Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg.
Died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.
Composed in 1894.
As an unrepentant, life-long bachelor (he once vowed “never to undertake either a marriage or an opera”), Johannes Brahms depended heavily on his circle of friends for support, encouragement, and advice. By word and example, Robert Schumann set him on the path of serious composition as a young man; Schumann’s wife, Clara, was Brahms’ chief critic and confidante throughout his life. The violinist Joseph Joachim was an indefatigable champion of Brahms’ chamber music, and provided him expert technical advice during the composition of the Violin Concerto. Hans von Bulow, a musician of gargantuan talent celebrated as both a pianist and conductor, played Brahms’ music widely, and made it a mainstay in the repertory of the superb court orchestra at Meiningen during his tenure there as music director from 1880 to 1885. Soon after arriving to take up his post, Bülow invited Brahms to Meiningen to be received by the music-loving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von Heldburg, and Brahms was provided with a fine apartment and encouraged to visit the court whenever he wished. (The only obligation upon the comfort-loving composer was to don the much-despised evening dress for dinner.) Brahms returned frequently and happily to Meiningen to hear his works played by the orchestra and to take part in chamber ensembles. At a concert in March 1891, he heard a performance of Weber’s F minor Clarinet Concerto by the orchestra’s principal player of that instrument, Richard Muhlfeld, and was overwhelmed. “It is impossible to play the clarinet better than Herr Muhlfeld does here,” he wrote to Clara. “He is absolutely the best I know.” So fluid and sweet was Mühlfeld’s playing that Brahms dubbed him “Fraulein Nightingale,” and flatly proclaimed him to be the best wind instrument player that he had ever heard. Indeed, so strong was the impact of the experience that Brahms was shaken out of a year-long creative lethargy — the Clarinet Trio (Op. 114) and the Clarinet Quintet (Op. 115) were composed without difficulty for Muhlfeld in May and June 1891.
During his regular summer retreat at Bad Ischl in the Austrian Salzkammergut in 1894, Brahms was again inspired to write for clarinet. During July, he composed two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano, and invited Muhlfeld to visit him in September to try out the new pieces. They then took the Sonatas to Frankfurt, and there played them for Clara Schumann four times in five days, but her hearing was so bad by that time that they sounded to her, she said, like little more than “chaos.” She read them at the piano, however (Clara was one of the 19th-century’s greatest keyboard virtuosos), and pronounced her love for these latest of Brahms’ creations. With this blessing, Muhlfeld and Brahms toured successfully with the Sonatas to several cities; the performance in Vienna on January 11, 1895 was Brahms’ last public appearance as a pianist. Simrock, Brahms’ publisher in Berlin, was eager to issue the scores, but the composer would not release them until late in the spring of 1895 so that Muhlfeld would have exclusive performance rights to them during the tour. Except for the Four Serious Songs and the set of eleven Chorale Preludes inspired by the death of Clara in 1896, these Sonatas were the last music that Brahms wrote.
The Clarinet Sonatas are works of Brahms’ fullest maturity: economical without being austere, tightly unified in motivic development, virtually seamless in texture yet structurally pellucid, harmonically rich, and, as always with his greatest music, filled with powerful and clear emotions trenchantly expressed. (“Who can resist an emotion strong enough to penetrate all that skillful elaboration?” asked the composer’s friend Elizabeth von Herzogenberg about the Fourth Symphony nine years earlier.) The autumnal opening movement of the E-flat major Sonata follows the traditional sonata-form model. The first theme, suffused with cool sunlight, is an almost perfect example of melodic construction — rapturously lyrical in its initial phrases, growing more animated and wide-ranging as it progresses, and closing with a few short, quiet gestures. After a transition on the main subject followed by a brief moment of silence, the second theme, another gently flowing melodic inspiration, is introspectively intoned by the clarinet. The development section is compact and lyrical rather than prolix and dramatic, and leads to the balancing return of the earlier materials in the recapitulation. The Sonata’s greatest expressive urgency is contained in its second movement, a curious stylistic hybrid of folkish Austrian Landler, sophisticated Viennese waltz, and Classical scherzo. The movement’s principal, minor-mode formal section flanks a brighter central chapter which Brahms marked forte ma dolce e ben cantando — “strong but sweet and well sung.” For the finale of this, his last chamber composition, Brahms employed one of his most beloved structural procedures, the variation. The theme is presented by the clarinet with two echoing phrases from the piano alone. This spacious melody is the subject of five variations, the last of which, a sturdy strain in a portentous minor key, is largely entrusted to the piano. An animated coda brings this splendid and deeply satisfying Sonata to its glowing conclusion.
Johannes Brahms
Composed in 1892-1893.
It was Brahms’ ability as a pianist that brought him his earliest fame. His father, Jakob, a double bass player of meager success in Hamburg, early recognized the boy’s musical talents, and started him with piano lessons when he was seven. Just three years later, Johannes was playing well enough to be offered a tour of America as a child prodigy, but he was instead accepted for further training (at no cost) by Eduard Marxsen, a musician whose excellent taste and thorough discipline helped form his student’s elevated view of the art. Marxsen guided Brahms’ earliest attempts at composition, and prepared him for his first public recital, given in Hamburg in September 1848, when he was fifteen. Significantly, the program included a fugue by Bach. A year later, Brahms presented a second concert which featured another selection by Bach as well as Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata.
Such high-minded music-making was, however, only one aspect of Brahms’ life when he was a budding teenage pianist, since at the same time as he was studying the great classics with Marxsen, he was earning money for the always-pinched household budget by playing in what were euphemistically called “dance halls” in Hamburg’s rough dock district, work he began when he was just thirteen. This exposure to the seediest elements of city life affected the young Brahms deeply, and was probably the reason that he could not achieve a satisfactory relationship with any respectable woman later in his life. (He once vowed that there were two things he would never attempt: an opera and a marriage.) It is a tribute to the innate strength of his personality that he was able to absorb the amazing range of his experiences as a youth — from the transcendent to the unseemly — and emerge only a few years later as one of the most significant artistic figures of his time.
In 1850, Brahms met Eduard Remenyi, a violinist who had been driven to Hamburg by the civil uprisings in Hungary two years before. In 1853, the duo undertook a concert tour through Germany, a venture that not only allowed Brahms to extricate himself from the waterfront taverns, but also to meet Joseph Joachim, who, at 22, only two years his senior, was already regarded as one of the best violinists in Europe. Joachim introduced him to Robert and Clara Schumann, who were overwhelmed by Brahms’ talent when he played them some of his own compositions, including his first published works — the C major (Op. 1) and F-sharp minor (Op. 2) Piano Sonatas. It was because of the Schumanns’ encouragement that he began his First Piano Concerto in 1854; Brahms was soloist in the work’s premiere on January 22, 1859 in Hanover.
Brahms toured and concertized extensively as a pianist in northern Europe for the next decade. He made his recital debut in Vienna in 1862, and returned there regularly until settling permanently in that city in 1869. By then, his reputation as a composer was well established, and he was devoting more time to creative work than to practicing piano. He continued to play, however, performing his own chamber music and solo pieces both in public and in private, and even serving as soloist in the premiere of his daunting Second Concerto on November 9, 1881 in Budapest. His last public appearance as a pianist was in Vienna on January 11, 1895, just two years before he died, in a performance of his Clarinet Sonatas with Richard Muhlfeld.
Brahms’ pianism was noted less for its flashy virtuosity than for its rich emotional expression, fluency, individuality, nearly orchestral sonority, and remarkable immediacy, especially in performances of his own music. The English pianist Florence May, who studied with him in the 1870s, reported, “Brahms’ playing … was not [that] of a virtuoso, though he had a large amount of virtuosity (to put it mildly) at his command. He never aimed at mere effect, but seemed to plunge into the innermost meaning of whatever music he happened to be interpreting, exhibiting all its details, and expressing its very depths.” Richard Specht, an intimate of Brahms during his last decade, recalled in his biography of the pianist-composer, “His playing, for all its reticence, was filled with song, there was in it a searching, a gliding of light and flitting of shadows, a flaring and burning out, a restrained masculine feeling, and a forgetful, romantic passion…. He always played as if he were alone; he forgot his public entirely, sank into himself, gained new knowledge of his own tones in re-creating them, was lost to himself.”
