One of the greatest lieder singers of our time, the tenor Christoph Prégardien is giving three recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall this week. The second and third of his appearances are devoted to 19th-century song and to Handel and Telemann respectively, but his opening programme, for which he was partnered by the pianist Stefan Litwin, ranged across almost two centuries, from Schubert to Wilhelm Killmayer.
But this was much more than a random selection of favourites. The sequence carried the title Erinnerung (Recollection), with the 30 songs thematically grouped; there were songs about trees, about the horrors of war, about romance and so on, with settings by Hanns Eisler as the common denominator between them all. More than half of the songs here were by Eisler, from excerpts from his Op 11 Zeitungsausschnitte (Newspaper Clippings), which was composed in the mid-1920s when he was still trying to reconcile the influence of his teacher Schoenberg with his urge to compose music that would connect with the widest possible audience, through his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht in Berlin in the 1930s, in the US during their second world war exile and afterwards back in Europe in the newly created GDR.
