Franz Schreker / Clytus Gottwald (arr.) Three Songs. Vocal transcriptions by Clytus Gottwald

Franz Schreker was an Austrian composer and librettist. During his lifetime, Schreker was known alongside Richard Strauss as one of the most famous opera composers after Wagner. His late Romantic musical language also features expressionist elements. He wrote most of his opera libretti himself. In them, he created psychological portraits of his protagonists, some of which contain autobiographical references.

Franz Schreker's music was also denounced as ‘degenerate’ by the National Socialists, and it was not until the late 1970s that a renewed interest in Schreker's music began. Since then, more and more recordings of his music have been released.

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Rainer Maria Rilke was an important poet whose works had a profound influence on 20th-century literature. He travelled extensively throughout his life, and his experiences are reflected in his writings. His poems in particular are characterised by profound reflections on questions of love, death, art, faith and human existence. Works such as The Panther and the Sonnets to Orpheus have long been part of the standard repertoire of literary canon. Many of his poems have also been set to music. CARUS has published Rilke's texts in the form of settings of poems describing nature (Cyrill Schürch) and transcriptions of instrumental works for choir (Clytus Gottwald), among others. Personal details

Paul Heyse, geb. in Berlin 1830, gest. 1914 in München. 1910 erster Nobelpreisträger für Literatur. Heyse war mit Rheinberger befreundet. Personal details

The choral conductor, composer and musicologist Clytus Gottwald (1925 - 2023) made significant contributions to contemporary choral music. As editor for New Music at Südfunk Stuttgart and founder and director of the Schola Cantorum Stuttgart, he was in productive exchange with his contemporaries, Pierre Boulez, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and many others. With his Schola Cantorum, a 16-voice chamber vocal ensemble, Gottwald decisively shaped the a cappella choral culture of the highest technical level that is taken for granted today. Clytus Gottwald's transcriptions of piano songs and instrumental pieces for unaccompanied choir are appreciated by choirs all over the world. Modelled on the style of Ligeti, his works set the highest of musical standards. Clytus Gottwald has received several awards for his services, including the Cultural Prize of Baden-Württemberg in 2009, the European Church Music Prize in 2012, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2014. His importance for the development of contemporary choral music cannot be overestimated. Personal details