Straussian modernism and Viennese Schmaltz

'It is worth noting that the novel's last scene, with it's off-stage procession, tumultuous church-bells and climactic murder, itself resolves a very inward drama in the convention of grand opera. A fact not lost on the twenty-three-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose opera Die tote Stadt (premiered simultaneously in Cologne and Hamburg in December 1920) is based indirectly on Bruges-la-Morte, and is now the form in which the novel is most widely known.

Its immediate source was Le Mirage, the four-act theatrical version of Bruges-la-Morte which Georges Rodenbach prepared at the end of his life, but never saw staged. In dramatising his book he found himself driven to just those kinds of explication through dialogue that the novel pointedly avoids. Korngold, in following him, and in wrapping the play in his precocious melange of Straussian modernism and Viennese Schmaltz, prolonged and broadened the fame of this recondite novel - but at the cost of what makes it so singular and unforgettable.'

Those words are from novelist Alan Hollinghurst's introduction to the new edition of Georges Rodenbach's novel Bruges-la-Morte. It is essential reading and I know many readers will disagree about the Viennese Schmaltz and say that Korngold's opera is also essential listening. Die tote Stadt is available in several versions including one from Naxos. I took the photos of Bruges in February when visiting that evocative city for something well beyond Strauss modernism, the John Cage happening.

Talking of Richard Strauss I will be playing the rarely heard string septet realisation of his Metamorphosen on Future Radio on May 4 as part of a programme marking the anniversary of the surrender of German forces in Europe on May 7, 1945. The main work in the programme will be the equally rarely heard Violin Concerto by Benjamin Frankel. Born in London in 1906 of Polish-Jewish parents Frankel studied in Germany and London, and his 1951 Violin Concerto is sub-titled 'In Memory of the Six Million'.

Two weeks later, on May 18, I will be presenting a programme of works by musicians in exile. The music will be Bohuslav Martinů's Concertino for Piano Trio and String Orchestra, then a very rare treat in the form of Peter Paul Fuch's Five Miniatures in a performance from a private tape made available by the composer's widow and finally the String Quartet No. 5 by Fuchs' teacher Karl Weigl. It is a great privilege to be able to showcase these composers, and my thanks go to Future Radio for making it possible to bring this music to thousands of happy new ears.


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An American Requiem worth remembering

Many interesting recommendations added to my Requiem article this week. But we all overlooked one that is worth remembering - Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 4 "Requiem" (in memory of my beloved father). This 1943 orchestral work is in four movements, each of which are referenced to the Liturgy for the Dead. My article about Howard Hanson a while back also mentioned Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and he currently has a festival in his honour in London. Header photo shows Hanson standing with John LaMontaine. (Credit Fredonia Press).

Now playing - Howard Hanson Symphony No. 4 with the composer conducting the Eastman Rochester Orchestra on Mercury LP SRI75107. The coupling is Walter Piston's Symphony No. 3. I also have the Arte Nova CD of Hanson's Fourth with David Montgomery conducting. But the composer captured on vinyl in inimitable Mercury sound wins on every count.

Now read how precious this human life is.
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Understatement of the week

Norman Lebrecht has written a big piece about Korngold.
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How important is a composer’s music?

Why a String Quartet? What is it that has given it its exalted reputation and mystique? Why have so many composers regarded it as the perfect medium of expression, though it is perhaps the most demanding to write for? And why do distinguished artists often prefer to work as a team in a first class quartet rather than make bigger money as, say, orchestral leaders? Music means different things to different people: but for those to who music is an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion – the string quartet is perhaps the most satisfying medium of all.

These words are by Elizabeth Maconchy (photo below) who was born one hundred years ago, on March 19th 1907. She has been described as the greatest ever English composer for strings, irrespective of gender. She wrote a remarkable cycle of thirteen string quartets, and three one-act operas. Her music is lean, sinewy and uncompromising, and develops from the central European styles of Berg, Bartok and Janacek. But, despite all these attributes, the neglect of Maconchy’s music is breathtaking. She is ignored by the mainstream. Her music is absent from our concert halls, and in the classical departments of London's two largest record stores her name does not even appear on the CD racks. And she is ignored by the cognoscenti, with neither William Glock nor John Drummond mentioning her in their autobiographies.

The neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy does raise the question, how important is a composer’s music? Comparisons with another twentieth century composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, are interesting. Korngold was born in the right place, mainland Europe. He had the right teachers including Zemlinsky, and moved in the right circles, including Mahler and Richard Strauss. He was forced to move to the right place, Hollywood, for the right reasons, political persecution. He worked in the right genres, film scores and neo-romantic orchestral music. And Korngold is rightly recognised with browser space in the CD stores, two biographies, and concert and broadcast performances.

Elizabeth Maconchy was born ten years after Korngold, in the wrong place. Her birthplace, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, is one of the few towns in the world that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry. She had the wrong teachers. Ralph Vaughan Williams, who remained a close friend but not a musical influence, is forever branded an English pastoralist, while her teacher in Prague, Karel Jirak (left), remains as neglected as his pupil. She had the wrong life changing event. TB claimed her sister and father, and she contracted and recovered from the illness herself. This experience contributed to the development of her individual musical voice, and her single minded and painstaking focus.

She also lived in the wrong place. Essex is a creative no-go area between the musical honey-pots of London and Aldeburgh. She didn’t network with musical movers and shakers, although she was the first woman to sit on the influential BBC music panel, and was also the first woman President of the Society for the Promotion for New Music. She was married to a historian for more than sixty years, and bore two daughters, one of whom, Nicola LeFanu, is a notable composer in her own right. And she wrote for the wrong genre. The string quartet stubbonly refuses to fit into the sound-byte culture of radio stations such as BBC Radio 3, where a single movement is rapidly becoming the largest acceptable single unit of musical currency.

Let’s make one thing clear, I am a big fan of the music of Korngold. In the 1970’s I discovered him through the three pioneering LPs of his music. First the RCA Red Seal LP of his film scores, The Sea Wolf conducted by Charles Gerhardt. Then, the still unsurpassed, recording of the Symphony in F-sharp with Rudolf Kempe and the Munich Philharmonic (nla), followed by Jascha Heifetz's recording of the Violin Concerto (below). But around the same time I discovered the music of Elizabeth Maconchy. First there was her unrepresentative overture Proud Thames on an adventurous Lyrita LP of 1972 (SRCS 57) that also included music by Geoffrey Bush, William Alwyn and Lennox Berkeley. But the record that got me hooked another Lyrita LP (SRCS 116) with Vernon Handley conducting her Symphony for Double String Orchestra, and Manoug Parikian playing the Serenata Concertante for Violin and Orchestra. It is very sad that the Lyrita re-issues on CD have not included these wonderful recordings in the composer's centenary year.

The peak of Elizabeth Maconchy’s achievement are the thirteen quartets, and these span more than fifty years from 1932 to 1984, from the youthful exuberance of the first, to the ultimate concision of the thirteenth (Quartetto Corto) which lasts for just eight minutes. The ghosts of Berg, Bartok, Janacek, and Jirak hover over the opus, and Maconchy's uncompromising approach to composition is expressed in her own notes about the Sixth Quartet: ‘Writing music, like all creative art, is the impassioned pursuit of an idea … The great thing is for the composer to keep his (sic) head and allow nothing to distract him. The temptations to stop by the way and to be side-tracked by felicities of sound and colour are ever present, but in my view everything extraneous to the pursuit of this central idea must be rigorously excluded – scrapped’.

We are very fortunate that the neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy’s music is not total. In 1989 Unicorn-Kanchana had the vision to record the complete quartets with three young string groups, the Hanson, Bingham and Mistry Quartets. The performances are committed, energetic, and exemplary. The recordings were produced by Misha Donat, and two church venues were used with the legendary sound engineer Tony Faulkner balancing nine of the quartets, and Anthony Howell the others. These are performances and recordings to die for, and the even better news is that the complete string quartets are now available on 3 CDs on the Regis label for the price of a single CD, and they come with an excellent 24 page booklet of notes by the composer and Nicola Lefanu.

