Wenn Wasser wäre is a spoken-word album on which the actor Bruno Ganz reads T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in German, followed by a sequence of poems by Giorgos Seferis. It arrived fifteen years after his New Series readings of Hölderlin, Celan and René Char. Eliot and Seferis were both Nobel laureates, and the Greek poet translated Eliot and learned from him. Short excerpts of music by György Kurtág, Giya Kancheli and Nikos Xydakis act as hinges between the poems.
The recording was made in 1999 in Zürich and Basel, with Fabian Lehmann as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Eliot is read in the German translation by Ernst Robert Curtius, Seferis in versions by Christian Enzensberger. The Seferis part has its origin on the set of Theo Angelopoulos's film Eternity and a Day, where Ganz was handed a book of his poetry. The music comes from existing ECM recordings, with the Keller Quartett, Gidon Kremer, György and Márta Kurtág at the piano, and others.
The five sections of The Waste Land, from Das Begräbnis der Toten to Was der Donner sprach, are read as one unbroken arc, and Kurtág's music only arrives with the last of them. The Seferis sequence is built around Die »Drossel« and includes Der lüsterne Elpenor, Die Argonauten and Auf der Bühne. The music is used sparingly: fragments of Kurtág's Játékok, his Officium breve and a two-piano transcription of Bach's Sonatina from Actus tragicus, a passage from Kancheli's Lament, and Xydakis's rebetika-based pieces played by Ross Daly. The album ends with Nur ein Weniges noch, a Seferis poem of under twenty seconds.
Die Zeit greeted the release with "Ein großer Augenblick in der Hörbuch-Musik dieses Jahres" and praised the care of the edition. Gramophone wrote that "Ganz's timing and use of nuance are deeply musical" and found the music telling but never conspicuous. In 2021 der Freitag recalled that Nur ein Weniges noch, from this album, was printed in Ganz's death notice.
This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1723, released in September 2000. The jewel case comes in a slipcase with a large booklet containing a preface by Ganz, essays by Ulrich Schmid and Steve Lake, poems by Lawrence Durrell, and facsimile pages from Eliot's manuscript of The Waste Land.
