Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his extended prose poem "Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Kornetts Christophe Rilke," in 1899, but it wasn't until a new edition appeared in 1912 that it skyrocketed in popularity and attracted the attention of many composers. Rilke felt the words of his text were music enough, and objected in general to settings of his poem, but he paradoxically gave Danish composer Paul von Klenau (1883-1946) permission to use it. Klenau's 1918 setting of the entire poem for chorus and orchestra prominently uses a ...
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Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his extended prose poem "Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Kornetts Christophe Rilke," in 1899, but it wasn't until a new edition appeared in 1912 that it skyrocketed in popularity and attracted the attention of many composers. Rilke felt the words of his text were music enough, and objected in general to settings of his poem, but he paradoxically gave Danish composer Paul von Klenau (1883-1946) permission to use it. Klenau's 1918 setting of the entire poem for chorus and orchestra prominently uses a baritone soloist. Klenau (who went on to adopt serial techniques and wrote a twelve-tone opera about the same time as Berg was working on Lulu) uses a Straussian post-romantic harmonic vocabulary here, but his music has an emotional objectivity and reserve more characteristic of French sensibilities of the era. His settings are pastel-hued and evocative, with genuine sensitivity to the subtleties of the text, and the lush middle section of the piece, which describes the Cornet's...
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