Songs for voice and piano are a constant thread running through Manfred Trojahn’s output. In an interview he reveals his thoughts about setting poetry to music: „to change, without damaging“.

[t]akte: Over the past 14 years you have written over 100 songs for voice and piano. What attracts you to this genre, which is somewhat out of fashion within avantgarde circles?

Manfred Trojahn: I think that composing songs is very closely associated with music theatre. Song and the poetic form on which it is based convey specific content as does music theatre, and I have a certain need for this content.

Has something gone out of fashion there? I probably didn’t notice that much. Fashion is not what I’m primarily interested in.

You only composed works in this genre in the 1980s, relatively late and only sporadically: the “Trakl Fragments” in 1984 and the cycle “Spätrot” after Karoline von Günderrode in 1987. However, from 2004 you seem to have rethought your approach. We have the impression that since then it has become a sort of habit for you to compose at least a small collection of songs almost every year. How did this change come about?

There wasn’t really a change; except for a few years my preoccupation with song has always been a key interest. Trakl, for example, was an early victim of these preoccupations, but not only he, Storm also had the same effect on me. However, I was not always at the height of my potential. I am a late developer, and so I turned to the genres which have become most important to me really late.

In 2004 the “Liederwerkstatt”, or “song workshop”, began – a venture to encourage song composition supported by the GEMA Foundation and later by the Siemens Foundation – initially in Bad Reichenhall, then in Bad Kissingen. Colleagues such as Reimann, Killmayer, Rihm, Schleiermacher and many others began to respond to this stimulus with great interest, and so, many song compositions were written in this context. Apart from that, one or two other things happened as well. As well as this, the “Liederwerkstatt” was a place where people could come together – that doesn’t happen so often. You go out for a meal, attend rehearsals – all things which happen less often as you get older. Above all you are with wonderfully motivated young singers and exquisite pianists –  a little bit of complete bliss.

It is striking that the focus of your choice of poetry lies mainly in the classical canon, particularly the romantic period – Hölderlin, Schlegel, Eichendorff, Heine, to name but a few. What criteria do you use for choosing poems? Do you find the poems or do the poems find you? How does this link to modern lyric poetry come about?

There is no arching link over anything. But there are prerequisites of the genre. Of course I have also used contemporary lyric poetry as in my settings of René Char and Johannes Poethen. But I clearly prefer to use an ensemble for these texts, and to give songs for voice and piano another form, so to speak. The poets listed, of whom Peter Horst Neumann is the only exception with two songs (written for the Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich), are those who have been chosen by the “Liederwerkstatt”. But there are also others, thanks to freely-chosen connections: for example, the Lasker-Schüler cycle, the Rilke settings or even a cycle such as Abendröte by Friedrich Schlegel, composed at the suggestion of the “Im Zentrum Lied” forum.

The poets for the “Liederwerkstatt” had to be able to be set several times; the concept of the workshop always provides for works from the classical repertoire alongside the new pieces. Since then there have been changes to the concept, but this main emphasis has happily remained. The poems are not therefore primarily freely chosen, but serve a concept. It has also happened that I could not respond to a poet – that was the case with Schiller – or that pieces were ready too late and therefore could not be finished, as with Three women from Shakespeare. I have always taken these stimuli as opportunities and not as a limitation, for it is indeed about immersing myself in texts with which I am constantly preoccupied anyway.

Poems are condensed language. How do you create free space for your music?

First of all I don’t doubt that this free space exists. The poem loses nothing of its own value, it acquires something extra. However, we can say that the poem does not actually need this. But it can be a wonderful experience to have both. It is therefore one of these very rare situations in which I can change something, without damaging it. In this lies a really powerful space and also a great responsibility: it all depends on me.

Arnold Schoenberg once wrote that he composed his songs “intoxicated by the initial sound of the first words of text, without even bothering in the slightest about the continuation of the poetic processes, indeed without even registering this in the slightest in the excitement of composing”. How do you approach composing your songs – do you also experience this “intoxicating excitement”? And how do the words and music relate in your works?

I am certainly less expressive than Schoenberg was, and think if I had the good fortune to place my working process alongside that of Francis Poulenc, for example, then the combination of calculation and inspiration which characterizes my music would actually be very close to his.

What is striking about your songs is a preference for tonal sonority. Where does this inclination towards tonality come from? Are there textual connections?

There are many different texts, and this undoubted tendency towards tonality certainly does not derive from the original poems. Perhaps we might recall the concept of the genre once again: I think that expanded tonality is a perfect language for the genre of song for voice and piano – it facilitates everything and actually obstructs nothing.

As we touched upon earlier, music theatre, opera is an important component in your output. A few of your works for voice and piano have the subtitle “Szene” [scena]. What is the dramaturgical element for you, and how do you distinguish scenas from songs?

The scenas are really a special form which, in its freedom of gesture, is much more orientated towards music theatre than songs could be. The variety of what occurs is generally greater. With these pieces I definitely also have visual ideas, more strongly than with poems, even if they contain, for example, place descriptions. Perhaps it is an almost private form, but at any rate the differences from song should already be clear. Song is also intended to have a more dramatic role, and the narrative lyricism of song plays a less prominent role. There are also mixed forms, so Goethe’s “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” is incorporated into the scena “Sie ist jetzt nicht mehr da”, and in this case the poem acquires a rather dramatic character.

 Interview by Robert Krampe.

(from “[t]akte” 1/2019 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)