A Final Reckoning: Viktor Ullmann's Last Piece

January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops. Representing the many victims, especially the doomed artists of Theresienstadt, we’re listening to the Seventh Piano Sonata of Viktor Ullmann. Under the Nazi regime, Ullmann was first silenced as a “degenerate” composer owing to his Jewish ancestry, then deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto/transit camp in September 1942. After contributing to the camp’s poignantly rich artistic life for two years — and composing most of the pieces of his which survive today — he was deported to Auschwitz in mid-October 1944 along with members of his family and many colleagues such as Hans Krasa (composer of the opera Brundibar), Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein. He’s believed to have been gassed on October 18, 1944.

Here are the Variations and Fugue from Ullmann’s last work, his 7th Piano Sonata. The fugue is on Yehuda Sharret’s Song of Rachel, a popular Zionist anthem. It’s dedicated to Ullmann’s three eldest children and dated August 22, 1944. His youngest son, Pavel, had died in the camp at the age of three and son Max would die in Auschwitz at twelve.  Felice and Jean (Johannes) were safe in the England.

As was Ullmann’s habit, this movement is full of other musical quotations, the most audible of which may be “Now Thank We All Our God.”

The seventh sonata is also the short score for a planned Second Symphony, eventually realized by Bernhard Wulff. (Look for the CD and DVD conducted by James Conlon.) Reviewing a performance of the orchestral version, James Reid Baxter offers this chilling description:

Wulff described the final Variations and Fugue on a Hebrew Folksong as a ‘final reckoning with European culture, which allowed things like Terezin to happen’. It is simply the most disturbing music I have ever heard. The little melody is lightly varied several times, then subjected to vehement, superb fugal treatment which sets alarms ringing — the possible symbolism of which is stomach-turning. The horror grows as ‘Now Thank We All Our God’is sonorously declaimed by the brass over a furious counterpoint, which builds to a general pause. Then a single, derisory blare of ‘B-A-C-H’ is heard on trombine, and the father of German music is dismissed in a ferocious stretto using the Hebrew melody, which concludes the Symphony with heartbreaking energy, singing in the face of deliberate murder of so many millions of futures. The sheer strength required to write, in those circumstances, silences all criticism. Never has the idea of ‘music as music’ seemed so small: as Wulff wrote, this is not ‘engaged composition, this is music as the will to survive.

Ullmann kept a diary in Theresienstadt in which he addressed the idea of singing in the face of… (words fail).

I have composed quite a lot of new music here in Theresienstadt, mostly at the request of pianists, singers and conductors for the purpose of the Ghetto’s recreation periods. It would be as irksome to count them, as it would be to remark on the fact that in Theresienstadt, it would be impossible to play a piano if there was none available. In addition, future generations will care little for the lack of music paper that we presently experience. I emphasise only the fact that in my musical work at Theresienstadt, I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: we simply did not sit and lament on the shores of the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was not sufficient to our will to exist. And I am convinced that all who have worked in life and art to wrestle content into its unyielding form will say that I was right…”

Musical Anniversary: A Florentine Tragedy

On this date in 1917, Alexander Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy) was premiered in Stuttgart. It is the first of two operas that Zemlinsky (1871-1942) based upon the works of Oscar Wilde. Der Zwerk (The Dwarf) followed in 1922. Here is an excerpt featuring Diana Axentii and Chad Shelton:

Zemlinsky was right in the thick of things in Vienna in the decades before WWII. As a composer he studied with Bruckner and enjoyed the advocacy of such figures as Brahms and Mahler. As a conductor and teacher he, in turn, played a role in the careers of Viktor Ullmann (his assistant conductor), Hans Krasa and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (composition students) and Arnold Schoenberg, who married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde. In addition to conducting the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, Zemlinsky holds the distinction of being the only teacher to give formal lessons (in counterpoint) to his otherwise self-taught brother-in-law.

