World premiere: 9 November 2002, Nuremberg
Liat Himmelheber | Ars nova ensemble Nuremberg | Werner Heider
Duration: 12 minutes
Publisher: Bärenreiter, BA 08564-72

The three songs for mezzo-soprano and ensemble were composed in late summer 2002. These pieces form part of a body of my work in which I attempt to reduce musical means to the very essentials in order to arrive at a musical texture possessing an unspectacular, unfashionable directness.

I make no secret of the fact that Wilhelm Killmayer’s music has remained a model for these endeavours for years, and so the settings of Keats’s poems stand in close proximity to my cycle *Occhi miei* on texts by Michelangelo, which I dedicated to Killmayer on his 75th birthday this year.

I had not yet fully realised what I would want to write for the ars nova ensemble nürnberg when the sad news reached me of the death of Bertold Hummel, a composer whom I had only met a few times, and of whom I remember a profound humanity. Writing this music in his memory then became my inspiration, and I believe the profoundly serious texts would have resonated with him.

Manfred Trojahn

When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in characters,
Hold like rich barns the fully ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starry face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Those shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have any delight in the fairy power
Of unreturned love! — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

To Sleep

O gentle embalmer of the still midnight,
Closing, with careful and gentle fingers,
Our eyes, pleased by gloom, sheltered from the light,
Enshaded in divine forgetfulness;
O sweetest Sleep! if it so please thee, lull,
In the midst of this, thy hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait for the amen, before thy poppy casts
Around my bed its lulling gifts;
Then save me, or the day gone by will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from a prying conscience, which still wields
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled locks,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

Bright Star: Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art

Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless hermit,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing upon the fresh, soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Resting upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft rise and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

Manfred Trojahn was born in 1949 in Cremlingen near Braunschweig. He studied orchestral music in Braunschweig and composition with Diether de la Motte in Hamburg. He has received numerous scholarships and awards for his work, including the Stuttgart Prize for Young Composers (1972), First Prize at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris (1978), the Sprengel Prize for Music (1980) and the GEMA German Music Authors’ Prize (2009). In 1979/80, he undertook a study visit to the Villa Massimo in Rome. Manfred Trojahn is Professor of Composition at the Robert Schumann University of Music in Düsseldorf and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Arts, the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Academy of Arts in Berlin.