Johann Ludwig Trepulka, Norbert von Hannenheim, Herbert Henck

On this album the German pianist and musicologist Herbert Henck brings back two twelve-tone composers who had been forgotten for more than half a century. Johann Ludwig Trepulka (1903-1945) was the only pupil of Josef Matthias Hauer. Norbert von Hannenheim (1898-1945) studied with Arnold Schoenberg. Both died in 1945. The album gives world premiere recordings of the piano works of theirs that survive.

Henck had already recorded Cage, Antheil, Mosolov, Mompou and Hans Otte for ECM, and he also wrote the booklet essay on both composers. He came across Trepulka's name through his historical research and first recorded the Klavierstücke for Radio Bremen. Three years later Trepulka's grandson found the name on Henck's website, which opened the way to unpublished family scores. Hannenheim, born in Transylvania, won several prizes in 1932 before a physical and mental collapse. Many of his manuscripts, left in a Berlin bank safe, were lost at the end of the war. The album was recorded in April 2005 at the Festeburgkirche in Frankfurt am Main, produced by Manfred Eicher.

Trepulka's Klavierstücke mit Überschriften nach Worten von Nicolaus Lenau, op. 2, are seven short pieces from 1923-24, each headed by a line of Lenau's poetry, after Hauer's own piano pieces of the same kind. They sound surprisingly tonal, sometimes almost diatonic, quiet and slowly circling. Hannenheim's Sonatas Nos. 2, 4, 6 and 12, all written by 1929, are the opposite: terse, linear, sharply dissonant and full of contrapuntal energy. The disc ends with the Molto lento second movement of his Konzert Nr. 2 for piano and small orchestra, a fragment written by 1932 and played here by Henck alone.

In Die Zeit, Volker Hagedorn called the disc "eine sensationelle Doppelentdeckung" (a sensational double discovery). Gerhard R. Koch of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung heard Trepulka's pieces as "sanft schwebende, in sich kreisende, oft homophone Klang-Mobiles", gently floating sound mobiles, and gave Henck credit for tracking down the few surviving scores. In Fono Forum, Dirk Wieschollek described Henck once again working as an archaeologist of musical modernism.

CD edition, ECM New Series 1937, released on 24 April 2007. The booklet contains Henck's essay in German with an English translation by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart.