Together with the ensemble KONTRASTE under the direction of Gregor A. Mayrhofer, the celebrated Lied interpreter Christoph Prégardien launches Die Schöne Müllerin/These Fevered Days at the Tafelhalle Nürnberg at the start of the season.
For his new work, Johannes Maria Staud has orchestrated Schubert's song cycle, written 200 years ago, for the 19-piece ensemble and added his own songs. A completely different lyrical voice speaks from these: Emily Dickinson's artful and radically modern texts were written a few decades after those of Wilhelm Müller on the other side of the Atlantic.
Johannes Maria Staud explains his composition, written at the suggestion of Christoph Prégardien: "The two strands are intertwined and naturally lead to a new interpretation of this timeless and enduring subject matter. Of course, one might immediately think of Hans Zender's “compositional interpretation” of the Winterreise from 1993. However, as much as I admire that work, my approach is quite different. With my instrumentation of the 20 Schubert songs in the cycle, I bring Schubert’s vibrant melodies and inventiveness into the present – very close to the original text. A misunderstood historicity would make little sense here. My own songs, obviously composed in a completely different tonal language, function as a deliberate counterpoint, as a commentary from the here and now, and as the work proceeds, they merge with Schubert's cycle on a superordinate level. From the perspective of the Müllerin, who in Schubert/Müller remains merely a projection screen for male desire, I thus take a new look at the narratives of Schubert’s songs reflected by nature: wandering – strangeness – desire – unrequited love – suicide."
Die Schöne Müllerin/These Fevered Days @ Breitkopf & Härtel (publisher)
