Lieder zwischen Abend und Morgen (5. Symphonie)
(2017)2(II=picc).1.corA.1.bcl.2-2.2.2.0-perc(2):crot/glsp/tgl/lo bell/gong/cyms(pair)/susp.cym/BD/tam-t-harp-pft-strings(6.6.4.4.3)
Abbreviations (PDF)
Anton J. Benjamin / Simrock
The Songs between Evening and Morning are a station on the search for the foreign within oneself, for the inner polyphony of the Western (and with that also the German) culture and its hidden points of contact with other cultures – songs between evening and morning, between Europe and the Far East.
Thus, there are three Far Eastern cultures to which the Western culture turns: China, India, and Japan. At the center of the work are three poems by German poets that, through the approaches to the musical style of the respective Asian culture, are set in such a manner that the correspondence with the East can be experienced aurally.
With polyphony, the Western culture has provided a technique with which to weave together all these spheres into a simultaneity, and thus at the central point is a fugue – a fenster, as it were – into which the songs are inserted, and in which the themes and motifs are gradually interwoven: a symbiosis of song and symphony in the tradition of Gustav Mahler.
Set to music are the following texts:
“Sonnenuntergang” (Sunset) by Friedrich Hölderlin (the version in two verses);
“Abendland III” (Occident III), Georg Trakl’s deeply sad and pessimistc poem;
“Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” (Song of the Spirits over the Waters) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his concept of circular flow and return to Chinese thinking;
“Die sterbende Blume” (The Dying Flower) by Friedrich Rückert (somewhat abbreviated), an original poem (thus not a translation from the Indian language), which with his idea of the letting go of the illusion of a detached, isolated ego corresponds with Hinduism;
“Frühlingsdämmerung” (Spring Twilight) by Joseph von Eichendorff, related in its magic of the description of nature to Japanese poetry;
“Das große Licht” (The Great Light) by the baroque poet Simon Dach (abbreviated) forms the conclusion and lets the Byzantine hymns be heard and, in this way, also integrates the Middle East.
Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz