Hölderlin, subtitled Gedichte gelesen von Bruno Ganz, is a spoken word album on which the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz reads poems by Friedrich Hölderlin in the original German. Released by the ECM New Series in September 1984, the same autumn as Arvo Pärt's Tabula rasa, it was one of the imprint's first records. It treats poetry with the same care for sound and silence that ECM gives to music.
The readings were recorded in Berlin in March 1984, with Bernhard Voss as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing; the cover is by Barbara Wojirsch. In the 1970s Ganz had been one of the leading actors of the Berlin Schaubühne, where he appeared in Klaus Michael Grüber's staging of Hölderlin's Empedokles in 1975. The poems are separated by brief, uncredited sound pieces for wind harp, violin, cellos, cymbal, voice, flute and lute.
The selection runs from short fragments to the great elegies and hymns. Brot und Wein takes up thirteen minutes and is the centre of the record, alongside the hymn Der Ister, Mnemosyne and Andenken. Poems of place such as Der Neckar, Heidelberg and Rückkehr in die Heimat sit beside the brief Hälfte des Lebens. The frame is set by other poets: it opens with a text by René Char, includes one by Johannes R. Becher, and closes with Paul Celan's Tübingen, Jänner from Die Niemandsrose. Ganz reads in a plain, unhurried voice, without theatrical emphasis.
Reviewing Ganz's two ECM recordings on Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo called them "two exemplary spoken word sessions", though ones that "may alienate anyone without knowledge of the German language", since no translations are given. He heard in Hölderlin's poems "a world of meditation". Ganz returned to the label with Wenn Wasser wäre, recorded in 1999, reading T.S. Eliot and Giorgos Seferis. For ECM's fiftieth anniversary in 2019, ECM used four of these readings in a short film shot around Lauffen am Neckar and Tübingen, the poet's birthplace and the town where he died.
This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1285, first released in 1984. The readings are in German, with no translations.
