Wilhelm Killmayer

Songs for tenor and piano by Wilhelm Killmayer on three German poets: a late cycle on Joseph von Eichendorff, songs from the third of his Hölderlin cycles, and two Trakl sets, Trakl-Lieder I and Schweigen und Kindheit. Song is the densest part of Killmayer's output and ran through his whole life as a composer. The disc, almost eighty minutes long, takes its title from the Trakl song Sommersneige (Summer's End).

Killmayer was born on 21 August 1927 and died on 20 August 2017, the day before his ninetieth birthday. He studied privately with Carl Orff from 1951 and joined his master class at the Munich Musikhochschule in 1953/54. He was appointed to teach at the same school in 1973 and became emeritus in 1992. The singer is the tenor Markus Schäfer, with Siegfried Mauser at the piano. The recording is a co-production with BR Klassik, made in 2016 in Studio 2 of Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich.

The Hölderlin songs, from poems of the poet's late period, have a tone of their own. Killmayer sets the poems almost complete and finds a sound aura that suits verse as simple as it is hermetic. The songs try to say what the text means and how it is, taking Hölderlin at his word, in short seasonal pieces such as Der Sommer, Der Frühling and Der Winter. The two Trakl cycles grow from an equally close reading. Here the settings look for a stronger psychological charge within the rich imagery that links Trakl to Hölderlin. Several songs use early or later versions of the poems, as in Elis (first version) or Untergang (fifth version).

The Eichendorff cycle, Killmayer's last large song cycle, can be performed in two ways. One alternates a cappella songs for male choir with songs for tenor and piano, the other is a cycle of piano songs alone, which is the form heard here. Its nine songs run from Frühlingsgruß and Mondnacht to Vom heiligen Eremiten Wilhelm. In each group the voice and piano keep a basic language of their own, while the tone changes with the poet.

CD, Wergo WER 7351 2, released in 2017.