Zemlinsky’s music evolved from a Brahmsian starting point to the kind of ravishing, post-Wagnerian style we hear in Strauss and Korngold. The “Wilde” operas are part of this mature stylistic world, at times opulent and at times brutally visceral. In the late 20s and 30s, Zemlinsky took a more objective turn, down the path taken by Hindemith and Weill despite his close personal association with the composers of the Second Viennese School.

A Florentine Tragedy (video above) is a one-act opera with only three characters: a merchant, his wife, and the aristocrat who cuckolds the husband. It features a shocking twist as this pretty routine society tragedy descends into a violent confrontation between the two men, and we learn which kind of power matters: brute strength or institutional power.

The Dwarf, based on Wilde’s story “The Birthday of the Infanta” is also a one-act, and the two works pair naturally, both musically and literarily. The Dwarf is in part a dramatization of the pain that Zemlinsky suffered when he lost Alma Schindler to Gustav Mahler. He was apparently considered unattractive, and he knew it. The Zemlinsky-Wilde Dwarf, however, doesn’t know it. He’s been led to believe, for the amusement of onlookers, that he’s a handsome prince, worthy of the love of the Infanta to whom he’s been given as a birthday gift.

Here is a video (for some reason, with piano only), of the scene in which the Dwarf sees his reflection for the first time. The eventual outcome: a new rule, whereby the Infanta is not be given any more living toys, because they break so easily.

There’s no finer advocate for Zemlinsky than James Conlon, whose recordings I recommend:

I haven’t seen the syllabus, but John may very well be discussing Zemlinsky in his upcoming spring class on Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik) — a study of composers who were affected by the Third Reich. As Jew, Zemlinsky had to leave Europe in 1938 and lived his final four years in obscurity in New York City.

"Courage has grown so tired, and longing so great."

I recently promised to devote special attention on this site to Entartete Musik (music deemed “degenerate” in the Third Reich).

Ullmann.jpg

My first subject is the Czech/German composer Viktor Ullmann, a student of Schoenberg, a conducting protege of Zemlinsky, and a leader of musical life in the Terezin concentration camp before being murdered in Auschwitz in September 1944.

Holde Kunst’s Ullmann Resource Guide is still taking shape, but I wanted to offer this unique preview from my YouTube travels.

This production of ARBOS - Company for Music and Theater is presented at the former frontline of World War I (a frequent source material for Ullmann) between Italy and Austria at the Valentinalm near the Plöckenpass. In This video clip Rupert Bergmann performs the character of the Cornet and Alfred Melichar performs the music of Ullmann on the accordion (from the YouTube listing)

Video: Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke

(The Lay of Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke) - Excerpt

Spoken song cycle by Viktor Ullmann · Text by Rainer Maria Rilke · Written 1944 in Terezin

Listen to Whole Cycle Free

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau speaks the Ullmann-Rilke cycle on his album “Melodramas”.

Get the German and English for all five movments

here

.

Text for video excerpt

im Falle sein Bruder Christoph (der nach beigebrachtem Totenschein als Cornet in der Compagnie des Freiherrn von Pirovano des kaiserl. Oesterr. Heysterschen Regiments zu Ross …. verstorben war) zurückkehrt….

Reiten, reiten, reiten, durch den Tag, durch die Nacht, durch den Tag. Reiten, reiten, reiten. Und der Mut ist so müde geworden und die Sehnsucht so groß. Es gibt keine Berge mehr, kaum einen Baum. Nichts wagt aufzustehen. Fremde Hütten hocken durstig an versumpften Brunnen. Nirgends ein Turm. Und immer das gleiche Bild. Man hat zwei Augen zuviel. Nur in der Nacht manchmal glaubt man den Weg zu kennen. Vielleicht kehren wir nächtens immer wieder das Stück zurück, das wir in der fremden Sonne mühsam gewonnen haben? Es kann sein. Die Sonne ist schwer, wie bei uns tief im Sommer. Aber wir haben im Sommer Abschied genommen. Die Kleider der Frauen leuchteten lang aus dem Grün. Und nun reiten wir lang. Es muß also Herbst sein. Wenigstens dort, wo traurige Frauen von uns wissen. 

