Description

Symphony No. 1 “Attempt at a Requiem”

Karl Amadeus Hartmann wrote his first symphony in 1935/36. At that time, he was an unknown musician whose work could not hope to be performed or promoted in his home country. He had to wait over ten years for the first performance; it took place in the spring of 1948 under the direction of Winfrid Zillig in Frankfurt. I was 21 years old at the time and the impression this work made on me was extraordinary. My admiration for Hartmann’s music, whose particular spirituality, namely its spontaneous, unbroken directness, its honesty and straightforwardness – things that radiate from this artist beyond his work to his environment, to his fellow human beings – seemed important and significant to me. Moreover, in all of Hartmann’s works there is an essential manifestation of the art of composition, namely an exact correspondence between the need for expression and its urgency and the choice of instrumental means. The superficial listener may at first miss the fact that the powerful orchestral apparatus which Hartmann invokes corresponds exactly to the strong degree of his expression, exactly to the colorfulness of his speech. Added to this is the expansiveness and charged vitality of the South German, who is able to sensually combine his inwardness with the beautiful moment and the hymnally powerful, according to his landscape, according to a need for communication borne by an unshakeable faith in humanity.

Hans Werner Henze

(Hartmann: Kleine Schriften – Schott Mainz, 1965 � ED 5208)

Text based on words by Walt Withman

Introduction: Misery

I sit and look out on all the plagues of the world
And on all tribulation and shame –
I see the toil of battle, pestilence, tyranny,
I see martyrs and prisoners –
I observe the contempt and humiliation,
which the poor have to suffer from the arrogant;
on all meanness and torment without end, I sit and look,
see and hear. –

Spring

When recently the lilacs bloomed outside the door,
and the star in the sky sank early into the night,
I mourned, and will mourn anew with every spring. –
As often as you, spring, oh spring, return.
Freedom – you will always bring us:
Lilacs blooming every year, misery oh, you give us all. –
And thoughts of death, which is near us. –

Tears

Tears, tears, tears!
In the night, in solitude,
dripping down onto the white beach,
sucked in by the sand –
nowhere, nowhere a star, a star!
All, all bleak and black, –
Wet tears from a hooded head’s eyes;
O who is this spirit?
This figure in the dark, full of tears, full of tears?
What a shapeless lump
Bent, bent, there on the sand? –
Sobbing tears,
wild cries shaken by misery?
O shadow, O shadow,
so calm and dignified by day,
with serene face and measured step.
But now that you are fleeing into the night,
when no one sees you,
o melting ocean of tears!
Tears, tears!

Epilogue: Please

I heard the All Mother,
as she looked thoughtfully at all her dead,
desperately, at all the distorted bodies,
all the people who have perished in misery,
as she called out to her earth in a plaintive voice,
while she walked there:
Oh take them in, O my earth,
I charge you not to lose my sons, my sisters,
and you rivers, receive them well,
receive them, receive their precious blood,
and you places here and there and airs,
which you swim impalpably above,
and all you juices of the earth and growth!
O my dead!
Breathe them out, eternal sweet death, after years, centuries.