Four Songs for Baritone from Ernst Toller’s ‘Vormorgen’

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Schramm must have had a particularly close relationship with Toller, a famous left-wing poet, as almost all of Schramm’s vocal music, which includes two operas and an orchestral song cycle, set Toller’s words. Toller spent some time in prison in the 1920s for his political activity, which was also his most prolific period of writing. Vormorgen was a collection of poems written while in prison. Much of his writing, plays and poetry, was written as a reaction to the First World War, particularly its futility and the cost of human life. He left Germany in 1933 with the rise of the Nazis, and committed suicide in New York in 1939.

Schramm and his wife also left Europe before the Second World War. They initially settled in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in 1937, but found the heat too oppressive and so decided to make New Zealand their home, settling in Wellington.