Clytus Gottwald

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clytus Gottwald

Clytus Gottwald (born November 20, 1925 in Bad Salzbrunn ) is a German composer , choir director and musicologist .

Life

Clytus Gottwald was born in Bad Salzbrunn, the birthplace of the writer and Nobel Prize winner Gerhart Hauptmann , in 1925 . The father Norbert Gottwald was the rector of a secular school that was closed by the National Socialists in 1933 . The mother, Bertha Gottwald, b. Metze, came from a family of Oder boatmen. From 1936, Gottwald attended the grammar school in Striegau / Silesia and in 1940 switched to the newly founded music grammar school in Frankfurt am Main . There his teachers were Kurt Thomas (choir direction, composition), Wilhelm Isselmann (violin) and Wilhelm Dürr (vocals). In 1944 he was drafted into the military, but in September of this year he was captured by the Americans during the invasion (1944–1946), which he survived mainly in the USA.

After his return from captivity, Gottwald joined the Radio Stuttgart choir in 1946, which later became the Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR). He studied singing with Gerhard Hüsch in Munich. In 1949 he enrolled at the University of Tübingen , but had to give up his studies after one semester for economic reasons. 1954–58 he was assistant to the French choir director Marcel Couraud . In 1954 he took up university studies alternately in Tübingen and Frankfurt am Main. His main subject was musicology ( Walter Gerstenberg , Friedrich Gennrich , Helmuth Osthoff ). In the minor subjects he studied Protestant theology (Steck) and sociology (v. Wiese and Kaiserswaldau, Theodor W. Adorno ). In 1960 he completed his studies with a doctorate in Frankfurt.

From 1958 to 1970 he was cantor at the Protestant Pauluskirche in Stuttgart , from 1960 to 2004 he worked for the German Research Foundation (DFG) with the main research area music palaeography.

In 1960, Gottwald founded the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, initially with the aim of performing music on which he had obtained his doctorate, then from 1964 onwards to perform works of new music. The ensemble has performed at all new music festivals from Edinburgh to Jerusalem, from New York to Moscow. In the course of his international career, Gottwald had around eighty world premieres, including works by Pierre Boulez , Mauricio Kagel , György Ligeti , Krzysztof Penderecki , Helmut Lachenmann , Dieter Schnebel , Heinz Holliger , Brian Ferneyhough , Péter Eötvös , Hans Zender and John Cage . 1970–74, Boulez appointed Gottwald to the planning committee of his Parisian IRCAM . He has been in demand as a guest conductor of European radio choirs in Stockholm ( Eric Ericson ), Helsinki, Copenhagen, Paris (Groupe vocal de France) and Radio della Svizzera Italiana Lugano. In 1969 he became the chief editor for new music at SDR in Stuttgart (until 1988). In 1990 the Schola Cantorum ended its career with a tour of Russia.

Gottwald then turned to a new field of activity, the production of transcriptions for choir of works by the composers Alban Berg , Claude Debussy , Edward Grieg , György Ligeti, Franz Liszt , Gustav Mahler , Maurice Ravel , Franz Schreker , Richard Strauss , Richard Wagner , Hugo Wolf u. a.

Gottwald's main publishers are Carus-Verlag and Universal Edition . His musical legacy is in the Paul Sacher Foundation Basel.

Musical work

Although his upbringing fell during the Third Reich , Gottwald was always interested in the phenomena outside of his immediate environment. Although his information was limited to the radio because of the remote location in the Silesian lowlands, he soon developed a preference for certain forms of music. When he was summoned to Breslau in 1939 as part of the entrance exams for the Musisches Gymnasium in Frankfurt am Main, Kurt Thomas asked him what his favorite music was. Gottwald replied spontaneously: The dance of the seven veils from Salome by Richard Strauss . In the first years of his school days in Frankfurt, the students of the Musisches Gymnasium could attend the symphony concerts and opera performances free of charge. He saw almost all of Pfitzner's operas there and heard Bartók's music for string instruments in a symphony concert conducted by Franz Konwitschny . He got to know Stravinsky's Firebird from fellow students and Thomas got to know the record of Hindemith's Mathis Symphony. One day in composition class with Thomas, the talk was about Arnold Schönberg , and in the next lesson Thomas brought along Schönberg's op. 19 and played from it. After the war, Gottwald learned Gregorian chant in the musicology seminar with G. Reichert, and because he was subscribed to the reproduction of the examples as a singer, he got to know the choral performance practice thoroughly. He had his Damascus experience, as far as choral music was concerned, in a concert by the Parisian ensemble Marcel Couraud, which performed the Cinq Rechants by Olivier Messiaen . From the presence, the precision and the liberated tonality of this music, he developed the idea of ​​the direction in which choral music had to move.

