Wartime Consolations
1.-4. Hartmann : Violinkonzert "Concerto funèbre"
5.-7. Weinberg : Concertino op. 42 für Violine & Streicher
8. Weinberg : Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes op. 47 Nr. 3 (für Violine & Streicher arr. Ewelina Nowicka) 10:44
9. Schostakowitsch : Unfinished Sonata for Violin and Piano Moderato con moto (1945) 5:25
Karl Amadeus Hartmann: The Art of Mourning
“On every portrait of Karl Amadeus Hartmann—whether painted by his brother Adolf
or on one of the numerous photographs—you notice the striking, radiant eyes of
the composer” writes Klaus Kalchschmid about the composer. “They reflect the
vast curiosity that shaped Hartmann throughout his life, but also his
vulnerability. It also indicates an openness with which Hartmann challenged his
friends and colleagues around him.”
This vulnerability and openness shows in his music, which seems to confess, to
mourn, and to plea in timeless, consonant ways. The communicative aspect was
important to Hartmann, who was not interested in academic exercises. (And in
fact he was asked, by an exacerbated professor, to suspend composition classes
in favor of the trombone at the conservatory.) “While I work, I am also
preoccupied with the effect of a work as a whole: The whole ought to represent a
piece of absolute life—truth that spreads joy and is connected to grief… I don’t
want disimpassioned intellectualisms but a work of art with a statement.”
Hartmann was the student of Anton Webern, an admirer of Arnold Schoenberg, and a
liberal quoter from Alban Berg, but he was anything but a mindless disciple of
the 12-tone cult: “Those who compose slavishly in acquiescent dependency on tone
rows can certainly crank their bits out at a nice clip. But… you cannot just
skirt the burden of tradition by replacing old forms with new ones. We have to
accept that our path has become more difficult than that of our great idols
before us.” Hartmann consequently developed a musical voice that makes him one
of great if lamentably unsung composers of the 20th century.
Of the composers who were among the many secondary victims of the Third
Reich—shunted, not gassed—and the subsequent shift in musical ideology (also
including Walter Braunfels, Wolfgang Fortner, Boris Blacher, Reinhard
Schwarz-Schilling et al.), Hartmann was probably the most successful after the
war, for the short 18 years he lived after 1945. His music evokes a dazzling,
heterogeneous array of other composers—one of the surest signs of the total
originality that marks Hartmann. From Karol Szymanowski or Alban Berg’s violin
concertos, Ravel’s La valse or Sibelius’ Andante Festivo, to the darker, edgier
tones of Eduard Tubin, Allan Pettersson, or Bernd Alois Zimmermann, there’s
little that could not be said to remind of Hartmann here and there.
Hartmann thoroughly abandoned and occasionally destroyed or extensively reworked
his early compositions which he found too dated or tailored too closely to
trends of the time. Only his two string quartets, containing kernels of later
echt-Hartmann, are exempt from such harsh judgment. His first success, premiered
by his mentor and friend Hermann Scherchen, was Miserae, his first symphonic
work (and indeed for some time called Symphony No.1), which he would eventually
incorporate into his Sixth Symphony. The next great work, a pivot of his
composing career, was the Violin Concerto.
The began life in a particularly dark period of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s.
Freedom, indeed humanity, seemed under siege in the late summer of 1939. The
Nazis had Germany in their grip for six years. Books had been burned, pogroms
incited, Jews expelled or incarcerated, intellectuals cowed; art that didn’t
suit the rulers was declared degenerate and of unGerman spirit. The
demilitarized Rhineland had been occupied and the Wehrmacht invaded Poland on
September 1st. A little over a month later Poland capitulated. If humanity was
not yet quite at the brink of defeat—annihilation even—it would be, just a few
years later, and the writing was on the wall for those who wanted to see it.
For less sensitive people, doubts were drowned out by the propaganda clanking
and clinking that accompanied the country’s initial military successes. This was
the added perniciousness for those who opposed the regime and everything that
went with it. Hartmann’s creative will was undermined by doubts amid an
aggressive burgeoning and embrace of mediocrity all around him. But withdrawn
into inner immigration, and refusing to have his works performed in Germany,
Hartmann was fuelled by the determination that “freedom [would] prevail, even if
we ourselves were destroyed.” In this climate, still two years before he
attained a glimmer of happiness amid the darkness— the time he spent with Anton
Webern between 1941 and 1942 and their ensuing friendship—Hartmann set out to
write a funereal piece for string orchestra in one movement. Just a few months
later it had morphed into the four-movement Violin Concerto—the Concerto
funebre.
The “Violin-Concertino”—as the German composer and music theorist Winfried
Zillig refers to it—is such a profound and deeply personal musical statement
that it communicates this with moving immediacy to the listener even today…
inconceivably far removed though we are from the events and the circumstances of
Hartmann’s war-time Germany. It was “a counterpoint of profound mourning to the
hysterical jubilations during the Polish campaign” (Zillig). The work received
its premiere on leap day, 1940, by the St. Gallen Chamber Orchestra in the
presence of the composer and his three brothers, who all made the trip to
reasonably neutral Switzerland. Except for a long-lost bit of incidental music
(presumably composed to retain a claim to royalties from abroad), it would be
his last composition for the duration of the war.
The first movement of the Concerto is essentially a long solo part, accentuated
by the orchestra. Hope enters into it in its form of determination. It has a
stubborn air, force calm, with willful slow, regular breathing. The second
movement, by turn, shows nervous anguish and dejection, anger and futility side
by side. A glimmer of Wagner may shine through, and there is a serene, coolly
searing sadness. The third movement strikes as ghoulish at first hearing, more
than hopeful, with parallels to Shostakovich, except with Hartmann’s skill for a
natural slow movement’s flow (Hartmann will sneak a slow movement even within a
movement titled Allegro di molto) that is more akin to Haydn. The link to
Shostakovich comes back in the short final movement, Chorale, which is based on
a funeral march for the victims of the Russian Revolution that Hermann Scherchen
set to German: The opening melody of “Unsterbliche Opfer” (“Immortal Victims”)
also pops up in Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony.
And then the final chord comes in, as unsettling and cruel as anything in
classical music, prohibiting any sort of resolution, comfort, or closure: an
open, darkly perturbing end, despite all the hope therein. Christoph Schlüren
pithily got to its core, describing its idiom—the whole work’s, but it’s
particularly befitting the fourth movement—as that of “a soul famished for a
beauty vanished; wrapped in mourning’s garb.”
The Concerto would also become one of the first public performances of
Hartmann’s after the war, when it was presented in October of 1945 at a matinee
of the Munich State Theater. He went on to revise the Concerto in 1959 (which is
when it got the name under which it’s now known), but unlike the story of so
many of his works, which is one of seemingly continuous morphing and
re-creation, the has a straightforward and linear editorial life from perception
to revision.
Hans Werner Henze, a young friend of Hartmann’s, wrote about the joy and
surprise of meeting Hartmann after war—unknown to him because of Hartmann’s
tenacious silence during that time; of finding “someone who could compose so
marvelously—and so completely different than anyone else in the entire country.”
It remains such a joy, still, when the ears happen upon a composer who can
compose so marvelously—and so completely different than anyone else! Karl
Amadeus Hartmann succumbed to cancer on December 5th, 1963, on the day exactly
172 years after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died.
The Bright Side of Weinberg
Mieczysław Weinberg was born in Warsaw in 1919, son to Shmil Weinberg, a
composer and conductor at the Yiddish theater in Kishinev. Shmil moved to Warsaw
before the 1917 October Revolution broke out. There he sought refuge from the
increasingly hostile climate for Jews in Kishinev that included deadly pogroms
in 1903 and 1905, which had counted members of the Weinberg family among its
victims. This is the prelude to prosecution that would be the reoccurring theme
in Mieczysław’s life.
