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.

****

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

Swedish Sea Squalls: Atterberg's 3rd "West Coast Pictures"

No musical landscape artist worth his salt leaves the subject of the ocean unpainted for too long. The orchestra is typically the preferred pallete, and for a perhaps unsurprising share of composers, the symphony the ideal canvas. Most famous is Vaughan Williams' First, though Debussy's 3-movement La Mer may supersede this if we grant the three movement cyclic work the status of symphony-in-all-but-name (SIABN). Less known sea-symphonies by generally familiar composers include Rubenstein's Second, Hanson's Seventh, and Afvén's Fourth. Trailing in their wake is a flotilla of others of geometrically increasing obscurity, if certainly not (blog rallying cry!) quality. (Nystroem? Gilson? Flagello?!)

Kurt Atterberg's Third Symphony, "Västkustbilder" (West Coast Pictures), stands out among the esoterica as a particularly unrestrained portrait of maritime scenes, and the Rasilainen conducted CPO recording does it full justice. Atterberg is the latest of Sweden's ample share of late Romantics (a little less than a generation younger than predecessors Peterson-Berger, Aflvén, and Stenhammar), composing music of swelling grandiosity well into the 1950s. Atterberg wrote nine symphonies in all (and #9 is choral, naturally), uneven in seriousness but consistently pleasurable and well-wrought. From the rare person who's heard all nine, the Third is frequently ranked as his finest foray into the genre. Indeed, Atterberg's compositional predilections -- loose forms, shades of Swedish folk music, sweeping melodies, and eager tone-painting -- meet in happy confluence in this oceanic essay.

Likely inspired by the scenery of Stockevik, a tiny town on the west shore of the island Skaftolandet, the symphony was written over the course of three years and completed in 1916. Like some other famous symphonies whose outward projection of unity belies a more cobbled compositional process (cough Berlioz), Atterberg's Third emerged from what was conceived of as a group of standalone tone poems concerning impressions of the sea. A fleeting hint of cyclical recall of the first movement's opening in the subsequent two does manage to pay lip-service to overall cohesion, but the logic across (and within) movements is clearly pictorial and cumulative rather than strictly "symphonic." Critics seemed enthused regardless, a German reviewer praising "West Coast Pictures" as "perhaps the best that has been composed up until now apart from Richard Strauss's orchestral works."

From their sibilant titles, each of the three movements is meant to evoke a different nautical scene, "Sun Smoke," "Storm," and "Summer Night." The "Sun Smoke" portrait features the gentle undulations of a modal figure (the scantily recurring cyclic motif) that steers the orchestra through tranquil waters. I hear glimmers of Debussy, and pre-glimmers of Puccini's Il Tabarro in this opening.

"Sun Smoke" Opening

The requisite "Storm" that follows is surprisingly tuneful for an orchestral gale, a battery of sturm+drang topics stitched onto generally four-square melodies. Despite its pictorial aptness (there is no shortage of wave-crashes!), I find this storm the symphony's relative weak link -- Atterberg's melodic tendencies get slightly in the way here, depriving the movement of the potential ferocity that his orchestrational imagination might have been otherwise capable of. (You have to wait to his wonderfully strange Ninth to hear Atterberg really synthesize his tuneful and destructive sides -- for a rendering of Ragnarök, appropriately!).

"Storm" Theme

Atterberg's Third turns out to be one of those symphonies that saves its best for the end, and then heaps it on in generous proportions. The "Summer Night" is the work's end-weighted glory, a movement as long as the first two combined and containing the most compelling material. It blithely forgets the tensions of preceding tempest; Atterberg's description of the movement implies that for the rest of the symphony, we've sailed into untroubled seas, a vision of the "peculiar peace of the inner fjord, while the sea roars outside but its raging can hardly be heard."

The 18 minutes of "Summer Night" consist of a succession of episodes, alternatively placid and ecstatic, in a extremely loose rondo form. A few minutes in comes what I feel to be the symphony's most impressive section, a theme of an albatross-like wingspan. This type of long-breathed melody soaring above an active but contrapuntally simple accompaniment is, for those who like their classical music juicy and romantic, one of Atterberg's most attractive specialties.

Albatross Theme

More melodic episodes drift in and out. A brief scherzo is embedded within the center of the movement (a strategy employed in his Second Symphony as well), serving to introduce a turn motif that figures into the coda, as well as picking up the tempo for the more blustery restatement of the albatross theme (it's undoubtedly high-tide now!). Moving into "Summer Night's" final pages, Atterberg deems even the gracious albatross theme too dark, building up the pieces of a broad new subject that will dominate the score's elated coda.

"Summer's Night" Finale Build-Up (a tad of Howard Shore in there, anyone?):

The sounding of all bells, whistles, and fanfares at conclusion leaves a taste of almost Tchaikovskian triumphalism behind -- though by this point, you're either so swept up by Atterberg's swooning extroversion, or have long since stopped listening, to be bothered by such relinquishment of symphonic decorum.

-Frank Lehman