Gripped by every measure

It was pure coincidence. In summer 1972, in the middle of my studies for my degree, I moved from a Stuttgart suburb to the west of the city, just half a kilometer from the Graulich family home and the head office of Carus-Verlag. Günter Graulich was then closely involved with editions in the Stuttgart Schütz Edition, for 1972 was a special year in the history of Heinrich Schütz – the 300th anniversary of his death. At that time I was not so very interested in the music of Heinrich Schütz, having grown up with him alongside Bach and his contemporaries. This may have been because the essential qualities of Heinrich Schütz were then rather obscured by the overly Romantic ways of singing and playing still typical at that time, and the use of a group of singers which was simply too large.

At that time I was much more interested in the choral music of German Romanticism, works by Mendelssohn and Brahms. It was precisely their historical approach to contrapuntal vocal music which was a bridge for me to what I had learned in my “musical puberty.” Their compositional style developed into what became my preferred style towards the end of my studies. During my studies I had heard, particularly with regard to Mendelssohn, only derogatory, even ridiculing opinions.

And so it came about that the “thousand year” performance ban on Mendelssohn’s music stipulated by the Nazis lasted only about three times as long as their disastrous dozen years in power. Only at the beginning of the 1970s did an unprejudiced examination of Mendelssohn’s vocal works begin. I can still remember exactly how I tried to find kindred spirits, swimming against a strong tide, undermined by the rejection of this music which was then regarded as too bombastic or as a pure stylistic copy.

My very first radio recording and second LP recording in the mid-1970s were devoted to Mendelssohn’s works – admittedly neither with music from Carus-Verlag nor for its record label, which had just been launched. However, the recordings led to an initial interest in my work at that time by the publisher Günter Graulich.

One of the fundamental precepts of the publishing house is to encourage a wide interest in different works through music editions and recordings of the same work. In the late 1980s Günter Graulich invited me to record all of Brahms’s unaccompanied sacred works. I passed on this generous, kind offer to my choir – and had to concede that after its first two recording projects, the ensemble was tired of making recordings. So I had to decline. This resulted in a recording by Roger Norrington which has been in the Carus catalog ever since, and was only joined by our new recording in 1995.

Our first recording for Carus was therefore devoted to the secular choral music of the German composer and music teacher Karl Marx (1897–1985). Now we began to work together closely once more: Carus wanted to publish the “complete sacred works of Mendelssohn” and to issue large parts of this on recordings. In 1976, four years after the publishing house was founded, Günter Graulich himself edited the first Mendelssohn publication in the Carus catalog with the organ version of the famous hymn Hör mein Bitten. And now came the plan for a complete edition of his sacred music, accompanied by a complete recording: what a project! And, from the perspective of the early 1980s, what a risk!

“Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy has left us his most significant creations in his many compositions of sacred vocal music.” This was the assessment of Hermann Kretzschmar in his 1895 concert guide Führer durch den Konzertsaal. Why should the precocious composer of a few well-known works, such as the Octet or the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not have also written important vocal works? However, a more thorough examination of Mendelssohn’s vocal works was always overshadowed by an undue emphasis on his role in reviving Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or by prejudices about his Jewish background.

From the very beginning I was as enthusiastic about the idea of a complete recording as I am gripped by almost every measure of this composer’s work (and the proviso “almost” is the same reservation that applies to every great composer: that alongside the outstanding works, there are also weaker ones). In 1983, just a year after the release of the very first compact disc on the German market, we released the first Carus CD (Mendelssohn’s Hör mein Bitten and other sacred works, Carus 83.101), marking the beginning of this ambitious and extensive project.