Symphonic Stag Party - Henze's Symphony No. 4

Unsung Symphonies is thrilled to welcome Emily Richmond Pollock, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is writing a dissertation on opera in West Germany from 1945-1965. We let her contribute even though she's never watched all of The Big Lebowski.

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It’s fitting that a post about Hans Werner Henze’s Symphony No. 4 would appear on a blog called Unsung Symphonies, because this is a piece that has literally been “un-sung.” In 1962, six years after the disastrous premiere of his opera König Hirsch (a third of the piece was cut), Henze returned to the opera to create his own “authorized” shortened version, which threw out the original half-hour Finale of Act II.¹ It was that cut material that became his Fourth Symphony, with the vocal parts submerged and incorporated into the orchestral texture.

The symphony’s single continuous movement camouflages a formal scheme that was unusually “instrumental” within the opera, where sections were named Introduzione e Sonata, Varizioni, Capriccio, and Ricercar. In the symphony, these section headings were standardized to Prelude and Sonata, Variations, Scherzo and Trio, and Rondo. These instrumental pretensions (paging Alban Berg!) result in a tidy relationship between musical structure and dramatic sense in the scene, which depicts a year in the life of the title character, the King Stag – bound to the forest as an animal, his human soul continues to make him yearn for the city. The connection between the cycle of seasons in a year (conveyed in the opera by changes of lighting) and the classical, four-movement, ostensibly “cyclical” symphony, becomes almost too programmatic and “on the nose” once it is transposed from the opera stage into the concert hall.

The orchestrational aspects of the transposition from one musical medium to another, however, are executed with subtlety and panache. For one thing, it’s appealing to be able to hear what the opera sounds like without voices – and it’s not just the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance that makes the texture feel all of a sudden more like an integrated contrapuntal whole.² In an opera, orchestration often takes a back seat to vocalism, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that the people in the pit are more than “mere” accompanists. In the symphony, though, the vocal lines become part of a crowd, coming in and out of relief with much more flexibility than is usually possible within the standard hierarchy between orchestra and vocal soloists.

A short passage from near the beginning of both the scene and the symphony helps to illustrate Henze’s general approach.³ The King’s two angular interjections (“Wald, hör’ mich an!” and “Öffne dich und laß mich ein!”) become solo calls in the cellos and the trombone, respectively. Henze keeps the lines in the tenor range, but uses different instrumental colors, which blurs any fixed identity between the original character and the melodic lines in the symphony. Meanwhile, the ensemble of Forest Spirits that answers the King is subsumed into the string section, allowing the rustling woodwinds to come through in a way they never did in the original.

Opera:


Symphony:


Henze had a different strategy in mind when he orchestrated one of the King’s virtuosic solo passages from the third section: the tenor solo is set exclusively for the trumpet, which of course stands out starkly from the rest of the orchestra – maybe even more so than the original singer’s voice.⁴ In addition, instead of the brass section’s entrance drowning out the vocalist (as it nearly does in the opera), it complements the sound of the trumpet, so the whole group can really go for it, instead of struggling to stay under the soloist. I would guess that that the firmer identity between the vocal solo and the single instrument in this section is related to the opera passage’s more “arioso” register and more closed form; by contrast, Example 1’s dialogic context meant that the King’s lines were less strongly “set off” from the surrounding material.

Opera:


Symphony:


It’s probably apparent by now that Henze’s orchestration in the opera is generally quite lush; in some cases, the extensive doublings between the instruments and the voices mean that hardly anything changes between the opera and the symphony – the voices are merely strained out.⁵ But wow, the Berlin Philharmonic can really play (yes, yes, Captain Obvious) – what is pretty enough in the opera takes on shades of poignancy and even contrapuntal brilliance when it is slowed down a little, executed by amazing musicians, and allowed to breathe, the way a symphonic slow movement traditionally begs to be played.

Opera:


Symphony:


And what of the sections that in the original had separated out the orchestra from the voices? A slow, unapologetically consonant passage toward the end of the scene features the Forest Spirits in a breathtaking a cappella hush, alternating with equally “choral” answers from the strings or woodwinds.⁶ The idea of alternating orchestrations of chorale textures gets taken one level higher in the symphonic version, which casts the voices sometimes as groups of solo woodwinds, sometimes as solo strings, sometimes (when unison in the original) as celesta or harp. In both versions, it’s a beautiful passage that stops time and positively shimmers.

