Three Banned Composers from the 20th Century

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

One week from today, BIS will release a new album of three virtuoso Viennese composers from the first half of the twentieth century. Those composers, in “order of appearance” on the album, are Franz Schreker, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Ernst Krenek. As many (most?) readers will expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. [added 10/15, 8:20 a.m.: I feel it important to note that I just received information from Presto Music. They have also created a Web page for this album, and the price is significantly lower than that on the Amazon Web page! The Web page also allows for preview listening through a free 30-day trial!]

I have no idea if any of the three composers encountered the others over the course of their composing efforts in Vienna. However, they were all banned by dictators during the Thirties; and, following the end of World War II, they were blacklisted by the emerging avant-garde composers. The best-known of them fled dictatorship by moving to the United States.

That was Korngold, who would enjoy a prosperous career of composing music for Hollywood films directed by Max Reinhardt. (Korngold used to joke that Robin Hood saved him from Adolf Hitler!) Krenek would make a similar move after the jazzy rhetoric of Jonny spielt auf rubbed the Nazi Party, which was just on the rise, the wrong way. Schreker was the only one of the three to remain in Europe. His music was also banned by the Third Reich, but that was probably more for his Jewish religion than for his music. He died in 1934, and Nazi authority prevented his music from being performed, not only in Europe but also anywhere else.

Ironically, the shadow of that blacklist prevailed over my own music education. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I had no trouble minoring in Music. I was particularly enthusiastic in signing up for the Music of the Twentieth Century course. The professor was a “new arrival;” and he led his pupils (myself included) on an engagingly informative journey from Gustav Mahler to post-Schoenberg composers, some of whom, such as Milton Babbitt, were obsessed with the relationship between serial composition and mathematics. (Full disclosure: I majored in mathematics!)

It that context, it should be no surprise that, over the course of my studies, I never encountered the music of any of the three composers on this new album. Indeed, the only one that was ever discussed was Krenek; but his efforts were more talked-about than performed. He concludes this new album with his Opus 54, “Potpourri.” This was composed in the year after he composed Jonny spielt auf; and, while there are suggestions of his jazzy rhetoric, they tend to be overshadowed by too many suggestions of schmaltz.

To some extent, the “wild card” on this album is Schreker. It has been quite I while since I last encountered his music. However, it is almost exactly seven years ago that I wrote about a Naxos release devoted entirely to his compositions. His contribution to this album is a “shortened version” of the overture he composed for his opera Die Gezeichneten, based on the play Hidalla by Frank Wedekind (best known for the two plays that Alban Berg incorporated in his Lulu opera.

I must confess that I know more about Schreker through my book of “memories and letters” by Alma Mahler than I do through my listening experiences. That was far from the best of sources! Fortunately, my first serious contact took place in Davies Symphony Hall when James Conlon visited the San Francisco Symphony in June of 2006. Sadly, that was a time when I was just beginning to focus on writing; so my account of that visit was somewhat modest.

The performances on this new album, however, are a far cry from any of my Davies encounters. The ensemble is the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire under the baton of Sascha Goetzel. There is no shortage of lush rhetoric over the course of the album, but Goetzel gives a clear and sympathetic account of all three of the contributing composers. Nevertheless, there is only so much of that rhetoric that I can take. In future listening, I shall probably confine my attention to a single composer!

Mitropoulos and American Composers

My journey through Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection concludes with an account of his performances of music composed in the United States. Note that I did not write “music by American composers.” Thanks to Adolf Hitler, the United States saw a significant influx of European composers trying to escape the Nazi juggernaut. Many of them were particularly forward-looking, and I am one that believes that our country was very fortunate enough to have Arnold Schoenberg as one of them.

I might even go as far as to say that Schoenberg was as prolific after arriving in the United States as he was before leaving Europe. Indeed, one the best examples of how he applied his twelve-tone technique is his Opus 36 violin concerto. He dedicated this concerto to his former student Anton Webern (who did not make the “transatlantic move” and suffered the consequences).

