The incessant

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The incessant is an oratorio in three parts for solos, mixed choir, boys' choir and orchestra by Paul Hindemith (music) and Gottfried Benn (text). The first performance took place on November 21, 1931 in Berlin at the 2nd conference for radio music by the Philharmonic Choir and the Philharmonic Orchestra under Otto Klemperer . It was published by Schotts Sons, Mainz, 1931; at the same time a separate text edition with insignificant textual deviations. Benn himself published an abbreviated version of the lyric text for the first time in his Selected Poems from 1936, at the same time with 2 uncomposed "studies" ("chorales"). The same selection of texts then appeared in Die Trunkene Flut (1949) and in Gesammelte Gedichte (1956).

Gottfried Benn wrote an introduction to this oratorio. There he explains: "We know nothing about creation except that it changes - and the incessant should be an expression for this broadest background of life, its elementary principle of transformation and the restless shaking of its forms." In the continuation of this introduction Benn explains that this idea of ​​the ever-changing creation coming from Heraklitus via the Greeks is finally found in German literature in Goethe's Faust and then in Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra . Benn does not understand the incessant as a religious or philosophical, but as a "universal principle ... which has lived in humanity since the beginning and which is related to the fateful ..."

literature

  • Gottfried Benn : Complete Works. Stuttgart edition. 7 volumes in 8 parts. Edited by Gerhard Schuster (Volume I – V) and Holger Hof (Volume VI and VII / 1 and VII / 2). Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986-2003, ISBN 3-608-93943-1 . In:
    • Volume I: Poems 1 [Gesammelte Gedichte 1956]. 1986, p. 136ff. (with comment).
    • Volume VII / 1: Scenes and other writings. 2003 (with comment).
  • Gottfried Benn: Letters in three volumes. Volume 3: Letters to Paul Hindemith. Ed. Ann Clark Fehn. With an essay by Dieter Rexroth . Limes, Wiesbaden / Munich 1978.
  • Gottfried Benn: Letters. Volume 4: Letters to Tilly Wedekind. Edited by Marguerite Valerie Schlueter. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986.
  • Martin Andris: Music non-stop. Paul Hindemith's conceptions of history before the end of the Weimar Republic (= Rombach Sciences. Litterae series. Vol. 236). Rombach, Freiburg i.Br./Berlin/Wien 2019, ISBN 978-3-7930-9920-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gottfried Benn, Letters. Volume 4: Letters to Tilly Wedekind. Edited by Marguerite Valerie Schlueter. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986, p. 293 (Editor's note on Letter No. 22 of July 27, 1931.)
  2. ↑ Proven in Gottfried Benn : Complete Works. Vol. I (1986), pp. 402f. (Commentary on p. 136ff.).
  3. ↑ Evidence ibid.
  4. ↑ Gottfried Benn: Collected works in four volumes. Volume 3: Poems. 10th edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, p. 599.
  5. ↑ Gottfried Benn: Collected works in four volumes. Volume 3: Poems. 10th edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, p. 600.