Opera:


Symphony:


Aside from these “devocalizations,” Henze didn’t do much to transform the piece from its operatic context to its symphonic form. This might seem like cheating – how symphonic can a symphony be if it comes right out of one of the most blatantly operatic operas of the post-war period? But this generic fuzziness is exactly the issue that this piece can illuminate so usefully. We use words like “operatic” and “symphonic” as if those words have stable meanings, but how often do we think about what those labels really stand for? Henze has commented ironically on the “division of labor” between him and the composers of the Darmstadt school, where “they got the electronic studios and the late-night programmes, I got the symphony concerts and opera houses.”⁷ Perhaps for Henze, then, these two monumental genres were actually close kin.

So is Henze’s Fourth an operatic symphony, or is König Hirsch a symphonic opera?

(Both!)

— Emily Richmond Pollock

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1. The major secondary work on the opera, and on the Symphony by extension, is the monograph by Klaus Oehl, Die Oper König Hirsch (1953–55) von Hans Werner Henze (Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag, 2003). See in particular p. 245-277 and 304-313.
2. The sound examples in this post come from a radio broadcast of the full version of König Hirsch at the Staatstheater Stuttgart in May 1985, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and from a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic in April 1964, conducted by the composer (Deutsche Grammophon 449 861-2).
3. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 13-20 (from “Introduzione” section); Symphony: m. 13-20
4. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 27-45 (from “Capriccio” section); Symphony: m. 232-251.
5. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 1-19 (from “Variazioni” section); Symphony: m. 155-173.
6. Opera: Act II Scene 6, m. 162-193 (from “Ricercar” section); Symphony: m. 426-459.
7. Henze, “German Music in the 1940s and 1950s” in Music and Politics, tr. Peter Labanyi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 47.

Paradise Regained - Weigl's Fifth "Apocalyptic"

This should sound like a gutsy way to start a symphony even to the most jaded listeners among you:

In performance, the effect will be even more striking. This work begins with the filing of orchestral musicians into the concert hall, warming up their instruments like normal. This isn't a transcribed preamble to a concert like Edgard Varèse's Tuning Up (1947) but genuine, if highly predictable, span of "chance" music. As the buzz of non-music suffuses the hall, the conductor takes the stage and instructs a quartet of low brass players, positioned oddly on a raised platform, to sound a theme. Their sharply-etched annunciation stands in starkest relief against the disorderly backdrop. The brass quorum call thus issued, the warming up musicians fall in line, proposing a handful of mysterious motifs that will soon coalesce into this symphony's main thematic subject.

This is the beginning of Karl Weigl's Fifth Symphony "The Apocalyptic" (1945), from a movement dubbed "Evocation." It's a rhetorically direct strategy, to wring order out of a swarming musical chaos, routine since Beethoven's 9th first premiered in 1824. The outlines of the brass melody are also familiar, the downward agglomeration of perfect intervals resembling Beethoven and perhaps even more, the grand columns that buttress Anton Bruckner's symphonies. In the long competition of composers striving to out-inchoate each other's openings, Weigl's is the logical extreme; to my knowledge, no such an audacious version of the ex nihlo archetype had been attempted prior to this 1945 work. It is the more surprising because Weigl was no avant-garde composer, and this is no experimental symphony. Nothing remotely as strange occurs for the duration of the long (50 minute) symphony. For all its potency in establishing the mood of this work, the opening of the "Apocalyptic" is a weirdly one-off event.

The great expanse of the rest of the "Evocation" movement presents a dense network of sonata themes. Some are knotted in the vein of early Schoenberg, like this the first subject proper, straining the ears with its tangle of counterpoint and hovering tonality (listen to the progressive enchroachment of the brass summons):

Others are broad, even benedictory like this secondary theme:

In full Brucknerian fashion, there's a false climax at the end of (what seems to be) the development section, evoking the life out of that introductory brass theme. This is not music that minces its words.

