The reputation that Walter Braunfels enjoys today falls far shortof the high regard in which he was held during the 1920s, when he was seen as one of Germany's leading composers, his name frequently mentioned in the same breath as those of Richard Strauss and Franz Schreker. As with Schreker, the National Socialists' stigmatised his music as 'degenerate' and even his greatest triumphs, including the Aristophanic opera Die Vögel, were suppressed, and although he was rehabilitated after 1945, he was unable to repeat his earlier triumphs.There is an especially bitter irony to the fact that one of his greatest successes during his lifetime, his Te Deum Op. 32, was written in the context of his conversion to Catholicism as a response to the horrors of the First World War. This is a large-scale choral work filled with reminiscences of Wagner, but unlike Parsifal, Braunfels' music does not subscribe to the idea of art as a form of religious worship.The awed and awe-inspiring sounds, the threatening march rhythms heralding the Day of Judgement and the passages which, filled with hope, hold out the promise of redemption in Paradise - all of this is clothed in a compelling musical form that goes far beyond the piece's historical background.The baton is wielded by Stuttgart's new general music director, Manfred Honeck, who conducted the world première of Braunfels's final opera, Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna in Stockholm. Honeck and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra have been hugely acclaimed throughout Europe and further afield, such is the power of this live recording from Stockholm's Berwald Hall.
