...Again and again does my life pass in the old movies cinema. Again my youth, and again the same questions, connected with it for life, "What was the Rubicon that became the point of no return? Where was the flaw – in the initial premise or in the way of its fulfilment? Did the nation sincerely err, or did it allow someone to seduce it, sweeping this fact under the carpet?"

 

The most light time of my youth concurred with the old days before the war, and it is the period that all my "damned" questions are pointed to. I shall hardly manage to come closer to the answers to them, therefore it is even more pleasant for me to see others' attempts to do it. It inspires even more when these others are young people. The project presented on this CD, is one of these remarkable attempts. In its discrepancy, the situation with these songs and marches is similar to my excruciating questions. On the one hand, it is the music that was the distinctive feature of our life then, i.e. part of the country's common mechanism advancing to the Nazism abyss. On the other hand, many of these songs had been written one and a half century prior to the mentioned events, in the period of the anti-Napoleon liberation movement and the subsequent struggle of the isolated German lands for the consociation, while some songs' roots are in the German musical poetic folklore. This music's heroic patriotic polarity was also successfully used later; sometimes the words were only written over to correspond to the current context. Does it mean that in these songs, there was initially hidden a certain wormhole from whence these songs, the heights of musical art in their majority, happen to be under avowed and secret bans today? Or maybe, is it rather someone's or even our common reasoned or enforced reluctance (or misgiving) to separate the husk from the grain? Must we consciously deny the doubtless merits of an artwork, made to order or initiated by spirit and mood of later condemned regime? What is the way the author-artist's aim and responsibility and all consecutive sinuosities of his creation's life are balanced? ...There is one more chance for us to reflect and to remove at least some of the interrogation points, found in plenty in this small text of mine.

 

 

Karl Stürmer, historian, musicologist

Burghausen, December 2002