Naxos Concludes Pfitzner Song Project

courtesy of Naxos of America

This coming Friday Naxos will release the fifth and final volume in its project to record the complete songs composed by Hans Pfitzner. This will again be a CD featuring a single vocalist: baritone Uwe Schenker-Primus, who was also the vocalist in the fourth volume. As on all four of the previous volumes, the pianist is Klaus Simon. As usual, Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for this new release.

Advance material from Naxos described this recording as “the final volume in a series that restores Pfitzner’s place amongst the most important Lieder composers of the late Romantic period.” Having completed the entire journey, I would like to offer an alternative perspective. Where the nineteenth century is concerned, I would say that the attentive listener is likely to experience some “reverberations” of songs composed by Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf. On the other hand I would be reluctant to add Richard Strauss to that list, while also recognizing him as one of “the most important Lieder composers of the late Romantic period.”

Instead, I am more interested in how art song progressed during the early decades of the twentieth century. In that context I suspect it would not be out of place to identify Pftizner as a “fellow traveler” along with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, as well as the early efforts of Anton Webern. If that “fellow traveler” epithet is too extreme, then I think it would still not be out of place to conjecture that this German composer was more than slightly aware of rumblings emanating from Vienna!

Mind you, much of this album consists of songs composed after 1920, by which time those Second Viennese School rumblings were developing sharper edges. Pfitzner clearly did not want to venture into that territory. However, this was also a time when Pfitzner seemed to be gravitating away from vocal music, focusing more on instrumental music instead.