Karl Weigl is not a household name for the same reasons that Zemlinsky, Schreker, von Schillings, and Schmidt are not. While an inventive and prolific composer, his music continued up the late-romantic branch of Mahler and Strauss long after the history-hogging offshoot of atonality had broken off. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna 1881, Weigl was situated at the absolute center of Viennese musical culture for several decades. He studied with the luminaries Fuchs, Adler, and Zemlinsky, participating with the latter in his progressive "Society of Creative Musicians" along with Schoenberg and Webern -- pals until their musical paths diverged so radically. He went on to become Mahler's right hand man at the Vienna opera, acting as vocal coach and rehearsal conductor. Weigl garnered prestigious positions and critical praise for his music through the 20s. But the rise of the Nazi party dragged this prominent composer's reputation down considerably. With Hitler's annexation of Austria, the Jewish socialist managed to emigrate to the United States like so many other German composers. Adjustment to American life was difficult, but he eventually secured teaching posts at various schools of music on the East Coast. But deprived of the renown as a composer he enjoyed in Europe, he was forced to retreat into composition without performance.

Weigl wrote his Fifth Symphony at the conclusion of World War II. It is dedicated to "the people of the United Nations" and bears the inscription "to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt" -- a gesture identical to that of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (a former student) in his dedication to the F-sharp Symphony (1952). The timing and appellation "Apocalyptic" suggests that this is a war work; Weigl, an ardent pacifist, conceived of his Second Symphony as a response to the Great War. But there is little external evidence indicating what exactly Weigl meant in programmatic terms. I suspect he was making a nod towards Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, sometimes also referred to as "Apocalyptic," for the spirit of Bruckner infuses much of this work, particularly the massive 3rd Movement Adagio "Paradise Lost." Unquestionably the heart of the symphony, it is its most bald-faced musical anachronism, gorgeous but seemingly immobilized under the 19th century symphonist's shadow. Here is a sample of the only slightly updated Brucknerisms, swelling climaxes and all.

Paradise for Weigl, it would seem, is a Bruckner slow movement in double variation form. (When it comes to direct references, which are numerous, I hear more of Bruckner's 7th "Lyric" symphony than the 8th). Against the dominance of Viennese atonality that Weigl could never accept, the power of such sweet tonality was indeed "lost."


The "Apocalyptic's" second and fourth movements are most literally eschatological. The second, titled "The Dance around the Golden Calf," is a sardonic, very Mahlerian scherzo with certain modal touches that Llyod Moore (author of the one recording's liner notes) hears as distinctly "Jewish." (So who exactly is the target of sardonic energy here?). The fourth movement, "The Four Horsemen," is eventful but not necessarily the fire-and-brimstone you'd expect from the title. Rather, elements of previous movements (particularly "Paradise") clash against the backdrop of a semi-serious march themes. You'll be hard pressed to locate Famine, War, Death, or Pestilence individually here, or even a clear-cut sense of victory or defeat. The ending, a sudden blast of celebratory bells, sounds perfunctory and pessimistic. All of this is quite a contrast to the work's unearthly opening sounds. It is a gesture which, for all the symphony's beauty and teeth-gnashing, Weigl never feels the need to corroborate.

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Weigl never survived to hear the eventual premiere of this work at the hands of Leopold Stokowski in 1968, although it was highly praised when finally heard. I freely admit I only picked up the BIS recording of this work because of the extravagant cover art. Thomas Sanderling's conducting of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin is stellar, especially for such a red giant of a work, but without other recordings, I am in no position to say if it's truly definitive. Only one other Karl Weigl symphony has been recorded, the Sixth, by the same forces.

--Frank Lehman

Impossible Symphony - Kastner's "Les Cris de Paris"

Unsung Symphonies is proud to announce its first guest post, from Harvard Professor of Music Alex Rehding! In addition to his wide-ranging work in music theory, the history of ideas, and aesthetics, Alex is always on the lookout for new obscure works. In today's post, he explores a genuinely "unsung" symphony, a work from the composer J.G Kastner that has not been performed before, and for certain reasons may never be!

