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Wayfaring Stranger

M2564

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Moeck

Composer: Braun - Gerhard

Instrumentation: Treble + Percussion

Period/Genre: Contemporary

Grade: Difficult

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$36.75 tax incl.

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*Contemporary Piece.* Includes Preface and Performance Instructions.

1. Wayfaring Stranger

  • Gerhard Braun was the son of Felix Friedmann-Braun, a judge and brilliant amateur pianist in Berlin. Gerhard grew up in a prosperous, cultured family with many links to leading literary, musical and artistic figures in Germany. Gerhard chose to study medicine, but his studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as a medical officer. As a Jew he suffered the persecution of Jews in Germany during the 1930s. In late 1938, following the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom, he spent five and a half horrendous weeks in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, from which he was released on the condition that he and his family paid a large sum in tax and that he emigrated.
  • In January 1939 Gerhard and his family came to England. From 1942 he was able to practice medicine in England but only as a junior hospital doctor. The absurdly long and stressful hours that junior doctors had to work were too much for a man in his fifties whose health had been seriously impaired by mistreatment at hands of the Nazis and he died in 1946, aged 52. Ruth Tenney, Marcel Wolfers' wife, was a poet, and Gerhard set many of her poems to music.
  • Gerhard's surviving compositions give a wonderful glimpse of the role of music in his families life. There are many settings of words by his wife Anneliese, and birthday serenades for his adopted daughter. He also set many poems by the American poet Ruth Tenney, who was Marcel Wolfers’ wife. Gerhard’s songs reflect the hardships of the time, and how music was able to give the family a sense of dignity and identity.

_Score 7 pp._

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