Notes
Aribert Reimann: «Unrevealed» for Baritone and String Quartet • »Variations« for Piano. »Dear sacred name, rest ever unrevealed« – this entry on November 14, 1813, in Lord Byron's diary paraphrasing a sentence from Alexander Pope's »Eloisa to Abelard», is Aribert Reimann's motto to his composition «Unrevealed« for baritone and string quartet (1979/1980); »un-revealed« is meant not only in the literal sense of the word but also as »concealed», even »protected« from the greedy and malevolent eyes of a society dripping with philistine self-righteousness and double standards of morality. The texts on which this composition is based describe the famous fall of an incestuous love affair between the poet and his half-sister Augusta, whose married name was Leigh, and, therefore, touches on a delicate matter which – then as now – society at best tolerates arduously, yet more likely condemns and considers tabu; it is an outsider's position with which Aribert Reimann strongly identifies, having set to music poems by Sylvia Plath, who was led to suicide by the pressure of normality. He chose four texts – two »Stanzas«, one letter (written on May 17, 1819) and an »Epistle« – which Lord Byron (born 1788, died 1824 in the Greek struggle for liberty) wrote after the forced separation from Augusta and his final departure from England. Byron himself mentioned to a friend that Augusta was the only true love of his life and that all other women he had known seemed later to have been »whores«. The natural, in no way theatrical or deliberately plaintive language underlines the authenticity of this feeling and illuminates truth and beauty in one so branded. Reimann's composition continues the traditional line of his work in two ways: it is another representative of the song cycle, and it is, according to Reimann, a »piece for baritone next to a string quartet which stands by itself in its four- movement form«. It could, therefore, be considered the »second string quartet« (after the adolescent work from 1956); it is modelled after Schoenberg's Quartet No. 2 which also incorporates the human voice. Aribert Reimann, himself a pianist and accompanist, more often composed for solo piano than for string quartet; after smaller, early compositions, he wrote «Impressionen« (1954), Sonata No. 1 (1957), «Spektren« (1967) and most recently »Variationen« (1979). Similar to the «Orchestervariationen« (1975), the ›theme‹ here is not an explicitly notated series of tones but rather a changing state of sound: at first a chord series in low range, expanding from a six-tone to a twelve-tone cluster into a wide range arpeggio. These arpeggios are interrupted twice by two-part linearly constructed sections (with appoggiaturas preceding single notes
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