Futo Balazs

Müller-Schubert: Der Leiermann

The piece was written in 2003, commissioned by the Budapest Spring Festival. The process of the work follows the line of the composer s personal interpretation of the original poem. In this song the original dark, grim ending appears as a sort of cathartic dénouement. The theme is love versus mortality. The work is a kind of wholly composed song written in the 21st century its form derives basically from the text. The narrator begins the story in Sprechgesang and in the final lines of the poem tries to sing in a normal singing voice. This acoustic line is followed by the merging of the sinus tones into the clarinet parts. Thus, basically, a peculiar change of toneintroduced for dramatic purposes constitutes the essence of the song. First performance: March 2003.