O Miserere for Baritone and Piano

Bialas O Miserere for Baritone and Piano

- 4 Four songs based on poems by Heinrich Heine (1983)

“A composer’s path to self-discovery depends not least of all on whether he can mediate successfully between an orientation on historical styles and a fixation on a personal idiom.  The solutions to this problem are many and varied, ranging from hermetically isolated eccentricity to a ready willingness to conform.  

These extremes have never posed difficulties to Günter Bialas.  The worth and validity of his far-ranging musical output since the Thirties has been the result of a specific mediation between the stylistic trends current at any given time and the values of his own musical language.  Bialas has always been an inquisitive and open-minded composer, but without precipitously adapting to fashionable techniques.  Notwithstanding his necessary orientation on current styles, composing has always been for him a deeply individual matter, a subjective act which only becomes fully manifest when set down in his personal idiom.   

This critical open-mindedness is no less pervasive in Bialas’s music than are his activities as a teacher, which place him among the most significant musical mentors of our time.  Bialas’s work also takes on an individual character through the various stylistic transformations it has  undergone in the course of his career.  His music gradually evolved from a primarily texture-oriented craftsmanship to a distinctive principle of freely formed Klangsatz, or 'composition in sonorities'.  This fitting term was coined by the composer himself to denote a specific technique of sound-spaces and sound-surfaces, a technique which transcends the vicissitudes of stylistic fashion as an emblem of his personal style.” (Siegfried Mauser)