Sieben Lieder nach Gedichten von Wolfgang Borchert by Jürgen Golle; Zwei Lieder fürBariton und Instrumente, 1971 by Robert de Roos; Fünf Lieder für mittlere Stimme mitKlavierbegleitung by Henk Badings; Etta ReichReview by: Jurgen ThymNotes, Second Series, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Jun., 1975), pp. 871-872Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/896846 .

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a full score to imagine what purpose the organ might serve.

This is not intellectual music; indeed there is not an ounce of musical inspiration in the composition. Bizet has no new ideas about Te Deums and little freshness to contribute to liturgical music in general. He has the typical Frenchman's problems with declaiming Latin: the words "Te Deum," for example, are set to three long half-notes, with the melodic accent on the last. The harmonic idiom is unimaginably trite for mid-century (e.g. V in E Major to C Major at the words "sanctus Do- minus"); the rhythmic ostinati are so perva- sive as to make one wonder if there will be an intermission after the act; the fugue subject does not really work. I must side with Dean that basically it is bad music.

The editor of a newly-published work of this sort bears a certain responsibility to make a convincing case for its publication. Wojciechowski's commentary is mechanical and unconvincing; under the circum- stances, more should have been made of the purely historical interest of a publication of one of Bizet's earliest large-scale works. The version generally released should, of course, have been a full score: the editor's cryptic remarks about transposing instru- ments are irrelevant without them. The English translation of the Vorwort is outra- geous. We discover, for example, that the Te Deum is the only liturgical work Bizet composed in 1858, and that "it was found necessary to transpose the vocal parts in order to make them usuable [sic.] in mod- ern notation." (Translation: modern clefs have been substituted for the original C- clef s.)

The tenor of this review is negative, but perhaps snobbishly so. Confronting a proudly popular edition is, for the musi- cologist,` a somewhat disconcerting task. It may be bad music only in an academic sense. Certainly it has some promise as a novelty for church choirs and institutional choruses bored with their repertoire. As a cross between, say, Manon and Widor, it has a certain charm that cannot simply be brushed off.

D. KERN HOLOMAN University of California, Davis

Jurgen Golle: Sieben Lieder nach Ge-

dichten von Wolfgang Borchert. Leip- zig: Deutscher Verlag fur Musik, 1972. [Score, 19 p., $2.75]

Robert de Roos: Zwei Lieder fur Bari- ton und Instrumente, 1971. Amster- dam: Donemus, 1972. [Score, 46 p., $4.00]

Henk Badings: Fiunf Lieder fur mitt- lere Stimme mit Klavierbegleitung; Worte von Etta Reich. Amsterdam: Donemus, 1974. [Score, 12 p., $4.00]

The poet Wolfgang Borchert (1921-47) is mainly known for his short stories, which articulate the disillusionment and frustra- tion of a whole generation whose ideals and values had dissipated in the holocaust of World War II. Borchert's poetry is not as convincing as the piercing prose of his short stories; the poems are mostly tame, occa- sionally immature, here and there eclectic, recalling Rilke, folk poetry, children's songs, or boy-scout lyrics, touching now and then on some genuine poetic insights.

Jiurgen Golle (born 1942), a young com- poser from East Germany, has revived seven of Borchert's poems in musical set- tings (composed, 1968 and published, 1972). The settings are written in a tonal twentieth-century idiom, characterized by triads frequently spiced up with disso- nances, quartal harmonies, and modal allu- sions. The music nicely captures the puber- tal enthusiasm of the poems "Ich m6chte Leuchtturm sein" and "Versuch es" as well as the tender and intimate style of "Ge- dicht," "Liebeslied," and "Abendlied." "Der Vogel" and "Legende" stand out among the settings, not only because the poems are more complex, but also because the composer has digressed here from the ste- reotypes of expression of the other songs.

The songs are not difficult to perform for either vocalist or pianist. The voice part (mezzo soprano or baritone) demands a range of one octave and a half, from c # ' to g" or c # to g', respectively, with the tessitura in the upper half of this range.

Many twentieth-century composers have been inspired by Hans Bethge's collection of Chinese poetry, the most well-known composition being Mahler's Das Lied von derErde. Most recently, the Dutch composer and diplomat Robert de Roos has chosen

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two poems from this anthology for musical settings: "Traurige Friuhlingsnacht" (Mel- ancholy Spring Night) and "Bekranzter Kahn" (Boats Decorated with Garlands) by Li-Song-Flu and Tung-Liu-Fan, respec- tively. The lyrics center around the same farewell to life, youth, love, beauty, and friendship, and are pervaded by the same infinite melancholy as that found in Das Lied von der Erde.

Whereas Mahler used the monumental orchestral apparatus and the tonal language of the late nineteenth century to express the Weltschmerz of the poems, de Roos has chosen a typical twentieth-century idiom for his musical rendition. The orchestra is a chamber ensemble, consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet (occasionally replaced by bass clarinet), various percussion instruments, celesta, piano, viola, and violoncello. De Roos uses these instruments soloistically as well as combinatorially, thus arriving (with- in a small ensemble) at a tender, multi- colored fabric of instrumental timbres. However, peculiar timbral effects are not an end in itself in these songs but serve to clarify the polyphonic texture of the music. The different textural layers (main voice, countermelodies, and accompa- nimental parts) are differentiated through timbral means by ever changing combina- tions of instruments. The voice part (a baritone with the ambitus A to f') is an integral part of the contrapuntal texture; at times it is the protagonist, at other times it serves as a countermelody in a subordi- nate role, occasionally merely declaiming the text. The melodic and harmonic events of the score are organized according to serial principles -each song is based on a different row-which are applied with a fair amount of liberty. All in all, de Roos's songs are quite respectable works, well worth the time and the effort to perform them and to listen to them.

Henk Badings's songs after poems by Etta Reich do not leave such a satisfactory im- pression. The poetry is utterly amateurish, producing at best an Altenberg parody; but more often the poems are full of embar-

rassing commonplace formulae, hardly tol- erable in such lyric contexts, and occasion- ally even produce involuntary comic effects.

Badings's musical idiom is atonal; in most of the songs the full potential of twelve chromatic pitches is exploited in a non-serial way. For instance, in the first song two complementary hexachords alternate with one another, modified through reordering of pitches within each hexachord. The al- teration of two different scalar systems (we may call them tropes), complementing each other in producing all chromatic pitches, is the basis of the third song. Only the last number refrains from using all twelve pitches, giving the impression of an almost pentatonic composition. While Badings's treatment of pitch is fairly advanced, he is quite traditional in dealing with rhythm and meter-despite some songs in 5/8 and 7/8.

The commonplace imagery of the poetry has led the composer to similarly conven- tional musical images taken from the stock- in-trade of nineteenth-century song- composition. The music of the soul ("Was aus dir tont, Seele, ist siuss") is depicted through arpeggios sustained by right pedal; the gloomy reflections in the songs "Herbst" and "Eine Welt ist zerbrochen" are matched through monotonous rhythmic ostinato patterns, exploiting the lower range of the piano. The boisterous rhythms in 5/8 mea- sure and the ecstatic melismas of the last song, "Friuhlingsabend" seem to overcharge the simple mood of unpretentious content- ment prevailing in the poem, but they provide a happy note at the end of the cycle.

The songs by de Roos and Badings are published by Donemus in Amsterdam, a publishing company that usually repro- duces the music directly from the compos- er's manuscript. De Roos's handwriting is a model of neatness and legibility, while Badings's score leaves room for some guesswork at blurry spots.

JURGEN THYM Eastman School of Music

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