The concerto was given its world premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The soloist was Louis Krasner, who had worked closely with Alban Berg on the composition of his violin concerto. Mitropoulos recorded this concerto with the New York Philharmonic, and Columbia released it on an album that also included the Berg concerto. Krasner was the soloist for both concertos, but the Berg concerto was performed by the Cleveland Orchestra led by Artur Rodziński. This is definitely a must-listen album for those interested in the work of Schoenberg and his students (even if Mitropoulos occupies only half of the CD).

A related composer from Schoenberg’s time in Vienna, who also made the move to the United States, is Ernst Krenek. While Krenek was never part of the “Schoenberg school,” he had his own approaches to innovation. Mitropoulos recorded his “Symphonic Elegy,” which was composed in memory of Webern’s tragic death and was scored for string orchestra. Columbia coupled this with Schoenberg’s Opus 17 “Erwartung,” which had been previously performed in Europe. Mitropoulos recorded the performance with soprano soloist Dorothy Dow, making this CD another “must listen” album.

There is also an opportunity to listen to the work of one of Schoenberg’s finest American pupils. Leon Kirchner studied with Schoenberg at the University of California in Los Angeles. After his graduate studies at the Berkeley campus, he pursued both composing and an academic career. He composed his piano concerto on a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and he completed it in 1953. The recording was made with support from the Naumburg Foundation. Kirchner himself performed the solo piano part with Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic.

Curiously, there is only one other American-born composer that seems to have attracted much of Mitropoulos’ attention. That is Morton Gould, who composed the music for Agnes de Mille’s ballet about Lizzie Borden, which was entitled “Fall River Legend” and was first performed by American Ballet Theatre in April of 1948. Gould extracted a suite from his score, which Mitropoulos recorded with the New York Philharmonic. Mitropoulos also recorded two “singles” of Gould’s music. “Philharmonic Waltzes,” which (obviously) was performed by the New York Philharmonic, was also composed in 1948. (The CD couples this with Roger Sessions’ second symphony and Elie Siegmeister’s suite Ozark Set.) However, there is also an earlier (1946) Gould composition entitled “Minstrel Show,” which Mitropoulos recorded during his tenure in Minneapolis.

The other American-born composer of significance is Samuel Barber. Mitropoulos conducted the premiere of Barber’s Opus 32 four-act opera Vanessa, which was performed by the Metropolitan Opera. This opera has enjoyed several revivals, one of which I remember seeing on television. Still, this “original cast” recording remains refreshing with Eleanor Steber in the title role and Nicolai Gedda as Anatol.

Finally, it is worth noting that Mitropoulos shared an album with Gunther Schuller entitled Music for Brass. The selections on this album were performed by The Brass Ensemble of the Jazz and Classical Music Society, reflecting Schuller’s interest in a synthesis of the two genres. Mitropoulos contributed to the album by conducted Schuller’s “Symphony for Brass and Percussion.” The result was not particularly jazzy, but the production of the album provided a platform for forward-looking jazz players such as Miles Davis and J. J. Johnson.

New Krenek Release from Toccata Classics

Photograph of Ernst Krenek at the piano on the cover of the recording begin discussed (courtesy of Naxos of America)

The pace at which Toccata Classics has been recording the music of Ernst Krenek has been painstakingly slow. The British label seems to have a plan for organizing their releases according to different genres. However, as of this writing, the only genre to have been given a complete account is that of piano concertos, which required only two CDs and was completed when the second CD was released in April of 2017, about a year after the first CD was released.

The very first Krenek album from Toccata surfaced much earlier, in July of 2015, during my Examiner.com days, under the title of Ernst Krenek Piano Music, Volume One. The pianist was Stanislav Khristenko. The description of the back of the jewel case described the release as the “first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek.” This claim made me curious enough about the scope of that survey that I checked out the list of Krenek’s compositions on Grove Music Online. I discovered that he had written seven piano sonatas between 1919 (Opus 2 in E-flat major) to 1988 (Opus 240), along with twenty additional piano pieces.