Brahms’ compositions for solo piano are marked by the same introspection, seriousness of purpose, and deep musicality that characterized his playing. His keyboard output, though considerable, falls into three distinct periods: an early burst of large-scale works mostly in Classical forms (1851-1853: three Sonatas, Opp. 1, 2, and 5; the Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4; and the Four Ballades, Op. 10); a flurry of imposing compositions in variations form from 1854 to 1863 on themes by Schumann, Haydn, Handel, and Paganini; and a late blossoming of thirty succinct Capriccios, Intermezzos, Ballades, and Rhapsodies from 1878-1879 and 1892-1893 issued as Opp. 76, 79, 116, 117, 118, and 119. To these must be added the dance-inspired compositions of the late 1860s: the Waltzes (Op. 39) and the Hungarian Dances. Brahms’ late works, most notably those from 1892 and 1893, share the autumnal quality that marks much of the music of his ripest maturity. “It is wonderful how he combines passion and tenderness in the smallest of spaces,” said Clara Schumann of this music. To which William Murdoch added, “Brahms had begun his life as a pianist, and his first writing was only for the pianoforte. It was natural that at the end of his life he should return to playing this friend of his youth and writing for it. This picture should be kept in mind when thinking of these last sets. They contain some of the loveliest music ever written for the pianoforte. They are so personal, so introspective, so intimate that one feels that Brahms was exposing his very self. They are the mirror of his soul.”
Anton Webern
Born December 3, 1883, in Vienna.
Died September 15, 1945, in Mittersill, Austria.
Composed in 1905.
Premiered on May 27, 1962 in Seattle by the University of Washington String Quartet.
Webern entered the University of Vienna in 1902 not as a student of composition but rather to study historical musicology under the tutelage of the renowned scholar Guido Adler. Webern pursued his interests on several fronts during the next two years — some piano and violin lessons, assimilation of the wealth of the city’s music (he was especially struck by Gustav Mahler’s new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna Court Opera), sufficient academic work to earn a doctorate for his edition of the Choralis Constantinus of the Renaissance master Heinrich Isaac — but his greatest ambition to compose. He produced a number of songs and chamber works during that time, as well as an ambitious symphonic piece titled Im Sommerwind (“In the Summer Wind”) inspired by Bruno Wille’s impressionistic poem of the same name, an idyllic description of a summer’s day in the fields and woods. By the spring of 1904, Webern determined to indulge his penchant for creative work by finding a composition teacher for himself, so he traveled to Berlin for an interview with Hans Pfitzner, then one of Germany’s leading composers and pedagogues. During the course of the audience, however, Pfitzner dispensed some disparaging remarks about two of his chief rivals — and two of Webern’s greatest heroes — Strauss and Mahler, and the young musician became so angry that he bolted from his chair and stomped out of the room.
Soon after returning to Vienna from Berlin, Webern spotted a newspaper advertisement announcing private composition lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, one of the young Turks of turn-of-the-century music, whose Pelleas und Melisande and Verklarte Nacht had greatly impressed him. Though Schoenberg was only nine years his senior and lacked the usual academic credentials, Webern, sometime in the early autumn of 1904, became the first of his students. This little band of iconoclasts, which would soon rock the very foundations of Western music, quickly grew to include Alban Berg, Erwin Stein, and Egon Wellesz. Schoenberg’s pedagogical method was challengingly different from the hoary university disciplines to which Webern had earlier been exposed. “He preaches the use neither of old artistic devices nor of new ones,” Webern noted. “Before all else, Schoenberg demands that the pupil should not write just any notes to comply with a school formula, but that he should perform these exercises out of a necessity for expression…. Thus Schoenberg educates through the creative process. With the greatest energy he searches out the pupil’s personality, seeking to deepen it, to help it break through…. This is an education in utter truthfulness to oneself.” Webern’s voyage of inner discovery under Schoenberg’s guidance produced an amazing amount of music during the early years of his apprenticeship — Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer’s superb study of the composer lists no fewer than fifty separate items which date from the time of his meeting with Schoenberg until his formal Opus 1, the Passacaglia for Orchestra of 1908. The catalog of these endeavors, most never published, includes piano pieces, chorale settings, sketches for orchestra and chamber works, but perhaps the most important category is devoted to string quartet movements, at least a dozen of them, the most notable of which are the String Quartet and the Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”) of 1905.
