Arnold Schönberg is regarded as the inventor of twelve-tone technique, but his fellow Austrian Josef Matthias Hauer disputed this claim. He continues to be celebrated as the “discoverer of twelve-tone playing” at his birth house in Vienna’s Neustadt but has not received much credit for this elsewhere: his compositions are only very rarely heard on concert stages.

Steffen Schleiermacher and the tenor Holger Falk pay tribute to Hauer’s music with a recording of his settings of poems by Hölderlin.

Hauer first read Hölderlin texts at the age of thirty in 1913 and immediately saw him as a kindred spirit: “My first acquaintance with the great lyric poet and musician offered me orientation in many things. I have set myself the life’s task of taking all there is from Hölderlin insofar as it is possible for me to do so.”

Hauer’s songs range over a wide stylistic spectrum. After his first encounter with Hauer’s songs Holger Falk expressed surprise: “I found songs in twelve-tone rows but with a tonal harmonic frame. Their expressive spectrum extends from the dramatic employment of the voice, from the very plain art song to speech-song. In the later compositions lyrical song and speech-song occur in immediate juxtaposition within a single song.”

Op.25 offers Steffen Schleiermacher the opportunity to demonstrate his capabilities as a soloist. The pianist shows us how he understands the little “Piano Pieces with Titles after the Words of Friedrich Hölderlin”, which are also notated without prescriptions of tempo and dynamics. Every piano student who has to practice these pieces as typical examples of the music of the twentieth century will recognize how far he or she has to go to match the talent of this leading interpreter of the piano music of this period.