipping back into the spoken word as do other parts of this strange fairy-musical. The most difficult part besides Melusine is that of the architect whose great love aria borders on the limits of tenor ability in high pitch up to C.

"Melusine" shows with exemplary clarity how precisely Reimann knows how to work for the conditions of a commissioned opus. Spirit and acoustics of the small rococo theater of Schwetzingen are captured in the score to an extent that the transfer of the work to a large theater such as Berlin Opera was problematic while it had the same magical effect as at the Schwetzingen premiere during its performance in the summer of 1972 at Santa Fe where more intimate conditions prevailed in the theater.

Reimann attended this important performance in the U.S. where he was working on the chamber concerto for piano and 19 players, which he had begun in Berlin in March 1972 and completed in September 1972. By contrast to Reimann's first piano concerto it uses an accompanying group of soloists. The wood winds consist of flute (alternating with alto flute), oboe (alternating with English horn), E flat clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, and contrabassoon. The brass winds are two trumpets and a trombone. The percussion instruments are handled by one player. The strings are formed by two conventional quartets and a contrabass.

In three contrasting movements passing over one into the other, Reimann develops a sound in which the solo piano is intentionally set off from the other instruments. They are not assigned the role of accompanying but of performing a concert. This means that the individual spirit of the participating instruments is maintained even when they join in textured complexes. This holds true, e.g. at the very beginning for the two string quartets. Their eight lines played simultaneously appear to form chords, yet incessantly float apart and together again with small ascending or descending glissandi, while the piano performs the principal voice in a quiet legato movement of quavers. Like everything in this very subtly worked score, every thought has thematic or motiving significance. Yet, Reimann's thematic work differs from the classical one in that the basic idea never returns unchanged but always in variants and in variants of these variants. There are reprise-like moments, however, particularly in the third movement where material of the first movement appears in a modified form.


From Wergo 60056:

Joan Carroll was born in Philadelphia, USA. Her operatic career began with an engagement at the New York City Opera in 1957. Then came guest appearances for various opera companies in the United States. In 1959 she came to Germany and was engaged by the Hamburg State Opera. Since 1961 she has sung at many opera houses in Germany and abroad. She made her name in modern music with her performance of the title role in Alban Berg's "Lulu".

Aribert Reimann: Inane. Inane is the third commissioned work to be written specially for Joan Carroll. The score of the monodrama "Inane", after a text by Manuel Thomas, was completed by Reimann in 1968. It makes use of the full range of Joan Carroll's versatile voice, passing through a great variety of changing moods and expressive zones. The text describes a psychologically complex situation of a kind that a modern woman can encounter and which exposes her to an unavoidable process of self-recognition. The scene develops above evocative yet peaceful chords; the first sung intervals are formed from the spoken word. But the main line of development fans out, and new elements or expressive attitudes are added. The instruments (they do not really form an orchestra) adapt closely to the changing musical situation, sometimes actually playing the part of a character in the plot or simply painting a background, with a preference for the darker registers. Aribert Reimann and his librettist Manuel Thomas have said about the piece; "Inane would not have been created without Joan Carroll. It was her personality, which contains the widest imaginable range of inspiration and artistic powers, which stimulated us to write a piece for her which would make full use of her potentialities."

Wergo Schallplatten GmbH, Mainz/Baden-Baden Tonaufnahmen: Sender Freies Berlin Bayerisdier Rundfunk, München