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Felicitas Kukuck: Composing Against All Odds

supportive colleagues, she had a good sense of what and community music publications and added two
worked. additional stanzas. Kukuck’s stanzas continue the tale
Felicitas Kukuck’s music is mostly performed in Ger- of the bridge: it gets destroyed by all the people in the
many by community and church choirs, and is rarely land, who dance as they swing their axes. In Kukuck’s
heard outside the country. In 2014, over thirty concerts version, the song ends with people coming together and
across Germany marked the centenary of her death, holding hands as they dance “ohne Ende,” or without
and her name remains among the prominent German end. It could be that she wanted a stronger ending for a
composers of the twentieth century. Most of the infor- song children would sing in school, or to contribute to
mation about her life and work is in German, although a sense of unity among children after so many years of
relatively well documented thanks to the efforts of her war in Germany.
daughter and organizations such as the Archiv Frau & Whatever the case, the additional stanzas have be-
Musik, which now holds the rights to Kukuck’s estate. come the definitive version of this old folk song. The
The quality, adaptability, and content of her body of singable melody is built like a bridge, with gentle as-
work will be of particular interest to musicians working cending stepwise notes, lingering a moment an octave
in Christian churches, although the collections of can- above where it began, and descending gracefully on the
ons and folk songs—if one can track them down—will text “fa la la la.” It moves from minor to major and
provide rich material for those working with young and back to minor again. When Kukuck sings it in an old
developing musicians. recording, her vocal tone and tempo vary to reflect the
9
parts of the story.
Selected Works of Felicitas Kukuck
Storm-Lieder [Storm Songs] (1952, 1985)
Es führt über den Main [It Crosses the Main] (1952) Möseler Verlag
Available in numerous arrangements
There are two volumes of these delightful part songs
Of the more than one thousand pieces Kukuck that set the texts of nineteenth-century German poet
wrote, it is her arrangement of this medieval Totentanz Theodor Storm. Unaccompanied and set for mixed
folk song for which she is best known. Totentanz songs are choir, the texts are largely secular and make frequent
part of the medieval fascination with death and dance reference to the natural world. Homophony prioritizes
(also known as danse macabre) that appears in visual art, clarity of the text, mixed meters indicate word stress,
literature, and music of this era. The text of Es führt and occasional, often unprepared, chromaticism il-
über den Main, authorship unknown, tells of how people luminates deeper meaning contained within Storm’s
dance when they cross a bridge over the Main River. poetry. These pieces may be more suitable for experi-
Everyone—from a shoeless fellow, a young woman, enced choirs.
and even a king—must dance as they cross the bridge,
a metaphor for death. In the context of German Prot-
estantism, the idea of dancing to one’s death could be Das kommende Reich [The Kingdom to Come]
understood as finding joy in anticipation of one’s own (1953)
personal resurrection. It could also be a reminder to Carus Verlag
live one’s life well, since death comes for everyone in
the end, often without warning. Written for mixed choir, orchestra, baritone and or-
Whatever its original meaning, this folk song has gan, this seventy-minute setting of the Beatitudes is an ex-
been passed down for generations as part of Germa- ample of Kukuck’s belief that music for less-experienced
ny’s extensive folk song tradition. In 1952, Felicitas musicians must also be of high quality. The choral parts
Kukuck wrote an arrangement of the song for school in this score are sometimes for two parts only or written

62 CHORAL JOURNAL November/December 2025 Volume 66 Number 4