In the summer of 2015, the Belgian composer Maarten Van Ingelgem set a poem from my cycle Notate einer Krankheit (Notations of an illness) to music, entitled Magnolie (Magnolia). The piece was a work commissioned for the Limburg men’s chorus Ensemble Vocapella, directed by Tristan Meister, for the CD Vom Werden und Vergehen (Of becoming and passing away). It came out in the spring of 2016 with Rondeau in Leipzig.
In 2017, we continued working together. This time, Maarten set my poem Als ich dich trug (When I carried you) to music. It was a composition commissioned for the ten-year anniversary of the men’s chorus, sung in Limburg’s cathedral. And in the following year. Geteilte Freude (Shared joy) was created, which now forms the conclusion to what Maarten called the Mühleis Lieder. The cycle premiered in its entirety in the spring of 2018, in Freiburg’s Konzerthaus, with Tristan Meister and Ensemble Vocapella, and in the summer the chorus also sang Geteilte Freude on its tour of Japan, in Matsuyama and Fukuoka.