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Walter Niemann: Heimweh (Longing for home), Op. 97 No. 4

536 views · Published 9 December 2017 · 3:15 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2017 · Music

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Phillip Sear plays an unusual arrangement of Stephen Foster's 1851 minstrel song' 'Old folks at home' from the 1924 Louisiana Suite by the German composer Walter Niemann  (1876-1953).
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Walter Niemann (1876-1953), who studied composition with Humperdinck and Reinecke, is best known today for his many short piano pieces, although he also wrote larger scale works. He spent much of his life in Hamburg and Leipzig.  In his many piano suites, Niemann often looked to antiquity and/or exotic locations (eg., Bali, China, Japan and many others).  However much of this music, with a preponderance of sequences of sonorous parallel chords sounds doggedly Germanic (for example, compare the relative exoticism of Godowsky's 'Java Suite' as opposed to Niemann's 'Bali' suite), and one imagines Niemann looking through illustrated travel journals rather than visiting the locations evoked.  However, the suites contain some genuinely beautiful moments.  Niemann was very good at portraying country landscapes, often with echoing cow-calls or church bells.  Here, he was trying to evoke the sense of nostalgia for lost homelands felt by the slaves.  In his (translated words):

"The grief and sorrow for the old abandoned country is mostly done full justice to and pulsates in most of these songs; thus, for instance, in the heart - touching tune: 'My old Kentucky Home', or in the early Song of Home, the 'Old Folks at home', the rendering of which is so beautifully described by the German poet Paul Keller, when he says: "She sang this most pathetic of all Songs of Home with deep heart-born emotion,and Mr. Brown hummed the accompaniment with a nasal tone, as the negroes do, when, far from home, one of them, leaning against the wall, allows his inmost, heart-felt sorrow and the grief of his enslaved soul to flow forth in song. Then all, with motionless body, like rigid statues, join in the humming-part, their large eyes fed with burning tears gazing, staring at the yellow light of the dim lamps".  The thumbnail shows part of a diorama "Old folks at home", from around 1951, at the Stephen Foster State Memorial's museum in White Springs, Florida.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- Played by Phillip Sear
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