In 1953 the Couraud ensemble broke up, Couraud came to Stuttgart and founded a choir with which he wanted to produce records. Because Gottwald spoke some French, he became Couraud's assistant. But the hope that Couraud would continue his Parisian work was not fulfilled. He made the usual choral repertoire (1954–58). Gottwald resumed his interrupted studies in 1954, not without first having passed the Graecum, which is the prerequisite for a theological study. He took musicology, Protestant theology and sociology. In the first semester in Tübingen he met a classmate from his time in Frankfurt. Heinz-Klaus Metzger came from the Sorbonne and, like Gottwald, had to take the entrance exam for the seminar. Since Gottwald had a scooter and Metzger's parents lived in Stuttgart, Gottwald had to pick him up for the seminar and bring him back home. Metzger reciprocated by introducing Gottwald to Adorno's philosophy of new music. At the end of the semester they separated again, Gottwald went to Frankfurt to hear Adorno. The conditions in Frankfurt were characterized by deep animosities between musicology and sociology, between Osthoff and Adorno, which went so far that Gottwald was advised to avoid taking any Adornite lectures in the study book. Osthoff gave him a dissertation topic from around 1500, probably because he was working on a book about Josquin Desprez himself. Attending the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1958 had a great influence on him inasmuch as the performance of Boulez's Poésie pour Pouvoir determined him to give up his own attempts at composition. Of his pieces from this period, he only accepted the setting of a poem by Gottfried Benn, fragments for choir and two pianos. It was also in 1958 that August Langenbeck, the collegiate cantor at the time, persuaded him to take over the cantor's office at Stuttgart's largest congregation, the Pauluskirche, which was advantageous in that he had his own room for any concerts.

In 1960 Gottwald received his doctorate and shortly afterwards met Carl Dahlhaus , who was working for the Stuttgarter Zeitung at the time . Since Dahlhaus had written his dissertation about the same time as Gottwald, a close relationship immediately arose that lasted until Dahlhaus' death. Wolfgang Irtenkauf made him the offer of the German Research Foundation to edit a new catalog of the Stuttgart choir books. Together with Dahlhaus, he drew up a plan for what a modern manuscript catalog should look like. To make the Renaissance music that he had researched sound, Gottwald founded the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, an ensemble of professional singers. Hans Otte , whom Gottwald had known for a long time, became the new head of the music department at Radio Bremen. He arranged a first concert at the Edinburgh Festival, at which German Renaissance music was performed. Otte was a Hindemith student and drew Gottwald's attention to Hindemith's last work, the Mass in 1963. With the German premiere of this work in 1964, the actual career of the Schola began. Again it was Otte who referred Gottwald to a composer whose works had been rejected by all choirs as unperformable, Dieter Schnebel. The Schola sang the world premiere of Schnebel's dt 31.6 together with Ottes Alpha-Omega in autumn 1965. It was understandable that many composers of new vocal music felt encouraged to offer the world premieres to the Schola. Gerd Zacher was already involved as organist at the Otte premiere , a collaboration that continued with the WDR production of the Kagel film Hallelujah . The next highlight of the Schola work was without a doubt the premiere of Ligeti's Lux aeterna , a composition commissioned by the Schola. The work at the Pauluskirche in Stuttgart was further increased by the fact that Gottwald took Adorno's essay “Vers une musique informelle” at its word and applied Adorno's thoughts to the Protestant church service. Gottwald's informal services had a far-reaching response because the form of the service was developed from music and not from the church agenda. Gottwald made the extensive material available to a theologian at the Ruhr University for his seminar, but never received it back.

A certain addition, if not correction, was given to Adorno's views through the contact that Gottwald made with the Stuttgart Concrete, an artistic-philosophical school of thought that had found its center in the philosopher Max Bense. The hinge between the Bense school and Gottwald's work was the poet Helmut Heißenbüttel, whom Gottwald knew from the radio. Heißenbüttel had followed Walter Benjamin's philosophy, while Gottwald followed Adorno's ideas, a difference that led to frequent controversies, but also created friendship between the two. One of the last events of the Stuttgart Concrete, which had started with Willi Baumeister, was a performance of Stockhausen's play Originale, initiated by Bernhard Kontarsky at the Stuttgart Opera : Kontarsky himself worked as a pianist, Otto Herbert Hajek as a sculptor, Heißenbüttel as a poet, the jazz musician Wolfgang Dauner as an action artist and Gottwald as a conductor. Gottwald portrayed Bense by musicalizing one of Bense's text graphics, Rosenschuttplatz, for three singers at the Schola, a precise pleasure for Bense, to use one of his titles. But that was not the only link between literature and music; after Baumeister's death in 1955, Hans Otte had already composed a Nänie for piano and orchestra based on the Baumeister title Montaru. Cage's 45 minutes for a speaker, translated by Ernst Jandl and edited by Heißenbüttel, also provided material for music. The difference between the Adorno School and the Bense School had a paradigmatic dimension. In the past, if the painter created a picture by rearranging the colors of his palette, according to Bense, it was the colors that created the picture. Of course, this did not remain without effect on the music. Composition was no longer a rearrangement of existing sounds, but in modern times was the production of sounds. The fact that the composers perceived this reorientation after 1960 as a liberation is shown by the great surge in production that began afterwards. Hardly any composer, be it Kagel, Ligeti or Schnebel, was left untouched. Gottwald was deeply involved in this process as an interpreter. Of the roughly 80 world premieres that the Schola sang, 70% were works of this type. In 1968 Gottwald got to know Pierre Boulez personally after a concert in Baden-Baden . Boulez decided to compose a new work for the Schola Cantorum that he had begun in 1953 for Couraud. The first performance of the cantata Cummings is the poet took place in Stuttgart in 1970. Numerous performances followed under Boulez's direction, three in London alone. In 1965 a stereo record ( Neue Chormusik I ) was released under the label WERGO . a. Ligetis Lux aeterna contained. A little later, the Kubrick film 2001 - A Space Odyssey conquered the cinemas, and Ligeti discovered that Kubrick had used entire passages of his music in it without signing a contract with him. Among them was Gottwald's recording of Lux aeterna (cf. Heimerdinger).

