Dream and Death

Traum und Tod is a symphonic poem after Stefan George by the Austrian composer Heinrich Gattermeyer (1923–2018), first performed in 1992 by the Niederösterreichisches Tonkünstler-Orchester in the Großer Saal of the Vienna Musikverein. Gattermeyer trained in Vienna and taught there for decades, writing prolifically for orchestra, choir and school ensembles in a tonal idiom that stayed deliberately outside the postwar avant-garde. George's late verse, with its ritualised imagery of dream and death, supplies the shape of the piece rather than a narrative programme.