At the beginning of this month, the second volume in this series was finally released. Like the first volume it includes only a single sonata, Opus 121 (the fifth), composed in 1950. (The sonata on the first volume was Opus 114, the fourth, composed about two years earlier. That volume also includes the Opus 120, entitled “George Washington Variations.”)

Most of the second volume explores Krenek’s talents as a miniaturist, both early in his career in Europe and later after he had acquired American citizenship. The earliest of these is the Opus 13a Little Suite, composed in 1922. The full title in German is Eine kleine Suite von Stücken über denselbigen Choral, verschiedenen Charakters (a little suite of pieces based on same chorale, in different characters). The “same chorale” refers to Opus 13, consisting of a toccata and a chaconne both based on the chorale theme for the hymn “Ja ich glaub’ an Jesum Christum” (yes, I believe in Jesus Christ). Taken together, Opus 13 and Opus 13a serve up a fascinatingly refracted reflection on Johann Sebastian Bach, not only in the forms of the Opus 13 movements but also in Opus 13a beginning with an allemande, a sarabande, and a gavotte. Nevertheless, Krenek’s interest in the influence of American dance bands surfaces in the final movement, which is a foxtrot.

The other early composition is the Opus 26 set of two suites composed in 1924. All of the movements of both suites are labeled only by tempo markings, rather than referring to dance forms. Like the Opus 13a suite, the movements show Krenek’s individual approach to atonality. He had not been influenced by Arnold Schoenberg but, instead, by the textbook Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts  (foundations of linear counterpoint) by Ernst Kurth. While these movements do not draw upon familiar forms as a point of departure, there is still a recognizable rhetoric of playfulness that distracts the listener from any concerns about the lack of a tonal center.

The final composition of this second release is the Opus 168 collection of six “Vermessene” (measurements), composed in 1958. By this time Krenek was living in Los Angeles and had cultivated a friendship with Igor Stravinsky. This was a time when Stravinsky was getting interested in serial composition; and he may have been drawn to Krenek because the latter had chosen a path different from that of Arnold Schoenberg. The Opus 168 pieces are, again, miniatures; but they reveal a voice that would not be confused with those of Schoenberg and his student Anton Webern. They also would not be confused with Stravinsky, but this was a time when Stravinsky showed little interest in writing for solo piano.

Sony’s Fromm Collection: Ernst Krenek

Fritz Eschen’s photograph of Ernst Krenek for the original cover of the recording being discussed

The fifth CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD box set of the Twentieth Century Composers Series of recordings presents two compositions by Ernst Krenek. The first of these is his Opus 161 “Sestina,” composed in 1957 for soprano and eight instruments. The soprano is Bethany Beardslee, and Krenek himself conducts. This is followed by Opus 93, settings of excerpts from the Latin text of the Book of Lamentations, performed by the Dresdner Kreuzchor, the boys’ choir of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden, Germany, conducted by Martin Flämig. Both of these compositions last a little less than twenty minutes.

Writing about Krenek is no easy matter. I always seem to begin with a sentence that I have been repeating ever since my Examiner.com days:

Krenek may have the questionable honor of being the most prolific composer in history whose name is unrecognized by just about everyone.

Indeed, in spite of the size of his catalog (suggested by the above opus numbers), Krenek may be best remembered as the first person approached by Alma Mahler to prepare the material for her late husband’s tenth symphony for performance. The symphony had five movements, and Krenek limited himself to the first and third movements.

My experiences with Krenek’s music in performance have been limited but somewhat fortuitous. When I lived in Santa Barbara, my piano teacher was married to a baritone with a great interest in performing Krenek’s art songs. During a later stint in Los Angeles, I had the good fortune to see the Long Beach Opera perform Jonny spielt auf (Jonny plays), whose title character is a black jazz fiddler. The good news is that all of these were engaging beyond my expectations. (As if to underscore my self-quote, that performance is not mentioned on the Wikipedia pages for either Long Beach Opera or Jonny spielt auf!)