But despite this wonderful recorded legacy we are still left with the conundrum of Elizabeth Maconchy - vital and astringent music combined with an unassuming personality. My header photo expresses this conundrum perfectly. When Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in 1957 he was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery just a few steps away from another film composer, Walter Jurmann, who is famous for writing the song "San Francisco". When I started writing this article I did not even know where Elizabeth Maconchy was buried. To my astonishment, my research uncovered that the unassuming final resting place she shares with her husband, shown in the photo, is a few miles from where I write these words, at Eaton Parish Church here in Norfolk.

But in the end it is the music matters. I started by asking the question ‘How important is a composer’s music?’ The string quartets of Elizabeth Maconchy are important twentieth century music. £15 ($28) is a very small price to pay to find out how important.


Good to see the BBC doing their bit. Elizabeth Maconchy (above) is the Radio 3 Composer of the Week starting March 19th, and you can also download audio files of her talking about her art. And read here about another scandalously neglected Elizabeth.
Header photograph by Pliable, February 2007, copyright On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Whatever happened to Howard Hanson?

Back in the late 70’s, when I was going through my post-Mahler phase, two LP’s were on my turntable a lot. They both featured works by composers who were then unknown in the UK. The first was ‘Chuck’ Gerhardt conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra (a crack session band comprising front desk players from the leading London orchestras) in Howard Hanson’s Symphony No 2 “the Romantic.” (See photo of Hanson to above). This is a wonderfully passionate account that is playing on vinyl as I write. It eclipses any subsequent recordings including the composer’s own interpretation on Mercury. The wonderful 12” RCA Gold Seal LP sleeve has a beautifully atmospheric black and white Christian Steiner (see footnote) shot of Hanson on the cover smoking a politically incorrect cigarette. CD jewel cases certainly killed the art of record sleeve design stone dead!

The second LP was Rudolf Kempe’s world premiere recording of Erich Korngold’s F Sharp Symphony with the Munich Philharmonic (Photo of Korngold to right). Again an RCA record, this time with a superb colour photo of Alma Mahler’s bust of Korngold on the sleeve. I have put the LP on as I write, the Munich brass blazes in the scherzo with a sound that puts any of the subsequent digital recordings to shame.

Both symphonies are fine romantic works, but certainly not masterpieces. Today the Hanson is largely forgotten. But the Korngold is quite well known, and attracts the attention of conductors such as André Previn. Is the Korngold really that much better music, or is it just musical fashion? And whatever happened to Howard Hanson?

If you don't know Hanson's music, and the romantic repertoire is your scene, it is well worth exploring. Here is a brief taster from the second movement Andante con tenerezza from his 2nd Symphony which has one of the best tunes in the symphonic repertoire... .

The Korngold Symphony is better known, but still let's remind ourselves of that thrilling scherzo...

Footnote - I know Christian Steiner's work as a photographer of musicians, but didn't realise he was an accomplished player himself. Here is an extract from his excellent web site:

Steiner, after graduating from the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, won several national competitions in Germany and it was one of these awards which first brought him to New York to further his piano studies. He comes from a long line of musicians. His father was a member of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and his brothers were members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Steiner made piano recording with RCA-Reader’s Digest, and was a guest soloist with orchestras in Berlin and New York; more recent engagements at the keyboard include performances with the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano, and with the National Symphony or Mexico. He also performed chamber music with members of the Berlin Philharmonic Octet and recitals with his late brother Peter in Europe and the USA. Among the singers he has collaborated in recital are Jessye Norman and Carol Vaness. In addition, Steiner is the artistic director of The Tannery Pond Concerts, a summer chamber music festival in the Berkshires.

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