[Fritz Geißler] Ode to a Nightingale for Nonet (Score-Video)
Performers:
Members of Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra
Audio from • Fritz Geißler (1921-1984): "Ode to a night...
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In 1966 when Geissler had once more attended the Donaueschingen musical festival (in the mid-1950s he had also been in Darmstadt) and at a time when he as a teacher for composition at the Leipzig musical college was lecturing on Arnold Schoenberg and and Alban Berg in the department of musicology, he wrote his nonet Ode to a Nightingale. The intensity and splendour of the music together with its tonal sensibility reveal the influence of Berg and Henze. So the complex composition of the piece is relaxed and kept transparent by its colorful and polymorphic atmosphere. His immense imaginative sense of sound together with a great variety of instrumental combinations as well as his improvisatorial flexibility (aleatorics) create an emotional sphere which reflects John Keats's ode, a romantic work of inspired beauty, with great intuition: The poet listens to the song ofthe nightingale which makes him fall into a melancholic dream full of love and longing, ending only the next morning. The many-faceted moods ranging from quiet resignation, desperate escapism to excited protest, from enchanting poetry to touching dramatism are impressively reflected in tones. The concise thematic material — a third sequence interspersed with second intervals — is presented in the slow introduction and imaginatively varied in the ensuing four parts: Full of excitement the first part vivaciously strives towards its climax, which, slowly decaying, leads over to the dance-like second part. The melodious trio is full of gracefulness. The ensuing third part, in which the material is occasionally presented as a twelve-tone figure, passes by quickly and energetically. Very slowiy the final part gains intensity, summarizing the themes — with reminiscences of the trio as well as the third motive of the introduction — adding the Czech folk song A nightingale came flying along to the expressive climax. The work was first performed by the Kammermusikvereinigung of the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1968.
(Source from CD Booklet; written by Dr.sc. Eberhard Kneipel, Wünschendorf; translated in English by Dr. Gerhard Hartmann, Potsdam)
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