The bad news is that the Krenek selections in the Sony collection are nowhere near as engaging. Sadly, Sony itself may be at the heart of the problem. These are settings in which the text can only be apprehended with printed assistance, and no such printed content has been provided by Sony. My guess is that Biblical scholars would be able to fend for themselves with the excerpts from Lamentations, but there is absolutely no information about the source text for “Sestina.” Indeed, it takes very focused listening simply to recognize that the text probably is in German.

Both of the pieces were composed after Krenek took an interest in Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. Unfortunately, there are signs that Krenek was more drawn to the mathematics of the technique than to Schoenberg’s approaches to making music. (Those familiar with the technique are probably also familiar with the twelve-by-twelve “magic square” of the integers from 1 to 12 that represent all “permissible” forms of a given twelve-tone row.) Later in life Krenek would take a similar interest in Fibonacci numbers.

At best one can say that both compositions on this CD are performed with a pristine sense of abstraction. However, even when Krenek himself is conducting, there is little, if any, sense of musical expressiveness emerging from that abstraction. To be fair, however, this album need not be taken as representative of Krenek’s work. As I observed back in May of 2017, there is no shortage of expressiveness in the serial approaches to his later piano concertos; and, when it comes to the rhythms of old Vienna, Krenek’s nostalgia is as convincing as Schoenberg’s.

Krenek’s Chamber Music and Songs on Toccata

courtesy of Naxos of America

Last month Toccata Classics continued to limp its way through its efforts to provide recorded accounts of the music of Ernst Krenek. I chose my verb because these releases have been relatively sporadic with little sense of an overall plan. Given that Krenek’s opus count ran “generously over 200,” as I have previously put it, one would have hoped for a more systematic effort for a twentieth century composer that spent much of his life undeservedly on the sidelines.

Toccata seems to have been at this project since 2012 with the release of an album entitled Music for Chamber Orchestra. There was no indication that this was intended as a complete account of the genre, nor was there much indication as to why the five pieces on the album were grouped as they were. This was followed by a “Volume 1” release of Krenek’s piano music. There has yet to be a “Volume 2,” let alone any sign of how many volumes will be required. The one “complete” account covers his piano concertos through the release of two volumes.

The latest release is the first volume in a category called “Chamber Music and Songs;” and, if the packaging is more than a little disorienting, the performances definitely deserve attention. Krenek’s principal teacher was Franz Schreker, but he became drawn to the efforts of Arnold Schoenberg to eliminate the need for a tonal center. This included taking his own approach to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique with rhetorical stances that always distinguished him from the Second Viennese School composers.

From this point of view, the new album provides a variety insights into different strategies that Krenek summoned to depart from that tonal center. His individual movements tend to be brief, although they frequently follow each other without any pause. Thus, the listener encountering Krenek for the first time may benefit by having the display of the track numbers at his/her disposal. Ultimately, however, the most engaging selections are the two double fugues that begin and conclude the album, the first for two pianos and the second for four hands on one keyboard. These pieces reflect the tonal style that emerged from Krenek’s studies with Schreker, and it is more than a bit of a pity that they have been ignored the way much of Schreker’s music has.

Toccata Classics Completes its Krenek Piano Concertos Project

Last month Toccata Classics concluded its project to record the complete piano concertos of Ernst Krenek with the release of its second volume. As I observed when writing about the first volume for Examiner.com, Krenek was a prodigiously productive composer with an opus number count that ran generously over 200. Indeed, in the face of all that productivity, I observed at that time that “Krenek may have the questionable honor of being the most prolific composer in history whose name is unrecognized by just about everyone.” Amazom.com almost seemed to add insult to injury in view of the number of hoops I had to jump through to recover the URL for the Web page of that first volume in the above hyperlink. (In fairness, however, I have to confess that just about any search for a classical album on Amazon has been a dicey prospect for quite some time. From this I have concluded that either Amazon really does not care about search or really does not care about classical music listeners!)

