Pfitzner’s Songs: The Naxos Recording Project

Portrait of Hans Pfitzner by Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

This past Friday Naxos released the second volume in its project to record the complete songs composed by Hans Pfitzner. Given that the first volume was released in October of 2013, it would appear that the project is proceeding at a rather slow pace. Indeed, word of that earlier release seems to have escaped my notice. Alternatively, the announcement would have come out a few months after I had written an Examiner.com article about a video of his Palestrina opera, pretty much the only work for which Pfitzner is known today; and, as a result I let the announcement pass, feeling that I had had enough of Pfitzner for a while.

However, with last Friday’s release my curiosity was piqued enough to give both volumes some attentive listening. After all, I have been going to art song recitals for over 30 years, even if my serious writing about them only began about a decade ago. Yet, over the course of all that listening, I am not sure I have encountered any of Pfitzner’s songs, either in performance or on recording.

To be fair, Pfitzner described himself as an anti-modernist. For example, he published a pamphlet entitled Futuristengefahr (danger of futurists) as a rebuttal to Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. He was also strongly nationalistic. He was originally a Nazi sympathizer, but that association did not last very long due to his association with the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter and his refusal to write incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream that could replace what Felix Mendelssohn had written.

The two Naxos volumes cover songs written between 1884 and 1923. In the spirit of the current Hyperion project to record the complete songs of Franz Liszt, both volumes share the same pianist, Klaus Simon; but each presents a singer with a different vocal range. The songs on the first volume are for soprano voice and are sung by Britta Stallmeister. Those on the second volume are sung by tenor Colin Balzer.

Within the “community” of art song composers, Pfitzner was admired by both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss; and his strongest influence appears to be Hugo Wolf. Nevertheless, the extent of his catalog is considerably less than that of either Wolf or Strauss. On the basis of an earlier release, I anticipate that the Naxos project will required only five CDs.

Both of the albums released thus far make a strong case that Pfitzner deserves as much attention from recitalists as is currently given to Wolf and Strauss. His selections of sources show that he has good taste in poetry, and most listeners will probably discover poets they had not previously encountered. Both Stallmeister and Balzer clearly appreciate the rhetorical objectives of each poem, and they both serve as informed partners for Simon’s piano accompaniment. The bottom line is that these albums offer a journey of discovery worth taking; and I definitely hope that, sooner rather than later, I shall encounter a recitalist willing to offer up some of these songs in performance.