Rainer Maria Rilkes (1875 - 1926) texts are (a truism?) themselves already music, and, like music, they are able to express an inexpressible, in a at the same time simple and complex language, which stirs in extreme refinement to our innermost part.
Although already countless "settings to music" of Rilke texts exist, I had so far not dared to connect me with them compositonally, doubting, what one is able to add this texts without to reduce them. I was afraid of the risk not being able to bring out an adequate because grand poetry never guarantees developing an equivalent music.
It appeared to me possible by letting develop at all the articulation of language at the beginning of the piece, in order to leave it alone and barely at the end; by selecting only a few and primarly short texts, which are to declaim less interpreting than rather to make them audible, quasi to exhibit them, streaming and arising virtually from inside out.
Thus the mezzosoprano acts mainly quietly, with restraint and at the same time urgency and without vibrato within a specific piano sound-room in each case, which becomes dynamized, livens up, becomes processful and leads at the same time over into a new tonal situation. The whole is covered finally with a network of motives, which, variously crossed into one another, load themselves in the course of their temporal occurring with meaning and possibly reflect the text aura in their own.
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