Comments on On An Overgrown Path: Furtwangler and the forgotten new music

Some debate elsewhere as to the accuracy of my com...

2008-07-30T19:07:19.469+01:00

Some debate elsewhere as to the accuracy of my comment that Hitler was not democratically elected -

http://www.analogartsensemble.net/2008/07/on-overgrown-path-gets-caught-in.html

My comment was based on the viewpoint well summarised here -

http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/04/what-hitler-was-not-elected.html

And no apologies either for linking to this post several times. Weren't hyperlinks the reason why Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web?

and operas were career-defining for his generation...

2006-09-06T15:23:21.326+01:00

and operas were career-defining for his generation

Thanks for your further thoughts, Daniel. Though I need to think some more, I would add now that even though past composers wrote many more operas than today's composers (they had many, many more opportunities; and some exposure to the operatic craft was part of the humanistic background of most classical composers of the pre-Cage era) writing and having an opera produced is still a career-defining opportunity for today's composers world-wide.

And yes, I would still place Braunfels ahead of Toch in today's musical community general esteem due to his lushly romantic operas -- especially his 'The Birds' based upon Aristophanes -- and his later oratorio composed upon Paul Claudel's 'The Annunciation'. Both are recorded -- the opera as part of London's 'Degenerate Music' operatic recording project of the 1980s/90s; and the oratorio on EMI, I believe (and without texts due to copyright restrictions, I recall).

You may or may not know that Braunfel's "The Birds" was also recently mounted by a mainstream American opera company in Florida, and other North American general directors, I recall, expressed an interest in the work. Do you know whether it has been done in Frankfurt? (as well as Braunfels' home city of Cologne, or Munich?).

I also do know that Ernst Toch's extensive archives are preserved at UCLA, and that Michael Tilson Thomas was, I believe, a student of his (and also of Hamburg-born composer Ingolf Dahl, whose archives are at the University of Southern California -- UCLA's musical competitor).

Michael Tilson Thomas has long championed both of these composer's works in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and I assume London and Germany, as well. (And my Berkeley high school chorus/orch toured Toch's 'The Geography Song' throughout the American Southwest, along with Mozart's 'Solemnes Vespers'.)

Again, we are trying to compare a composer who wrote in the opera and oratorio genres, with a composer who wrote in the concert, chamber choral, and film music genres.

I agree with you as to the reception of Wladimir Vogel's post-war output.

I will disagree with your comment about Braunfels and Jarnach. Some of Jarnach's works of the 1920s are going to have to be pretty amazing to match Braunfel's increasingly internationally recognized musical accomplishments. Jarnach's scholarly, editorial, and administrative talents are another matter.

Lastly, your comment on Kaminsky, Pepping, and Distler is especially intriguing and makes me want to explore his music.

I wouldn't take much stock of a curent consensus o...

2006-09-05T20:22:05.396+01:00

I wouldn't take much stock of a curent consensus opinion: given sufficient information the consensus will change, and both information about Kaminski and performances of his works have been rare. Kaminski was called to my attention by none other than Heinz-Klaus Metzger, and Metzger spoke of being shocked (a) not to have encountered his music previously, and (b) not to have heard a bad piece from him. If my view from Frankfurt means anything, the musicological assessment is changing and the emerging music and figure of Kaminski is one of the reasons why.

Kaminiski's invisibility is rather easy to explain. Beyond simply belonging to an age-group of composers who have been mostly forgotten, his work was difficult to "place". It was mystical, but not confessional, like Distler or Pepping; his tonal language was contrapuntal but not neo-baroque, and his students were as excluded from concert life as he was after his exclusion and internal immigration in 1933, so he lacked advocates. His two operas -- and operas were career-defining for his generation -- are said to be problematical, but I cannot judge without having read the scores. In any case, his genres were orchestral music, a few pieces of chamber music, and choral music, of which no pieces appear to be weak.

Kaminski's contrapuntal technique was phenomenal and his tonal language -- especially in pieces like the Dorische Musik für Orchester or the Musik für Violoncello und Klavier points to an alternative path in the course of 20th century German music. In fact, it is easy to imagine that had Kaminski participated in post-war musical life, at Darmstadt for example, its development would have been substantially different, although it is unclear whether he would have ever accepted the role of a school-defining composer. The Kaminsky who wrote "Es ist nicht Sache der Kunst, Gefühle auszudrücken. Musik ist da, um zu klingen und lebendig zu sein. Sie stellt nichts dar. Sie ist Leben an sich." ("It's not the function of music to express feelings. Music exists, to sound, and to be alive. It represents nothing. It is life itself.") was clearly a modernist, but his modernity was one substantially different to the more familiar paths.

As to the names on your list, my assessment is that Toch is the best known, Jarnach is probably held in as much esteem as Braunfels, and Vogel is widely appreciated for his early Busoni-inspired experiments, but the musical significance of Vogel's work -- he was active through the early 1980's -- is less clear, with the post-war developments in his catalog generally, in a word, disappointing. Jarnach is a bit of a curiosity as his principle works were written exclusively in the 1920s, and his post-war career was as an administrator and teacher in Hamburg.

Thank you for the reprise of this highly important...

2006-09-05T15:45:52.776+01:00

Thank you for the reprise of this highly important article, Pliable.

Daniel, what are your criteria for holding Heinrich Kaminsky perhaps the most important (or rather interesting) of the listed composers? While I have heard some works by Braunfels, Jarnach, Toch, Marx, Holler, Rathaus, Vogel, von Schillings, and Pepping; I believe that Kaminsky is no more than a name to me, and that I have not heard anything by him. (Do you have the inclination and time to develop Kaminsky's Wikipedia site?)

I might counter you, Daniel, that today's international music community holds Walter Braunfels to be the most talented of the above listed composers and Wladimir Vogel the most "interesting", musically. All this, of course, could change with more research, advocacy, and informed performances.

I also recall American musicologist Robert P. Morgan mentioning at Juilliard, in 1976, that he thought that Wladimir Vogel's THYL CLAES was the greatest unrecognized masterpiece of this troubled period in music history.

See http://www.sinfonietta-archiv.ch/PPL/Saison87/S5%20Text.htm

The case of Max Trapp is fairly clear: he was a Na...

2006-09-03T16:48:47.213+01:00

The case of Max Trapp is fairly clear: he was a Nazi, and an early one. His "Appell an die Schaffenden" ("Call to Creative Artists"), in _Die Musik_,in which he identified himself as such, was published in June of 1933. The 1951 performance is simply a reminder that de-Nazification was slow.

The most interesting musician on you list may well be Heinrich Kaminsky, and one whose career provides a useful contrast to Trapp. Kaminsky's father was an Old Catholic priest of Jewish background, and Kaminsky, who was Pfitzner's successor at the Prussian Academy of the Arts, lost that position in 1933 due to his political outlook. (Perhaps Furtwangler's programming of Kaminsky in 1934 and 1937 may be additional evidence of his independence.)