Leopold Spinner (1906 – 1980)

In Three Songs Spinner sets three poems to music, which muse on the transition between day and night or night and day, the moment of twilight, often associated with insecurity and doubt, but here with moments of consolation and insight. The poems Rondel by Trakl, Abendständchen (evening serenade) by Brentano and Septembermorgen (september morning) by Mörike are set as short and unpretentious compositions, resembling early songs by Webern.

Spinner puts the texts by Nietzsche in short forms characterized by large intervals and exalted expressivity, pointing out the immediacy and acuteness of the fragments describing inner landscapes.

Complex compositions, partly in a chorale-like mood, wherein Spinner approaches the greatness of Rilke’s visions by a big vocal range over a polyphone piano part.

Spinner’s last song cycle is solely dedicated to the dream, the world in between, twilight, dusk, transition, already brought up in the Three Songs of 1941. The dream as a threshold between day- and night-consciousness, inner homeland and at the same time gate to the supernatural, to another space-time continuum, dreamlike memory, outweighing linearity and polarity. Like lucid dreaming, wherein the dreamer is concious of his dreamy state. In this cycle Spinner sets Septembermorgen by Eduard Mörike to music for a second time.