The genesis of the Langsamer Satz is revelatory of the state of Webern’s creative and personal thinking in 1905, when he was 22 years old. Three years earlier, on Easter 1902, he set eyes on his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl, then sixteen, for the first time. They immediately became friends, and, during the following years, very much more. In the spring of 1905, he and Wilhelmine went on a five-day walking excursion in the Waldwinkel, a picturesque region in Lower Austria. Webern reveled in the beauty of the springtime countryside and the companionship of the woman who would become his wife six years later. “The sky is brilliantly blue,” he confided to his diary. “To walk forever like this among flowers, with my dearest one beside me, to feel oneself so entirely at one with the universe, without care, free as the lark in the sky above — O what splendor! ... We wandered through forests. It was a fairyland!” He copied into his diary the rapturous lines of Ging heut’ Morgen uber’s Feld, the second of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, and three long poems in praise of nature by Gustav Falke. In June, still suffused with the glory of the Austrian countryside and the soaring emotions of his young love, he composed his Langsamer Satz. Since a set of contemporaneous parts exists for the work, it is likely that the piece was played privately soon after it was composed, but the score remained unpublished until 1961; the University of Washington String Quartet (Emanuel Zetlin, Richard Ferrin, Vilem Sokol, and Eva Heinitz) gave the public premiere in Seattle on May 27, 1962.
Webern’s Langsamer Satz occupies the same emotionally charged expressive and stylistic sphere as Schoenberg’s programmatic string sextet of 1899, Verklarte Nacht. Though firmly tonal (E-flat major) in its harmonic idiom, the Langsamer Satz shows the sort of sophisticated thematic manipulation (especially in the inversion of its theme) that became an integral component of Webern’s atonal and serial music, though its lyricism and overt emotionalism find little equivalent in his precise and pristine later works. The Langsamer Satz is in traditional three-part form. The first (and last) section utilizes two themes: a melody of broad arching phrases that broaches an almost Brahmsian mixture of duple and triple rhythmic figurations; and a complementary motive of greater chromaticism, begun by the second violin, that climbs a step higher to begin each of its subsequent phrases. The central portion of the work is based on a rhapsodic theme in flowing triplet figurations that works itself up to a climax of aggressive unisons to mark the mid-point of the movement. An epilogue of quiet, floating harmonies (_zogernd_, “lingeringly,” Webern writes repeatedly in the score above these measures) closes this touching souvenir of Webern’s youth, which the Moldenhauers called “pure and exalted love music.”
Leon Kirchner
Born January 24, 1919, in Brooklyn, New York.
Composed in 1995.
Premiered on December 6, 1995 in New York City by Leon Fleisher.