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The name of J. G. Kastner (1810-1867) hardly counts as a household name in the symphonic repertoire. This is, at least in part, because everything about him evades

easy categorization: Kastner was always exceptionally good at crossing boundaries. As a musician born and raised in Alsace—a region located on the border between France and Germany that had been in constant territorial dispute for the last one thousand years—this must have come quite naturally to him. Born Johann Georg Kastner, he soon became Jean Georges after he moved to Paris in 1835 to study at the famous Conservatoire. Much of what we know about Kastner nowadays stems from the three-volume biography that his widow commissioned after Kastner’s untimely death. The German-language biographer, Hermann Ludwig, was eager to tie Kastner more firmly to a Germanic sphere of influence and its more prestigious symphonic tradition. As a result, the image we have of Kastner—such as it is—is furrowed by the same kind of rifts as his native Alsace.

This year marks Kastner’s 200th birthday on March 9. This joyous event was, arguably, somewhat overshadowed by his contemporaries Chopin and Schumann. Kastner has suffered from being not-quite-a-scholar and not-quite-a-composer. He earned his place in music history primarily with a hybrid genre called livre-partition or “book-score.” The livres-partitions collect information on a given musical topic— dances of death, the sirens, army songs, the city cries of Paris, and others—in the form of a learned (but rarely scholarly) treatise, and then top it off with an original composition on the topic of the treatise. The compositions that conclude Kastner’s learned works are often called “symphony.” This title may seem misleading, given that most of these works include vocal parts, but in fact they follow in the French tradition of symphonic works, of which Berlioz is the most famous representative, which not only include instrumental music but also vocal forces, including choruses and dramatic scenes.

In 1888 the German musicologist Philipp Spitta pointed out, in a review of Ludwig’s biography, that none of Kastner’s compositions had ever been performed. Spitta noted that Kastner seems surprisingly unconcerned about this circumstance, and speculated that perhaps regular concert audiences are not even right for his music: the compositions are firmly bound to the intellectual and physical context from which they stem, and readers who will have the stamina to plow through an entire treatise, Spitta surmised, will have the required musical literacy as well to work through the score.

It seems that in the intervening one hundred and twenty years the performance situation did not change much—until last year, when the Ensemble Clément Jannequin recorded a version of Kastner’s Grande symphonie humoristique vocale et instrumentale Les Cris de Paris (1857), which Spitta considered to be Kastner’s most successful work.

What the Ensemble Jannequin produces, to say it upfront, has fairly little to do with Kastner’s partition—it is an eight-minute excerpt of sections from the substantial symphony, adapted for the forces the vocal ensemble normally operates with: they replace Kastner’s extravagant orchestral forces with piano, organ, and lute sounds. The excerpts they put together focus on the humorous episode of the “dormeur” (sleeper) and his lovely serenade, which is repeatedly disturbed by the rude shouts of the market vendors.

The livre to which Les cris de Paris forms the partition, is a study—we might almost want to call it a musical ethnography—of the street cries of market vendors of Paris in a by-gone age. Kastner tirelessly collected, transcribed, notated, and classified the hundreds of calls that made up the soundscape of urban Paris and that were fast disappearing in the course of the industrialization. If any reader wonders why the cris de Paris are all so surprisingly musical, rhythmic and diatonic, a ready answer can be found in the partition, which weaves all these different sound snippets into a dense symphonic web of motivic relations.

The whole project is carried by a prominent sense of nostalgia, and was eagerly studied by French musicians of subsequent generations. It is not for nothing that the first vocal entry we hear in this recording is “Restez, ô mes songes fidèles” (stay, my faithful dreams). The Ensemble Jannequin subtly underlines the melancholy relationship of Kastner’s work to an irrevocable age by adopting archaic, though historically accurate, French pronunciation in their performance, which by the nineteenth century was outmoded—pronouncing, for instance, “trois” and “noix” with a nasal diphthong.

The dense and virtuosic polyphonic texture here suggests a closer relationship with operatic stretti than with symphonic genres. The Ensemble Jannequin is primarily interested Kastner’s work in so far as it creates a link to Clément Jannequin’s famous sixteenth-century chanson “Les cris de Paris.” (In his livre, Kastner criticized Jannequin for his insufficiently “scientific” approach to his material, which sacrificed authenticity in the service of following the rules of counterpoint.)

