Walden is a work for expanded orchestra and speaker that Heiner Goebbels composed in 1998, drawing on Henry David Thoreau's 1854 book about a solitary life in the woods. This recording comes from the premiere performances of November 1998 and appeared on ECM only in 2026. Goebbels calls the piece a "counterpoint to the urban imagery of Surrogate Cities (1994)", and a study of "the tension between withdrawal and openness", not a romantic picture of nature.
Peter Eötvös conducts the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, which commissioned the work. The speaker is Bob Rutman, to whom Walden is dedicated. He reads Thoreau, declaims, sings in the khoomei overtone technique and joins the orchestra on steel cello and bow chimes, two instruments he designed himself. The orchestra is widened with electric and table guitars, daxophone, koto, several drum kits and keyboards. The concerts were recorded at the Kölner Philharmonie and the Alte Oper Frankfurt, with Udo Wüstendörfer as Tonmeister and Manfred Eicher as executive producer.
The nine movements follow the sequence of Thoreau's text, from the opening Where I lived, and what I lived for (Simplify, simplify!) to The White Pond. The music comments on the words rather than illustrating them. Trip-hop pastiche, ambient stretches and heavy orchestral surges sit next to passages scored almost like chamber music, and the sung lines of a conventional opera pass to instrumental soloists. Spring, close to fourteen minutes long, is the largest span. The Ponds mixes amplified and acoustic sound, while Rutman's voice keeps returning as narrator, singer and player.
German critics welcomed the release. In Frankfurter Rundschau Hans-Jürgen Linke described a "landscape opera with speaker" whose sung parts are taken by instrumentalists, transparent in construction and full of surprising, exotic sounds. For Deutschlandfunk Kultur Rainer Pöllmann heard experimental writing tied to real groove and to fragments of jazz and pop, and was glad the recording was finally available to everyone. In Il Giornale della Musica Stefano Nardelli stressed how directly a piece from 1998 speaks to the present. He read it as a lucid reflection on how hard it has become to truly listen to the world.
CD, ECM New Series 2878, released in June 2026, with a liner note by Goebbels and a text by Frank Mehring.
