Peter Cornelius / Clytus Gottwald (arr.) Drei Weihnachtslieder

Peter Cornelius, born in Mainz in 1824, died there in 1874. Son of an actors' couple. Initially also took up this profession, but then studied counterpoint with S. Dehn in Berlin from 1844 to 1846. His church music dates mainly from this period and from the years after 1852, when he went to Liszt in Weimar, who encouraged his work as a church composer. Cornelius became one of the most important pioneers of the New German School. He followed Wagner to Munich in 1865, where he worked as a composition teacher at the newly founded Royal School of Music from 1867 on. Today, his opera ‘Der Babier von Bagdad’ (1858) and his ‘Weihnachtslieder’ op. 8 are particularly well known.  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