The American composer, conductor, and pianist Leon Kirchner was born on January 24, 1919 in Brooklyn, New York into a family of Russian Jewish émigrés. When he was nine, the family moved to Los Angeles, where he studied piano with Richard Buhlig and John Crown before entering Los Angeles City College as a pre-med student. He took classes in harmony at the school and began composing, and Crown introduced him to Ernst Toch, the noted Austrian-born composer then teaching at USC, who convinced Kirchner to leave the study of medicine and enroll at the university to foster his creative talent through study with him and his faculty colleague Arnold Schoenberg. After graduating from UCLA in 1940, Kirchner studied with Ernest Bloch at Berkeley and Roger Sessions in New York. In 1946, following three years of active military service during World War II, he returned to Berkeley to finish his master’s degree and lecture at the university there. He came back to New York in 1950 on a Guggenheim Grant, where his String Quartet No. 1 gained him his first wide recognition after it received the New York Music Critics Circle Award as the best new chamber work of the season. Between 1950 and 1954, Kirchner served on the faculty of the University of Southern California, and subsequently taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, and, from 1961 until his retirement in 1989, at Harvard, where he also directed the Harvard Chamber Players and Harvard Chamber Orchestra. In addition, Kirchner has held residencies at the Marlboro Music Festival (where he supervised the Rockefeller Contemporary Music Program from 1963 to 1973), the American Academy in Rome (1975), the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival (1983), and the Tanglewood Music Center (1985). Among his numerous distinctions are the Pulitzer Prize (for the 1966 String Quartet No. 3), the Friedheim Award (1992, for Music for Cello and Orchestra), election to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), and the Naumburg Award (1956).
Kirchner’s creative output includes the opera Lily (1977, based on Saul Bellow’s Henderson, the Rain King), two piano concertos, a flute concerto, a concerto for violin and cello, a half-dozen independent orchestral scores, three string quartets and several other chamber pieces, a piano sonata and a few smaller keyboard works, and a number of songs on texts of Whitman, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and García-Lorca. Kirchner’s professional training exposed him to some of the most potent personalities and creative theories of early 20th-century music: the serialism of Schoenberg, the Hebraic lyricism of Bloch, the impeccable craftsmanship of Sessions. He learned from those modern masters, of course, and also from the music of Bartok, Berg, Mahler, and others, but he did not forsake his own creative identity for any of their styles. In the Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote, “In his music, Kirchner takes the prudential median course, cultivating a distinct modern idiom without espousing any particular modernistic technique, but making ample and effective use of euphonious dissonance; the contrapuntal fabric in his works is tense but invariably coherent. Through his natural inclinations toward Classical order, he prefers formal types of composition, often following the established Baroque style.”
For the Left Hand, composed in summer 1995 for Leon Fleisher, was inspired by lines from Emily Dickinson’s Wild Nights (Wild Nights — Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury! Futile — the Winds — To a Heart in port — Done with the Compass — Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden — Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor — Tonight — In Thee!) and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence (A quickening gust Of wind blew up to me and thrust Into my face a miracle Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, — I know not how such things can be! — I breathed my soul back into me).
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Born May 29, 1897, in Brünn, Austria (now Brno, Czechoslovakia).
Died November 29, 1957, in Hollywood, California.
Composed in 1930.
Premiered on October 21, 1930 in Vienna, by pianist Paul Wittgenstein and members of the Rose Quartet.
Gustav Mahler called him “a genius”; Karl Goldmark proclaimed his music to be “a miracle”; Giacomo Puccini said, “That boy’s talent is so great, he could easily give us half and still have enough left for himself”; and Richard Strauss observed, “One’s first reaction, that these compositions are by an adolescent boy, is one of awe and fear: this firmness of style, this sovereignty of form, this individuality of expression, this harmonic structure — it is truly amazing.” The object of this cascade of encomiums was a teenage boy whose prodigality invited comparison with such pre-pubescent Wunderkinder as Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schubert: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (his middle name honored Mozart), born on May 29, 1897 in Brünn, Austria (now Brno, Czech Republic), was the younger son of Julius Korngold, a protege of Eduard Hanslick and one of Vienna’s most influential music critics at the turn of the century. By age five, Erich was playing piano duets with his father; two years later he began composing; at nine, he produced a cantata (Gold) that convinced his father to enroll him as a student of Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Conservatory. When Mahler heard Erich play his cantata the following year, he proclaimed the boy “a genius” and arranged for him to take lessons with Alexander Zemlinsky. Korngold made remarkable progress under Zemlinsky — his Piano Sonata No. 1 was published in 1908, when he had ripened to the age of eleven. The following year he wrote a ballet, _Der Schneemann (“The Snowman_”), orchestrated by Zemlinsky, which was staged at the Vienna Royal Opera at the command of Emperor Franz Josef. Next came a piano trio and another piano sonata, both of which Artur Schnabel played all over Europe. For the Gewandhaus concerts, Artur Nikisch commissioned Korngold’s first orchestral work, the _Schauspiel Ouvertüre (“Overture to a Play_”), and premiered it in Leipzig in 1911. Later that same year the budding composer gave a concert of his works in Berlin, in which he also appeared as piano soloist. Korngold was an international celebrity at thirteen. “It seems that nature amassed all its gifts in music and laid them in the cradle of this extraordinary child,” marveled Felix Weingartner.