The young man soon showed musical talent and at twelve entered the Warsaw
Conservatory which was then headed by Karol Szymanowski. He had just completed
his piano studies in 1939, when German troops attacked Poland: Weinberg,
accompanied by his sister, fled eastward. Facing the hardships of the flight on
foot, his sister made the ultimately fatal decision of turning back to Warsaw
where she, along with the rest of Weinberg’s family, would be murdered by the
Nazis.
Weinberg trekked on, reached the Soviet Union, and settled in the erstwhile
safety of Minsk. But the German war machine was soon on the move again— and
Weinberg, suffering from tuberculosis, was now relocated deep into central Asia,
to Tashkent in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. There he found work at the
opera house, met his wife Natalia Vovsi-Mikhoels, and got in touch with Dmitri
Shostakovich whom he sent a copy of his First Symphony. Shostakovich, much
impressed, immediately arranged for Weinberg to receive an official invitation
to travel to Moscow. It was the beginning of a musical friendship and the last
time Weinberg had to move—although he was hardly safe from prosecution yet, as
he would soon find out.
He got a first taste of it when on January 12, 1948 Weinberg’s father in law,
the celebrated Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s order
and his body then run over by a truck to feign a traffic accident. Weinberg
heard about it while he had to listen to attacks on “cosmopolitanism” at the
First Soviet Composers’ Union Congress in 1948. “Cosmopolitanism” of course
being ominous Soviet-speak for “too Jewish”. That was the year when Weinberg
first took to the concerto form, writing his Concertino for Violin and Strings
while on summer holidays. It isn’t clear whether Weinberg thought of it as a
practice piece or was distracted by the more substantial Cello Concerto in
similar lyrical vain that followed right after, but there is no record of the
work being performed in his lifetime. Indeed, the Concertino wasn’t published
until a decade after Weinberg’s death and only received its premiere outside
Russia in 2009.
Its lyrical sweep (subtly guarded by a wistful air against any joyous excess)
and its tender gracefulness are magnificent. Just as Weinberg’s music can
contain, all the dark tones notwithstanding, true humor (take his Children’s
Notebooks for piano, for example)—which is something that distinguishes it from
the biting irony that Shostakovich musters in his attempts at the comic—its
beauty can be equally untroubled. In view of such a dose of late romanticism
from Weinberg, one almost wonders if he mightn’t have gone too far in trying not
to offend the authorities or if that might have been the reason for the gorgeous
work not seeing the light of day.
Right around the same time, and equally of (partially) upbeat and romantic
disposition is the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes op.47. On the surface of it, the
Rhapsody seems an attempt at balancing his musical energy with the expectations
and dictations of Soviet officialdom. Perhaps it was, and he thought strictly of
his mother’s homeland when working on this rousing miscellany of tunes and
themes that doesn’t sound so differently from what the Georgian Aram
Khachaturian composed at the time. And Khachaturian was, although also briefly
denounced at the same congress, a respected and sanctioned composer after all.
In any case, the purely orchestral version of the Rhapsody was performed a year
later and enjoyed great success, so great that Weinberg also set it for violin
and orchestra (as performed on this disc, in Ewelina Nowicka’s re-arrangement)
and violin and piano, which David Oistrakh premiered in February of 1953 and
included among his encores. “The Rhapsody’s bittersweet touches never dominate
and while some of the seamlessly joined episodes hint at melancholy, there’s
always an impending energy and a raw, uplifting—if not outright joyous—force
that sweeps the listener on. Although the Rhapsody is a rare rousing, lighter
work of Weinberg’s, guile and disguise seem to be at work here, too. Those
“Moldavian” themes are, after all, decidedly Jewish themes from Moldavia…
something Weinberg knew better than to advertise openly, after the still recent
attacks on his “cosmopolitanism”.
