Gallows songs - Christian Morgenstern
20 years of the Dead Poets' Club, an anniversary worth celebrating - with a special poet and a special guest singer!
"O ghastly tangles of life, we hang here by the red thread!" - so begins the song of the gallows brothers by Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914).
And isn't it sometimes helpful to see things with a bit of gallows humor?
Morgenstern himself wrote that "gallows poetry" is a piece of worldview and that the world is viewed differently from the gallows. With his gallows songs, he wanted to "spread a little spiritual lightness, cheerfulness and freedom, to revive the imagination, to thaw out just a little of the music of the soul that had frozen in the post horn". Fifty years later, Marcel Reich-Ranicki recommended all gallows songs in his canon of German-language poetry.
Poems such as 'Der Lattenzaun', 'Sophie, die Henkersmaid' and 'Das Mondschaf' are legendary, 'Der Werwolf' is even school material. 'You laugh your head off', Tucholsky once said, 'afterwards, having become more serious, you admire a profound lyricism that only turns funny at the last moment - and realize at the end that you have learned a philosophical sentence'.
Actor Hans-Werner Meyer(Letzte Spur Berlin, Baader Meinhof Komplex) was recruited as the singer for the anniversary project. He received the email with the request and the first compositions on a Monday at 4:46 pm. He replied to Reinhardt Repke's email at 17:15: "He really liked the settings, he wants to, he has to sing it. Even his father would have recited Morgenstern at the kitchen table at home."
Playing time: approx. 90 minutes, excl. interval