In 1915 and 1916, Korngold wrote the first two of his five operas: Der Ring des Polykrates, a comedy, and Violanta, a tragedy. Bruno Walter premiered this complementary pair of one-acters in tandem at the Vienna Opera on March 28, 1916. Following a two-year stint in the Austrian army playing piano for the troops during World War I, Korngold composed some incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Burgtheater in Vienna, and then turned again to opera, producing his dramatic masterpiece, _Die Tote Stadt (“The Dead City_”), which was premiered simultaneously in Hamburg (where he served as conductor for three years after the War) and Cologne on December 4, 1920. The work appeared on the stages of 83 opera houses around the world during the following months; it was the first German opera performed at the Met after World War I (November 19, 1921, with Maria Jeritza in her American debut). After Korngold returned to Vienna in 1920, he was appointed professor of opera and composition at the Staatsakademie and served as music consultant for revivals of several of Johann Strauss’ operettas, including one pastiche that reached Broadway in 1934 as The Great Waltz. A poll by the _Neue Wiener Tagblatt (“New Vienna Daily_”) in 1928 showed that that newspaper’s readers thought Korngold and Arnold Schoenberg were the two greatest living Austrian composers.
In 1934, the Austrian director Max Reinhardt was conscripted by the Warner Brothers Studio in Hollywood to film a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Olivia de Haviland, Dick Powell, James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, and Mickey Rooney. Reinhardt chose to use Mendelssohn’s incidental music as background, and he took Korngold along to arrange the score. Korngold, who, as a Jew, felt increasingly uneasy in Austria, accepted other offers in Hollywood, and, when the Nazi Anschluss in 1938 prevented him from returning home, he settled permanently in California. (He became a United States citizen in 1943.) For the next seven years, he devoted his talents to creating a body of film music unsurpassed by that of any other composer in the genre, and won three Academy Awards (for Anthony Adverse, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Sea Wolf). His father’s death in 1945, however, caused him to re-evaluate his career, and he returned to writing concert music with concertos for violin (for Heifetz) and cello, and a large symphony that Dmitri Mitropoulos called “one of the most significant works of the century.” These new pieces caused little stir among critics and public, however, who by and large felt that such music was merely a warmed-over manifestation of an earlier age. (Romanticism was a badly battered notion during those dodecaphony-dominated post-World War II years.) Korngold went to Vienna for an extended visit, but returned to Hollywood, where he suffered a series of heart attacks. He died on November 29, 1957, and his remains were interred in the Hollywood Cemetery, within a few feet of those of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., D.W. Griffith, and Rudolf Valentino.
Korngold’s achievement, for both the screen and the concert hall, was sadly undervalued at the time of his death. A reassessment began in 1972, when the composer’s son George produced a recording by Charles Gerhardt and a top-flight London studio orchestra of selections from his father’s film music (_The Sea Hawk_). The album became a best-seller for RCA, and a sequel (_Elizabeth and Essex_) appeared the following year. New recordings of the Symphony in F-sharp (by Rudolf Kempe), the Violin Concerto (Ulf Hoelscher), and Die Tote Stadt (Erich Leinsdorf) in the mid-1970s fueled interest in Korngold’s concert and operatic music, just as the great Warner Brothers films of the 1930s and 1940s were starting their transformation from kitsch to classics. Brendan Carroll and Konrad Hopkins founded a Korngold Society in England in 1983, the same year Gotz Friedrich revived Die Tote Stadt at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. All of Korngold’s significant compositions have since become available in fine commercial recordings, his works are now given regularly in performance by leading artists, and two biographies of him have recently been published to mark the centenary of his birth: Erich Wolfgang Korngold by Jessica Duchen (Phaidon Press, 1996) and The Last Prodigy by Brendan G. Carroll (Amadeus Press, 1997).