In light of that opus number count, it is a bit surprising that this Toccata Classics project required only two CDs, which, in turn, served up only seven concertos. Furthermore, on that first volume of the first three concertos, the first two of them were receiving their first commercial recordings. The fact is that Krenek wrote only seven piano concertos; and only four of them (including the three on the first volume) were for solo piano. The remaining three were, in chronological order, Opus 88 for piano and organ (1940), Opus 124 for violin and piano (1950), and Opus 127 for two pianos (1951). On the second volume album only Opus 88 had been previously released as a commercial recording.

It would thus not be out of line to describe this project as a labor of love, which was probably shared by both pianist Mikhail Korzhev and Kenneth Woods, who conducts the English Symphony Orchestra. Indeed, one sign of the seriousness of purpose behind this project is the organization of the accompanying booklets, both of which are structured around three essays, “The Music-Historian’s Perspective,” by Peter Tregear, followed by “The Conductor’s Perspective” by Woods and “The Pianist’s Perspective” by Korzhev. It is as if everyone felt a need to offer an apologia for all the effort that went into this project, while the casual listener may find himself/herself reminded of the joke about a third grader’s book report that said simply, “This book told me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.”

Why do Krenek’s advocates have to work so hard? Both volumes in this set make for highly engaging listening experiences. Furthermore, with few exceptions, Krenek tends to express himself in movements that are elegantly compact in their treatment of duration. Considering the over-grandiose scale of many recent new works, Krenek can be admired simply for the fact that he rarely, if ever, leaves one with the feeling that he is going on for too long. Yes, he clearly was interested in getting away from any sense of a tonal center; and this led to a serious consideration of Arnold Schoenberg’s serial techniques. However, his rhetorical dispositions tended to be on the lush side, making it easy to be drawn into his expressiveness, even in the absence of perfect cadences. Why is he as far “off the radar” in death as he was in life?

One possible answer may lie in my rant last Friday about the dangers of “a capitalist society whose value system is based only on market value.” Whatever appeal Krenek may have had (or now has) with music-makers never seemed to register with the marketing folks, who, together with the “focus groups” that tend to be their primary “source of knowledge,” have become the gatekeepers of both what is available to us and how we experience it. Those marketers would probably dismiss Krenek with some demeaning phrase like “a musician’s musician,” which is simply code for “I can’t make heads or tails out of this, so I conclude that you won’t either.”

A sidebar is appropriate here. My own perspective on music owes a great deal to the many opportunities I had to converse with John Cage, not only one-on-one but, more often than not, in group discussions. With his Zen-like perspective, Cage used to pride himself on his ability to express opinions on just about anything without showing the slightest sign of annoyance. However, the most memorable exception to this disposition came once in one of those group sessions when he was telling us about Josef Matthias Hauer, a contemporary of Schoenberg’s who had independently developed his own twelve-tone technique. Cage explained that the primary reason we did not know about Hauer could be traced back to Columbia Records. He claimed that Columbia decided that there was only so much contemporary music they could promote and that they would therefore focus their efforts almost entirely on Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. (Note that this ordering was alphabetical on my part and not intended to reflect any priorities at Columbia.) The result was that there was no room for Hauer on the “map” they were using for guidance. It is thus reasonable to assume that any other major recording label had some similar sort of “map” and that Krenek never managed to get onto any of them.

Clearly, the last thing I expect is a mass uprising in support of Krenek recordings to let those mindless marketing wonks know what we think of them. The more positive outlook is that there will always be people like Cage willing to spread the word about “outliers” that the marketers have dismissed as “statistically insignificant.” Clearly, different “outliers” will appeal to different tastes. However, Krenek is one of those “outliers” who had a keen sense of how many of us approach listening, whether it involves concert performances or recordings. In other words he has much to day to those willing to take their listening seriously. These two albums of his piano concerto music provide an appealing sample of those many things he has to say.

