Who was/is Gerhard Schöne ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Gerhard Schöne
He was described as a "songwriter with the image of gentleness and moral integrity" in a publisher's announcement. Barbara Thalheim called him "the naive painter among the songwriters". Gerhard Schöne was a phenomenon in the GDR and is still extremely popular in eastern Germany today. Born in Coswig in 1952, the son of a pastor completed an apprenticeship as a corpus belter in an artisan metal trade, was active in church music and worked as a postman. After a correspondence course at the Musikhochschule Dresden and military service, he became a freelance songwriter in 1979, initially performing mainly in churches, then increasingly at public events and on radio and television. His records reached editions of over 100,000 copies. He was awarded the GDR Art Prize and the National Prize. Schöne did not polarize, but reconciled, he sang at church congresses as well as at the festival of political song, from 1982 also in West Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Gerhard Schöne achieved great popularity in 1982 with his LP 'Lieder aus dem Kinderland'. He then began to collect international children's songs, invited foreign musicians who performed at the Political Song Festival to his home and asked them to sing to him children's songs from their homeland. Thus the LP 'Kinderlieder aus aller Welt' (1986) was written. In the mid-80s he wrote a children's radio play with songs and music for two children's feature films. After a concert in the Berlin Palace of the Republic, the magazine 'Unterhaltungskunst' wrote: "Gerhard Schöne is a GDR songwriter phenomenon. Like no other from his guild, he draws people between 'three and ninety-three' with his naive-intelligent, witty-fabulous songs." About his relationship to children, the songwriter himself said: "When I write children's songs, I only hear inside myself. Every adult has a child somewhere. And I think I can feel good with children from my memory of being a child. The children themselves often give me suggestions for new songs through their reactions - pictures and letters - to my songs."
After 1989 Gerhard Schöne produced numerous other albums with children's songs, including 'Kinder-Lieder-Galerie' (1990), 'Kindergedichte' (2001) and 'Könige aus Morgenland' (2004). He has been a UNICEF ambassador since 1992 and a school in Wolmirstedt (Saxony-Anhalt) bears his name since 1993.
www.gerhardschoene.de
Extract from
Various - songwriter in Germany
Vol.2, For whom we sing (3-CD)
/various-songwriter-in-Germany-vol.2-for-who-who-we-sing-3-cd.html
Copyright © Bear Family Records®. Copying, also of extracts, or any other form of reproduction, including the adaptation into electronic data bases and copying onto any data mediums, in English or in any other language is permissible only and exclusively with the written consent of Bear Family Records® GmbH.