Braunfels: Te Deum – Wand

Some works arrive stillborn into the catalog, worthy but unloved, and Walter Braunfels’s Te Deum has spent most of its ninety-odd years in that condition — known mainly to specialists, dutifully mentioned in the Pfitzner-Strauss footnotes, never quite claiming the ground it deserves. This Cologne broadcast, taped for the composer’s seventieth birthday in 1952 and led by Günter Wand before he became a house name on the strength of his Bruckner, makes a case for the piece that no amount of program-note advocacy ever could. It simply plays it, with total conviction, and lets the music do what music does.

Braunfels came home from the trenches a different man than the one who went in — this much is documented, and it matters here more than usual, because the transformation is the piece. He’d gone to war a patriot steeped in Pfitzner’s cultural nationalism; he returned, like so many of that generation, unable to reconcile what he’d witnessed with any triumphalist reading of the old liturgical text. So his Te Deum, premiered in Köln in 1920 under Hermann Abendroth, refuses the coronation-anthem tradition almost entirely. There is no Walton here, no Berlioz-style pomp for its own sake — though Braunfels knew his Berlioz intimately (he’d written a whole orchestral fantasy on a theme from that composer’s own Te Deum) and borrows its rhythmic profile for the Judex crederis, only to invert its meaning completely. Where Berlioz marches, solemn and certain, Braunfels dances — a danse macabre wearing liturgical vestments, unsettling in exactly the way it should be.

The interpretation catches this ambiguity from the first bars. Wand shapes the opening “Feierlich, breit” with a broadness that never curdles into bombast; you hear supplication under the surface pomp, an anxiety the tempo marking alone wouldn’t tell you was there. The Gürzenich-Chor — recorded, it should be said, in the boxy, close-miked mono typical of West German radio in this period — sings with a rawness that actually helps the “Te Martyrum” section, where the chorus turns explicitly warlike, almost frightening in its urgency before collapsing back into prayer. A more polished modern choir might smooth over exactly what makes this passage work.

Leonie Rysanek is the reason to seek this disc out, full stop. Still years from her international breakthrough, she sings the soprano solos with a creamy, covered tone that already suggests the Sieglinde and Kaiserin to come — and she and Helmut Melchert, paired in the work’s recurring consolatory theme, achieve a tenderness that cuts against the grain of the darker choral writing around them. Melchert doesn’t have quite Rysanek’s glow, his tone occasionally papery at the top, but he phrases with intelligence and never forces.

Where the performance falters — and it does, here and there — is in ensemble untidiness one associates with single-take broadcast conditions. The Cologne Radio Symphony’s brass turn a little blowsy in the Judex, and Hermann Werner’s organ, crucial to the work’s sonic architecture, occasionally disappears into the recorded balance rather than anchoring it as Braunfels surely intended. The Aeterna fac section, in particular, wants a weightier bass line underneath its gradual brightening than engineers of 1952 were equipped to deliver.

None of which finally matters much. This is a historical document as much as a modern audiophile experience, and on those terms it succeeds unreservedly — a glimpse of Wand decades before the Bruckner canonization, conducting music he plainly believed in, with a cast that includes one of the great sopranos of the postwar era still finding her voice. Recordings of the Braunfels Te Deum remain scarce; there is no crowded field to navigate, no competing “reference version” to weigh this against. That scarcity alone makes the reissue valuable. That the performance is this alive makes it necessary.