At SDR , Gottwald took over the position of senior editor for new music in 1969. Boulez and Gielen, who had received a guest contract at the same time, conducted the first season he was responsible for. In 1970 Boulez invited Gottwald to join the planning committee of the Parisian IRCAM. In the same year Gottwald gave up his service as a cantor in Stuttgart. Years of rich production and conducting activities followed, in close coordination with the neighboring broadcaster SWR (Donaueschingen). The rollback of musical production that began in the 80s and the waning interest in new music determined him to counteract this trend, at least in choral music. In 1990 the Schola Cantorum stopped working after a tour of Russia. To prevent choral music from drifting into the pop scene as a whole, Gottwald wrote around 100 transcriptions for choir a cappella of works by composers who had written little for choir, such as Mahler, Berg, Ravel, Debussy, Strauss or Schreker. In this way he intended to further develop the technical abilities of the choirs without overwhelming them in terms of the new music. In doing so, he continued Hindemith's initiative, which as early as 1925 attempted to free choral music from the old masters ideology by commissioning compositions in Donaueschingen. He is aware that despite all the differences, pop music continues the tendencies of new music, such as the principle of defining composition as the production of sound. Only little has fallen away for the choirs.

Awards

Discography

As a choir director

  • Atelier Schola Cantorum . New vocal music. Cadenza 800891-900. 10 CDs.
  • Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, Brumel, Isaac: Musica Mensurabilis . Bayer Records 100271-274. 4 CDs. (Re-release: O Magnum Mysterium . Brilliant Classics 94267. 4 CDs.)

As a composer

  • Clytus Gottwald: Transcriptions . SWR Vocal Ensemble Stuttgart, Marcus Creed. Carus 83.181.
  • Clytus Gottwald: Vowel arrangements. Chamber Choir Saarbrücken, Georg Grün. Carus 83.182. 2005.
  • Choral arrangements by Clytus Gottwald . The Rudolfus Choir, Ralph Allwood. Signum Classics SIGCD102. 2007.
  • Clytus Gottwald: Hymn to Life. Transcriptions for mixed choir a cappella KammerChor Saarbrücken, Georg Grün. Carus 83.458 / 00. 2013.

Editing

  • Johannes Ghiselin -Bonnnet: Opera omnia. Vol. 1-4. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 23, 1961-68.

Fonts (selection)

  • Johannes Ghiselin - Johannes Verbonnet: Stylistic investigation into the problem of their identity . Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden 1962, DNB 451628403 (also Diss. Univ. Frankfurt 1961).
  • The manuscripts of the Kassel University Library, the State Library and the Murhard Library of the City of Kassel. - 6. Manuscripta musica . Kassel 1997, ISBN 3-447-03775-X .
  • "Hallelujah" and the theory of communicative action. Selected writings . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-608-91923-6 .
  • Review of the progress. An autobiography . Carus-Verlag, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-89948-117-4 .

literature

  • Ewald Liska (Ed.): Hommage à Clytus Gottwald: memories, letters, compositions for the 80th birthday . Stuttgart 2005: Carus-Verlag. ISBN 3-89948-071-6 .
  • Clytus Gottwald:  Gottwald, Clytus. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 7 (Franco - Gretry). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2002, ISBN 3-7618-1117-9 , Sp. 1409–1410 ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
  • Constance DeFotis: From the Work and Writings of Clytus Gottwald, Founder and Director of the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart. Diss. Univ. Cincinnati 1988.
  • Julia Heimerdinger: I have been compromised. I am now fighting against it: Ligeti vs. Kubrick and the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In: Journal of Film Music 3.2 (2011), pp. 127-143.
  • Katrin Beck: New Music in the Church of the 1960s. Clytus Gottwald and the consequences. Bockel, Neumünster 2016, ISBN 978-3-95675-013-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beck 2016
  2. ↑ Review of the IFB
personal data
SURNAME Gottwald, Clytus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer, choir director and musicologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Salzbrunn