In the continuing story of Weinberg’s life-imitation of Candide (minus the
optimism), he was arrested the night after that chamber versions’ premiere and
thrown into the infamous Lubyanka prison beneath the KGB headquarters where he
awaited deportation (or worse). Shostakovich, at incalculable risk to himself,
tried to intervene on Weinberg’s behalf. In the end it was more likely Stalin’s
death than Shostakovich’s naïve heroics, that resulted in Weinberg being
released in April. Weinberg went on to live almost another half century and
composed works that, had they been more widely published and performed in his
lifetime, would have made him one of the great voices of the second half of the
20th century. But his work would go on to be widely ignored, if not downright
suppressed. When Weinberg died, he was virtually unknown, and understandably
bitter. His fame will have to come (and it is coming) posthumously.
Because of his close connection with Shostakovich, Weinberg had and maybe still
has to overcome suspicions of being simply a lesser Shostakovich, a darker, grim
copy of the famous original. Weinberg contributed to the easy (mis-) perception
of a slanted student-teacher relationship when he humbly suggested that he
actually was a pupil of Shostakovich: “Although I have never had lessons from
him, I count myself as his pupil, as his flesh and blood”. But Weinberg is
neither lesser nor did he, though younger, copy Shostakovich any more than
Shostakovich allowed himself to be influenced by Weinberg. In works like his
mid-80s opera The Idiot—a work that surpasses even the high standard set by The
Passenger—Weinberg eloquently, effortlessly fuses the musical language common to
Shostakovich and Weinberg with that of the whole 20th century, from Gustav
Mahler to Bernd Alois Zimmermann. At his most buoyant he sounds truly at ease,
and there is no knout driving on the elation and vigor of the music. (This can
be readily appreciated in his Violin Concerto op. 67, which
Linus
Roth recorded on Challenge CC 72627, a Gramophone Magazine Editor’s Choice.)
When Weinberg was completely unknown to most music lovers, I liked to introduce
him thus: “Like Shostakovich, but without the smile.” There’s truth to every
joke and simplification, but the works on this disc will make
Weinbergsimplification more difficult and Weinberg-enjoyment still easier!
Shostakovich’s Unfinished
What a delight, surprise, and opportunity it must be, for a musician to find an
unperformed, unrecorded, entirely or relatively unknown piece of music by a
major composer, indeed by one of the Greats—Shostakovich in this case. And not
just some piece of musical minutiae: an 8-bar, twelve stanza ode to the family
dog by the nine-year old composer, or the adaptation for piano duo and accordion
of something well grazed-over. No, what we have here is nothing less than Dmitri
Shostakovich’s Unfinished Sonata for Violin and Piano—the complete and massive
double exposition of the first movement of what would have been a grand-scale
work along strict classical lines. Shostakovich wrote it in June of 1945, just
before he wrote his defiantly anti-heroic Ninth Symphony. Manashir Iakubov
writes in the introduction of the score, published by the Dmitri Shostakovich
Archive in 2012, that the sonata-movement contains the kernels of much of what
Shostakovich would go on to write. It contains a particularly b link to the
Tenth Symphony, in which Shostakovich would go on to recycle both themes of the
exposition.
The ork—at least the extant five, six minutes of it—eschews any sort of bravado
and virtuosity. Rather, it harkens back to somber Beethoven if not further (this
might be a stretch), to Bach. Then again maybe it isn’t such a stretch, because
the Preludes and Fugues op. 87 come to mind several times and Iakubov sees fit
to mention the influence of this ‘Violin Sonata No. 0’ on it as well. It was
also Iakubov who showed the 250 bars of music (plus about two dozen of the
beginning of the development section in the rough author’s manuscript) to Alfred
Schnittke, in the hope that he would finish it. Schnittke commented on its
symphonic proportions and how ‘such an extensive exposition with the contrast of
remote keys (G minor and E major) would require an enormous development, the
scope of which does not correspond to the chamber genre…’ If this is the reason
why Shostakovich abandoned the work after making a neat fair manuscript of what
he had written so far (replete with rehearsal numbers), we don’t know. But while
we wait to find out, we can now listen to its satisfying calm glow thanks to
this first ever recording of it.
Jens F. Laurson