Project Odradek Releases a New Recording of Pina Napolitano Playing Schoenberg

At the middle of last month, Project Odradek, a non-profit, artist-controlled, democratic classical cooperative, released its second album featuring Italian pianist Pina Napolitano playing music by Arnold Schoenberg. The first had been released in February of 2013 and consisted of Schoenberg’s complete works for solo piano. On the new album she plays Schoenberg’s only concerto for piano and orchestra (Opus 42), which he composed in 1942 and turned out to be his last major work for orchestra. Napolitano plays with the (Latvian) Liepāja Symphony Orchestra conducted by its chief conductor, Atvars Lakstīgala.

(It is probably worth warning readers to be careful in following the above hyperlink for the new album. The album as a whole was given the title Elegy, and Amazon.com may have confused it with a movie soundtrack album also called Elegy! All of the user comments on the Amazon Web page are about the soundtrack album, but the cover image shows Napolitano. Had the tracks been listed, it would have been easier to confirm that this Web page really is for the new Odradek release; but it would appear that Amazon may be getting downright sloppy in how they organize their database of offerings!)

In many ways Schoenberg’s concerto picks up where the collection of his solo piano music concludes, even if there is a gap of about eleven years between the concerto and the latest composition on Napolitano’s solo album. The listener who has tried to follow the full Schoenberg canon is likely to get the feeling that in Opus 42 Schoenberg had finally found a comfort zone for the grammatical constraints of his twelve-tone technique. While the technique may have been the result of his efforts to “emancipate the dissonance” over longer and longer durations, the concerto seems less about liberation from the constraints of dissonance and more about getting beyond the dominant-tonic cadence as a significant syntactic marker. If the Opus 25 piano suite established itself by casting familiar rhythms in new progressions (one cannot really call them “harmonic” progressions), in Opus 42 Schoenberg finally seems to have found ways to compose themes that allow for embellishment and other techniques of development and then frame them in structures that have their own characteristic strategies for establishing finality. The result is one of Schoenberg’s most compelling gestures of nostalgia since the conclusion of his Opus 21 Pierrot Lunaire.

It was probably this context of nostalgia that led to Napolitano coupling Schoenberg’s concerto with Béla Bartók’s third piano concerto. Bartók knew he was dying when he composed this concerto. He wanted to make sure that his widow would be able to provide for herself by maintaining her career as a concert pianist, so he made particular effort to leave her with a new addition to the repertoire that might have more popular appeal when compared with the many thorny dissonances of the first two concertos. Thus it would be fair to say that the entire album is framed by some of Napolitano’s most affectionate approaches to her instrument, suggesting that both of these concertos stand as fond memories of composers with reputations for “difficult music” during their respective lifetimes.

The concertos are separated by two instrumental selections. The first of these is Schoenberg’s Opus 34, which he titled “Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene” (accompanying music to a film scene). This piece is more characteristic of the angst-ridden abstract expressionism that tends to be associated with Schoenberg. The music itself was never intended for a particular film, which means that it can basically be taken as an abstract exercise in the rhetoric of film scores. Lakstīgala seems to have had no difficulty grasping the nature of that rhetoric and engaging it in his interpretation of Opus 34, offering up a highly successful account of what may be called “music for the imagination.”

Rhetorical implications are more explicit in the second instrumental offering, Ernst Krenek’s Opus 105, which he called a “Symphonic Elegy” for string orchestra. This is music that shifts from the abstract connotations of Schoenberg’s Opus 34 to more concrete denotation, since Krenek wrote it to commemorate the death of Anton Webern. However, while its intention may have been memorial, Krenek does not attempt to summon up associations with Webern’s own music. Rather, this elegy is his own personal (and clearly heartfelt) statement. Lakstīgala should be thanked for reminding listeners that Krenek’s music really does not deserve to be as neglected as it has become.