Some thoughts
on Ernst Pepping
The Church pictured here is at the center of the Evangelishes Johannestift,
the collection of charitable church institutions, of which the "Berlin School
of Church Music" was a small part. "Sacred Music" was deeply imbedded
in the social context of schools for young children and youth, assisted living
for mentally and physically handicapped individuals, and the elderly.
Diaconal training, health care, a hospital and a chuch conference center
were all grouped together as a self-contained village, all in service to the
wider world beyond.
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While the slow movement of Pepping’s 1950 Piano Concerto plays
in the background, memories of my own time with him blend with the
experience of singing, playing and listening to his music.
My time of study with him was in 1965/66 near the end of his
teaching career. I had come to Berlin specifically to study
with him, arrangements had been made through Oskar Sőhngen,
a high official in the Berlin-Brandenburg "Kirche der Union."
Oskar Sőhngen had been a friend and patron of Pepping for decades,
supporting him as a German Artist during the Third Reich,
and being the dedicatee of Pepping’s “Grosses Orgelbuch”
composed in the mid 1940s.
Pepping had a ground floor apartment in the building
which served as both classrooms and dormitory for the
“Berlin School of Church Music.” Taking composition lessons
with Pepping merely was to knock on his apartment door
at the appointed time, and sit in his living room as he
looked over the completed assignments. The school library
had several shelves containing single printed copies of
his works created over some four decades. As I was also a
member of the select choir, the Spandauer Kantorei,
I also learned to sing some of his music. And in my organ
lessons, I asked to learn some of the Pepping organ repertoire.
In the spring, I played a special concert of his pieces for him.
None of his music is particularly easy.
He never considered writing “down” to less than professional
performers. His choral music demanded high level skills,
usually unsupported by any instrumental accompaniments.
And all of his music had a strong horizontal drive,
contrapuntal independence.
In the printed program notes accompanying a recording of the
complete Symphonies & Piano Concerto is this quote from the
eulogy given by Oskar Sőhngen, 9 February 1981:
Ernst Pepping was able to create great and solid works
that stand outside the sphere of today’s aesthetic relativism
and will survive our time. The fact that Pepping, who did indeed
make the most important contribution to the revival of sacred music
in our century, in the broad public to a large extent has
been labeled merely as the great reviver of sacred music was
for him not always cause for joy and satisfaction. For he was
too deeply pervaded by the idea that sacred music does not
lead a life of its own but is a part of music in general and,
like it, has to listen to the times if it wants to say something
to people today.
That “sacred music does not lead a life of its own” can also
be said of the work of Leo Sowerby, with whom I also studied.
It is the common thread linking these two quite different composers,
and the reason I choose each one to study with.
I look at Bach, Mozart, Verdi and Brahms and see a similar
integrity: their “sacred” music is of a piece with the
“secular/ non-sacred” music. There is a single standard of
judgment – write your best!
Roger Petrich
4 February 2008
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