During my time as a student at the Freiburg University of Music, Hugo Distler’s music was very much in the spotlight thanks to the brilliant choral director and composer Konrad Lechner, and was by no means regarded as outdated at the time. We sang all the movements from the Mörike Liederbuch. I am also thinking here of the performance of the Christmas Story for soloists and a cappella choir. The choral works of Ernst Pepping were also featured. I have a vivid memory of a beautiful motet entitled ‘Jesus and Nicodemus’. We perceived this music as a movement of renewal in the spirit of Schütz, in which the German language was presented in a new light on this basis. I have further developed these ideas in some of my own motets.

Bertold Hummel (Conversation with Schmidt-Mannheim, January 1998)

Biography
Konrad Lechner, born 24 February 1911 in Nuremberg; died 14 December 1989 in Kirchzarten; German composer, music teacher, conductor and cellist, studied cello with Disclez, R. Metzmacher and H. Becker; conducting with H. Knappe and Cl. Krauss; and composition with C. Orff, K. Marx, J. Haas, J. N. David and W. Fortner. In 1934–35 he was a cellist at the Bavarian State Opera; in 1934 he was a cellist in E. Fischer’s piano quartet and, in 1935, in his chamber orchestra; from 1936 to 1939 he undertook concert tours as a fiddle and flute player with his fiddle trio; and from 1939 to 1944 he was director of the Munich Bach Society Choir. After serving as a lecturer at the Mozarteum in Salzburg (1941–45), he was conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and, from 1948 to 1953, a professor at the State University of Music in Freiburg im Breisgau (conducting, composition, university choir and orchestra). From 1953 to 1958, L. was director of the Municipal Academy of Music in Darmstadt, where he continued to teach composition, conducting, cello and viola da gamba.

Works
Symphonic Concerto (1948); a Requiem (1952); *Musik zu jedermann* (1947); a Psalm cantata (1956); String Trio (1951); two sonatas and a sonatina for piano; ‘Lamento’ based on an old Italian text for choir (1955), the motet ‘Laß alles was Du hast’ (A. Silesius, 1955) and songs.