Christian Reiner

Elegie an John Donne is a spoken-word album on which the Viennese actor and voice artist Christian Reiner reads poems by Joseph Brodsky in German. At its centre is Brodsky's early long poem Große Elegie an John Donne, heard twice in two different translations. Like Reiner's earlier Hölderlin album, it treats the reading voice as a solo instrument within the ECM New Series, the label's home for composed and contemporary music.

Brodsky (1940-1996) was born in Leningrad, was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987. This is Reiner's second ECM release after Turmgedichte (ECM New Series 2285), his 2012 reading of Hölderlin's late poems. The new album was taped over several years from 2014 at Garnison 7 in Vienna, with Martin Siewert as recording engineer. Manfred Eicher produced it together with the German writer Wolf Wondratschek, as a joint production of ECM and the Joint Galactical Company.

The elegy dates from 1963. Its long opening catalogue lists everything that has fallen asleep around the dead poet, from beds and walls to St Paul's, the sea and God. Then a voice weeps in the dark, and it turns out to be Donne's own soul. The first version, translated by Alexander Kaempfe and Heinrich Ost, runs over 26 minutes. A bell recorded at the Viennese church Maria am Gestade sounds in it, and Juri Smirnov reads passages of the Russian text. The second version, in Karl Dedecius's translation, closes the disc and lasts 17 minutes. “Each of them inspired me to a unique way of speaking and a distinct rhythm,” Reiner says of the two adaptations. Between them come seven shorter poems from 1958 to 1992, such as Der Polarforscher and Wiegenlied, translated by Felix Philipp Ingold, Alexander Nitzberg and others.

Reiner's Hölderlin readings had been warmly received in the German press. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that “Reiner is able to coax the music out of the words”, a quality that carries over here into Brodsky's long, accumulating sentences. Reviewing the Brodsky album on Between Sound and Space in 2019, Tyran Grillo singled out Reiner's use of pauses and described the whole as “a chapel of hard-won truths”. The booklet includes German texts by Ilma Rakusa and Klaus Reichert.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2513, first released in August 2017. The poems are read in German, with Russian passages in the long elegy.