The boisterous and rambunctious excerpts that the Ensemble Jannequin singles out, however, do not necessarily convey the impression that the symphony as a whole would make. Despite the “humoristique” overtones of the whole symphony, the score ends with a tender (and extremely quiet) chorus, which completes a whole day of noises in the cityscape of Paris.

It is worth studying the score as a whole—not only for the virtuosic web of market calls that Kastner weaves into his music, but also for the progressive instrumental effects that Kastner employs, including harp harmonics, and the sheer profligate orchestral forces that Kastner’s boundless imagination conjures up (including a march that requires forty different brass instruments). In the end, one can only agree with Spitta, that this is a music for which performance is secondary. It revels, more than anything else, in its status beyond boundaries as an impossible symphony.

--Alex Rehding

Vincentiana - Three and a Half Van Gogh Symphonies

Today, three (and a half) symphonies for the price of one. One from Finn, Einojuhani Rautavaara, another from an American, Gloria Coates, and a half from Henri Dutilleux, a Frenchman. On the face of it, these are some pretty strange bedfellows (all they seem to share at first is being fairly prominent living composers), so the fact that each has a symphonic work inspired by the art and life of Vincent Van Gogh is probably coincidental. But a happy coincidence for Unsung Symphonies, since we can see how composers of very different temperaments engage similar(ish) subject matter.

One technique that Rautavaara and Coates (not so much Dutilleux) frequently use is the blurring of a clear melody with lots of surface dissonance, setting it against other layers of unrelated, constantly fluctuating material. The results can vary from a quiet shimmer that leaves the underlying melody undisturbed to a tune whose outline is nearly erased by a dense haze of other activity. Boundaries blurred, shapes distorted, surfaces and backgrounds always squirming -- we could just as well be talking about Van Gogh's painting technique as modern musical procedures here.

Rautavaara's Sixth Symphony: "Vincentiana" (1992) draws a considerable amount of its material from the composer's opera Vincent (1990), a heavily symbolic, non-linear collage of the life and mind of Van Gogh with libretto penned (like all of Rautavaara's 8 operas) by the composer. The symphony is divided into the traditional four movements (like all of Rautavaara's 8 symphonies, save the strange Fifth), each one with a subtitle alluding to an image or idea from the opera. This is the only of his symphonies to feature electronics, which are most prominent at the edges of movements, the orchestra typically filling up the space in between. Meandering quasi-tonal rhapsodies (that as a Rautavaara listener, you either come to love or hate) are freely mixed with passages of extreme atonal/12-tone violence throughout the work, though some of those rows also contribute to the consonant triadic material as well, a Rautavaarian trick.

Among the highlights of the symphony is the combination of synthesizers and orchestral effects that kick off the work's first movement "Starry Night," a delirious waltz that seems to detonate towards the end of the third movement "Saint-Rémy" (Van Gogh's late life sanitarium), and exultant finale for the last movement "Apotheosis." The second movement, "The Crows," features a haunted refrain, ostensibly drawn from the opera's second act, where Van Gogh, in the company of Gauguin and his brother Theo, experiences a vision of fields "heaving, breaking in waves...writhing like big animals in their death-throes." Squint your ears for the almost inaudible string-section fuzz that blows over the slow chordal theme.

This slight blur becomes an impenetrable smear with the tail end of the Sanitarium waltz, which buckles, then gives way to a blast of electronics and wind-mouthpieces, transmuting some nagging chorus of physicians and art critics into a murder of displeased corvids.

Things do come together in the final "Apotheosis," which stems from music written for Vincent's final, triumphal/suicidal paean to light: "The day of the sun! And he who dies today shall never disappear, but will join those who once had the courage to go on and live!" Even here, Rautavaara's characteristically dense orchestration creates a blurry sort of sensory overload.

Even more prolific a living symphonist than Rautavaara is Gloria Coates, an American ex-pat composer living in Germany who has 15 symphonies under her belt. Prior to her Seventh, they had non-symphonic titles, and were only dubbed "symphony no. x" substantially after the fact; eventually, Coates seems to have overcome her own discomfort with attaching what she calls such "a little name" to her earlier orchestral essays. Coates' style is intense and difficult, highly dissonant and devoid of much anything that could be called ingratiating. But her music is also clear and tightly balanced. A hallmark is the highly expressive, almost compulsive use of glissandi in all corners of her works.

