Requiem ohne Worte (Requiem without words) for double bass and piano is an impressive, inventive and challenging work for the advanced bassist and is only available in solo tuning. Written in a confident but accessible modern idiom, with many opportunities for the bassist to display both technical and musical excellence, this is a major new addition to the serious concert, Repertoire.
Wolfgang Wagenhäuser writes: “Requiem ohne Worte (Requiem without words) was composed in 1997 in memory of my former student Tobias Heymann, who fell, alone, in the Alps and was covered by a blizzard lasting several days.
When my friend, the double bassist Ovidiu Badila, asked me about writing a work for him, the associated moods kept coming into my head and soul. The line-up of double bass and piano is as if made for the abysmal, the desolate, the craggy – but also sadness, comfort and … jazz; and Tobias had studied and loved this style of music too. The speechlessness corresponds most directly to the bewilderment. Music alone seeks to grasp this incomprehensibility.
From the name Tobias Heymann I derived a twelve-tone row that carries the entire work. In the execution I mix the different levels of time and sound, let them rotate and breathe. I steer the overall structure through the mixing ratio of the different techniques – whereby many a tonal passage is based on a pure twelve-tone structure.
Ovidiu loved the work very much, even though he would have preferred a funny piece from me, but he immersed himself in the Requiem with great commitment. We performed some of it live at a musical summer festival in East Friesland. It deeply moved the audience. In one recording session we recorded everything except the Dies Irae, which is by far the most difficult movement and we wanted to prepare it well. It then took a relatively long time and I had a strange feeling whether we would be able to complete it. But then one day we found the time and the requiem is completely recorded.
Tragically, it was also to be the swan song for Ovidiu, who died unexpectedly shortly afterwards. All too soon this wonderful and diverse, deep and virtuoso musician left us. May he rest in peace!”