Paul Burkhard might be best known as the composer of the popular song ‘O mein Papa’, but he was classically trained and saw no reason why ‘serious’ music should not be popular or ‘popular’ music serious. His Seven Steps of Life for organ, harp and clarinet, was one of his last works, written when he was already ill, and is a retrospective account in music of his own life. It incorporates the song of a nightingale that he had transcribed in Italian Switzerland in 1945. Hans Schaeuble was a close friend and colleague of Paul Burkhard. He studied in Leipzig and enjoyed much early success in Germany, culminating in a performance of his music by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1939. The ballet Rose and the Shadow was composed in 1957-8 and was recorded at the time on two pianos by Schaeuble and the Horovitz pupil Nico Kaufmann. Schaeuble himself was very fond of this work, and in it he shows himself to be a fine composer in the school of Paul Hindemith.
