Webern, Anton: Im Sommerwind

Composer and choir master Clytus Gottwald comments on his transcription of Anton Webern’s Im Sommerwind (1904) as follows: “First of all I had to eliminate all those parts of the source material that had strictly instrumental designs, reducing the work – to quote Wolfgang Rihm – to its singable remnant. What was so surprising, however, was that such a reduction did not lead to a meaningless sequence of fragments, but that the fragments turned out to be – with regard to harmony and motifs – so closely related to each other that the result proved an impressive ‘work within a work’. The reduction uncovered something that could be called the ‘essence’ of the work. In order to make the singable remnant singable, I used fragments from Bruno Wille’s poem Im Sommerwind, which Webern had used as a basis for his composition.”