Her 9th Symphony, "The Quinces Quandary" (1992-93) is a sonic expansion of a work for chamber orchestra from the same year, "Homage to Van Gogh." Both are inspired by Van Gogh's late painting "The Quinces," created in the last year of his life. As far as I can tell the two pieces are the same but for thinner orchestration in the former, although the CPO Recording of the work, which is clearly for huge orchestra, labels the track "Homage." Nevertheless, I present this clip, which conveys a representative sample of this imposing 23 minute work - one of the huge waves of glissandi - with the assumption that it is the symphony we're hearing (it sure sounds like a massive orchestra).

Coates' glissandi are apt metaphors for Van Gogh's late style. Her unending stream of sliding notes, restless and defiant of the boundaries of discrete pitch (and those of discrete event as well) are quite intentional musical analogues of the pulsating, unstable motion that undermines any "still life" in "The Quinces." The piece's continuous form is hard to pin down; this owes partly to Coates choice to eschew a prefabricated musical container, using the visual experience of gradually exploring the painting, allowing one's eye to train from one corner of the frame to the other, to guide her own pen.

Like Rautavaara's Vincentiana, the Quinces does manage to fasten onto something something comparatively solid and "thematic" at its conclusion, a stony dirge of brass chords (by far the most tonal thing heard yet) jutting against the ever-present glissandi.

The "Quandary" in the title alludes to something deeper, and more troubling, than a simple visual puzzle raised by the painting. While it was possible to take aesthetic-mystical flight in Rautavaara's Sixth, Coates' The Quinces Quandary allows no escape from the gloomy isolation of Van Gogh's world. If these are musically-represented decorative fruits, they are the most despondent fruits to ever grace a kitchen table. Take that oranges and pears!

Staring at the painting, Coates claims "I felt something of his own fears and disappointments...and the quinces were beginning to move, one was already falling."¹ The psychological aspect of Van Gogh's inner world Coates draws, orchestrally, from his "Quinces" is of withdrawal, despair, entrapment -- shades of the painter's mental illness, in other words. Her style is not a sunny one, and this is a work of frightening darkness. In her words, "If you only give the lighter side of yourself, that's not a symphony..." ²

One last Van Gogh work. Although not a symphony in name, and not really even a symphony-in-all-but-name, I'd be remiss if I left out Dutilleux's Timbres, Espace, Mouvement (1978), whose subtitle "Starry Night" betrays inspiration again from that most famous of Van Gogh's paintings. Timbres, like most of Dutilleux's small output, is music honed to an almost ridiculous polish, with every pitch, every orchestral pairing bearing the imprint of a calculating perfectionist. You really can't go wrong with Dutilleux and this piece is a little marvel.

***Update 10/18/2010***

After printing this, I discovered yet another Van Gogh inspired symphony, the 6th Symphony of Russian composer Alla Pavlova. Highly accessible, and perhaps a little trite, Pavlova's 6th exists in a kind of halfway point between lyrical neo-Romantic chromaticism and repetitive minimalist figurations. Much of Pavlova's sixth symphony seems geared towards an ever spinning cycle of dark, twisting modulations based on unusual triad relationships. Her orchestration is clear (featuring some viscous solo violin writing) but somewhat unvaried -- certainly, she resists the temptation to make experimental *timbre* the key in representing Van Gogh musically.

-Frank Lehman

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1. Quoted in CPO Liner Notes

2. Quoted from "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim," Interview and Feature with Gloria Coates by Kyle Gann, New York Times Apr 25/1999.

Fun with Scales: Furtwängler's Second Symphony

It’s Wilhelm Furtwängler-bashing season on the Internet. Around a week ago, Alex Ross nominated a disc of the German musician’s piano quintet as one of the worst recordings in history. Ross called it “an immensely earnest mishmash of Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, and Reger, full of unmemorable ideas developed at unrelenting length.” Pitting Furtwängler’s composing life against what most people love Furtwängler for (his performing), Ross offered up a clip of Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic in the Coriolan Overture — “in the interest of equal time.”