In June 1959, a memorial concert of Korngold’s music was given in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA. Jessica Duchen closed her study of the composer with the following excerpt from a review of that event which appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner: “A memorial concert to Erich Wolfgang Korngold … brought to our attention a musical voice which may be regarded, when the smog of controversy rolls away, as one of the most civilized and gracious of the 20th century. Thirty years ago Korngold’s idiom seemed advanced. Then came the schools of atonalism, polytonality, and general chaos, and Korngold was suddenly placed in the category of the reactionaries. Among those who discarded him, there are few survivors. Korngold spoke forth last night with a richness of melody and a luxuriance of harmony that marked him for survival. There is no defeatism in Korngold’s music. He loved life, he accepted life, and he gave back in music the wonder that he found in it.”
Paul Wittgenstein was a member of one of Vienna’s most distinguished families — his brother was Ludwig, the celebrated Austrian philosopher. Paul studied piano with Leschetizky, and made his public debut in 1913. When war erupted the following year, he was sent to the Russian front, where he lost his right arm in combat. He was held in Siberia as a prisoner of war until he was repatriated in 1916. Determined to overcome his handicap and continue with his performing career, Wittgenstein developed an extraordinary technique for left hand alone. Another of his teachers, Josef Labor (who, interestingly, had been blind since childhood), wrote a concerto especially for his handicapped pupil that enabled him to return to the concert stage. Wittgenstein subsequently commissioned concerted and chamber works for piano left hand from Ravel, Strauss (_Parergon_), Prokofiev (Concerto No. 4, though Wittgenstein found the piece unsuitable and refused to perform it), Britten (_Diversions_), Schmidt (Piano Quintet in G major) and other leading composers. Wittgenstein emigrated to America in 1938, and taught in New York City until shortly before his death, in Manhasset, Long Island on March 3, 1961.
In 1923, at the height of his career following the dazzling success of Die Tote Stadt, Korngold was asked by Wittgenstein to write a Left Hand Piano Concerto. Though the Concerto roused little enthusiasm when Wittgenstein premiered it in Vienna early the next year (Gary Graffman revived it with the New York Philharmonic in 1985), he thought enough of the piece and its composer to commission Korngold to write a chamber work for him in 1928. Two years later Korngold composed the Suite for Two Violins, Cello, and Piano Left Hand, Op. 23. The work was well received at its premiere by Wittgenstein and members of the Rosé Quartet on October 21, 1930 in Vienna, and the pianist played it in Colorado Springs, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles on his first tour of America four years later; the recently arrived composer himself was the guest of honor at the Los Angeles performance.
The Suite’s five contrasted movements give prominence throughout to the piano, whose technical and interpretative challenges substantiate Wittgenstein’s contention that it “takes double the talent and energy for a left-handed pianist.” The opening movement follows the venerable model of the Prelude (consisting of weighty and dramatic pronouncements from the piano) and Fugue (really a kind of free passacaglia, with the tortuously chromatic theme repeated and varied rather than serving as the subject for systematic imitation). The music of the Prelude returns to round out the movement. The Waltz is at once saccharin and elegant. The Groteske, which provides the Suite with a demonic scherzo, is balanced by the movement’s romantic central trio. The Lied is an arrangement of Korngold’s song Was Du Mir Bist?, Op. 22, No. 1 (“_What Are You to Me?_”), a touching setting of a poem by Eleonore van der Straaten composed just prior to the Suite. Though Korngold labeled the Rondo-Finale a “Variationen,” the movement is really a free fantasia on the amiable theme announced by the cello at the outset.
©2006 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
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