In the case of his brother Christopher (who, according to the death certificate, was killed while serving as a Cornet in the Compagnie des barons of Pirovano The kaiserl. Oesterr. Heysterschen cavalry regiment

…. Riding, Riding, Riding, through the day, through the night, through the day. Riding, riding, riding. And courage has grown so tired, and longing so great. There are no more mountains, hardly a tree. Nothing dares to stand up. Foreign huts squat thirstily at muddied wells. Nowhere a tower. And always the same picture. One finds that one has two eyes too many. Only at night does one sometimes believe one knows the way. Perhaps at night we always return to the stretch of road that we gained so painfully under the foreign sun? It may be. The sun is heavy, as it is during the depth of our summer. But it was summer when we took our leave. The dresses of the women shimmered for a long time among the green. And now we are riding along. So it must be Autumn. At least in the place where sad women know of us.

Please visit the Lieder and Art Songs Text website and support their sponsors. Their wonderful website is a lifesaver.

A Brief Comment on a Common Objection to Atonality

Like so many other classical music lovers, musicians, and bloggers, I too am impressed by the new book by Alex Ross, “The Rest is Noise”, and am enjoying this perceptive, engaging and big spirited work.  But I would like to comment on a suggestion or appraisal made in the book concerning the deep difficulties a listener faces with Schoenbergian atonality — and I don’t dispute for a second that many fair minded listeners have difficulties with Schoenberg and his atonal colleagues and progeny. Schoenberg understood this as well. This is the passage I find problematical:

“The source of the {Schoenbergian} scandal is not hard to divine; it has to do with the physics of sound. Sound is a trembling of the air, and it affects the body as well as the mind. This is the import of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, which tries to explain why certain intervals attack the nerve endings while others have a calming effect. At the head of Helmholtz’s rogue’s gallery of intervals was the semitone, which is the space between any two adjacent keys on a piano. Struck together, they create rapid “beats” that distress the ear — like an irritating flash of light, Helmholtz says, or a scraping of the skin. ..similar roughnesses are created by the major seventh, slightly narrower than the octave, and by the minor ninth, slightly wider. These are precisely the intervals that Schoenberg emphasizes in his music.”

Most composers know nothing of acoustics, and don’t care to know anything about it, because they intuitively understand that the effect of any given interval or harmony is so contextual that the remoteness of any given overtone from the fundamental note is comparatively meaningless. The evolution of harmony teaches us this… compare Renaissance polyphony with a Clementi sonatina, or Gesauldo with early minimalism, or even Chopin with Tchaikovsky and the nexus between style and intervallic content becomes apparent. Phrases such as Helmholtz’s “distress the ear”, “calming” and “irritating” sound amateurish and possibly philistine, and the attempt to quantify a listener’s aesthetic perception scientifically is an old and fruitless game.  It seems depressingly clinical, as well. And whose ears are we talking about? Professionals? the public at large? I’d like to trade ears with Pierre Boulez. You can’t tell me that Boulez perceives a minor ninth the way your Uncle Marty does.

Schoenberg emphasizes relatively remote harmonic relationships.  So does Debussy. So do certain Jazz musicians. So does Ravel. So does Varese. So does my beloved Milhaud. But these relationships are as “natural” as any of the more obviously primary relationships. It’s a question of vocabulary and syntax.

Schoenberg’s music is difficult because he eliminates a hierachical relationship between sonorities and is relentlessly contrapuntal, and because he rarely repeats things.  Some of his tonal works, such as the First String Quartet and the First Chamber Symphony, are as hard for the novice as the atonal pieces. I promise you, the First Quartet is more difficult than the exquisitely clear neo-classic Third Quartet, for instance.

A major reason why Schoenberg is so difficult, therefore, is not that he was the “liberator of the dissonance”, but because he was the “eliminator of the dissonance”…providing of course, that we apply the proper (natural) context for the workings of his admittedly esoteric and complex vocabulary. 

To read excerpts from The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross, visit Alex’s blog. Alex also has links to listen to some of the works he discusses in the book.