Wouldn’t it have been fairer to choose a few minutes of one of Furtwängler’s own pieces to balance out the supposedly awful piano quintet? Or was Wilhelm just that uninteresting as a composer? I’ll admit that until this month, whenever I heard Furtwängler’s name, I thought not of composing but rather about two other things: conducting and Nazi Germany.¹ Much has been written about the German musician’s complex relationship with the Third Reich and his position as the regime’s favored orchestral leader. Though the debate about his politics rages on, Furtwängler’s status as one of the 20th century’s greatest conductors is firm and secure. But the maestro’s own music doesn’t get much respect.

It tends to be easy to beat up on composers who are actually more famous for their performing. It’s as if you can only be really good at one of the two activities, and once you choose conducting, you might as well not bother writing your own stuff.² And there may be a few other factors working against our estimation of Furtwängler as a composer. For a guy with a shady political past, perhaps it’s easier to like him for the way he reproduces others’ music than for how he creates his own. Listening to Furtwängler’s own music might bring us uncomfortably close to a possible Nazi sympathizer. On the other hand, when we hear him only as a conductor, we’re kept at a safe distance, since we’re really just listening to Beethoven, Brahms, or Bruckner.

And Furtwängler’s music may be useless for music historians who want to demonstrate “progress” in music in the 20th century. As far as I know, he didn’t experiment with atonality, serialism, or electronics. If something sounds like it could have been written in the 19th century, then that’s already a big strike against talking about it as part of the mid-20th. In other words, it has to do something new or it’s not worth taking seriously.

So I felt a little rebellious when I decided to make his Symphony No. 2 (1944-5) one of our first 20th-century Unsung Symphonies. It could be his best-known work. Indeed, it has a flashy 2002 recording with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and I was able to find a score in Harvard’s music library. Someone out there thinks Furtwängler's music is worth hearing.

My own investigation of this hour-and-a-half long, four-movement behemoth for large orchestra suggests that Furtwängler could compose. What held this piece together for me was one simple tension, but one that went a long way — a tension between ascending and descending scalar motion. By the fifth measure, Furtwängler effectively introduces this tension, which drives the entire work. He begins with a mysterious, disjointed bassoon figure (joined by clarinets) against which the violins introduce the scale as the main musical tissue:



For one play on that idea, in a transitional section a bit later, note how Furtwängler gradually tears apart a smooth, five-note stepwise ascent. It starts in the oboe, then becomes an arpeggio in the flutes, and, finally, a fragmented, plucked passage in the violin:



Furtwängler does the reverse in the third movement, where a forceful drop in thirds in the strings is tightened into a stepwise descent in the clarinet, and then turns into a similar reach for the heavens in the violin. The horns and flutes also join in the fun. And because Furtwängler has conditioned us so well to listen for scales, the upward leap at the end of the ascending figure comes as a nice surprise:



As the fourth movement begins, bassoons firmly announce our central descent/ascent tension over a pedal in the double bass and cello, as if to say, in a primal way, that despite the jagged melody they played at the beginning the first movement, these instruments have finally come into line. When the trumpet completes its ascending line, the sonority it lands on is downright scary:



For my final example of Furtwängler’s play on the basic descending scale, I’d like to offer up some evidence that Furtwängler was more of a Mahlerian than he is sometimes given credit for. First, Furtwängler, midway through the fourth movement:



Compare to Mahler's Second Symphony, First Movement (Ricardo Chailly, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra):



Furtwängler's Second Symphony is chock full of this kind of manipulation of basic scalar motion. It’s certainly not the only thing going on here, but Furtwängler seems to have found a key to keeping listeners’ attention: hammer home something very simple, like an ascending or descending set of notes, and manipulate it in different ways. So next time you want to relax and listen to Bruckner's Seventh, check this one out instead.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. OK, sometimes I also think of the Lawn Wranglers.
2. See this Norman Lebrecht article, where Gustav Mahler, Pierre Boulez, and Leonard Bernstein are seen as the only famous conductors who could also compose. Even if that's true, I don't know that composing and conducting need to be pitted against each other like that. They seem like two tough activities that require a lot of expertise. It's also surprising when a great composer also turns out to be a superstar insurance agent or something.