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Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Hermann Reutter - His Music and His Life


Hermann Reutter
Hermann Reutter
Born: June 17th, 1900
Died: January 1st, 1985
Country of origin: Germany

Hermann Reutter was born in Stuttgart on 17 June 1900. In 1920 he moved to Munich. After three years of singing lessons with Emma Rückbeil-Hiller (Stuttgart) and Karl Erler (München) he studied at the Munich Academy of Musical Arts composition with Walter Courvoisier and piano with Franz Dorfmüller, and organ with Ludwig Mayer. 


Since 1923 he participated in the music festival of Donaueschingen and intensified his contact with the Donaueschingen circle, in particular with Paul Hindemith. Starting with 1926 he was a frequent composer in association with the annual music festival of the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein where many of his works were world premiered. He began intensive concert activities as pianist and accompanist in lieder in 1929, working together with major conductors and soloists of his period. 

In 1932 he succeeded Ewald Straesser as principal teacher of composition at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart. He was appointed director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt on the Main four years later. In 1945 was the end of this work. He returned to Stuttgart and resumed concert activities in 1950. Two years later he was appointed professor of composition and lied interpretation at the Stuttgart Hochschule fuer Musik. In 1955 he became full member of the Berlin Akademie der Kuenste and of the Bayerische Akademie der Schoenen Kuenste, Munich. Since 1956 he was juror, later chairman, of the jury in the category Singing at the ARD competition. 

He succeeded Hermann Erpf as director of the Stuttgart Hochschule fuer Musik. Since 1960 he often stayed in the USA for interpretation courses at various universities. From 1966-1974 he led the master class of lied interpretation at the Munich Musikhochschule. In 1968 he founded the Hugo Wolf Society Stuttgart, being its president until his death.

For his achievement as a composer and a teacher he was awarded (among others) the Ludwig-Spohr-Award of the City of Brunswig (1953), the Grand Cross for Distinguished Service of the Federal Republic of Germany (1959 and with Star in 1975), a Honorary doctorate of the Music and Arts Institute San Francisco and the Hugo Wolf Medal of the International Hugo Wolf Society, Vienna (both in 1976). 

Hermann Reutter died in Heidenheim on 1 January 1985.
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Friday, February 20, 2015

Johann Friedrich Reichardt - Miltons Morgengesang (1808)

Johann Friedrich Reichardt - His Music and His Life



Reichardt, Johann Friedrich (born in Königsberg, 1752; died Giebichenstein, 1814). German composer, conductor, and writer. Court composer and conductor to Frederick the Great and Frederick II, 1775–94. Instituted many reforms. Visited London and Paris 1785 and again some years later. Dismissed from court post for sympathy with French Revolution. Conductor Kassel Opera (Germany) 1808. Wrote at least 12 operas, Singspiele, setting of Milton's Morning Hymn, over 1,500 songs (incl. setting of Erlkönig, highly praised by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), and much chamber music. Author of several books on compostions.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Nine Film Scores We Can't Believe Are Not in the Hall of Fame

Superman, John Williams

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? etc. etc. Superman  (1978) is surely one of John Williams’s classic movie scores. His music for Star Wars,Saving Private RyanJurassic ParkE.T. and Harry Potter have all made it into the top 300. But for reasons which are frankly a mystery to us, Superman is nowhere to be seen. 
The Magnificent Seven, Elmer Bernstein
Elmer Bernstein’s 1960 score for the Western classic The Magnificent Seven is a Classic FM favourite, but glance at last year’s Hall of Fame and the iconic music for John Sturges’s film is nowhere to be found. Let’s fix that.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, John Williams
The score for everyone’s favourite (and completely daft) American adventure film is right up there with the best movie music ever written –and yet it’s missing from the Classic FM Hall of Fame. What gives? 
Gone with the Wind, Max Steiner
This iconic 1939 score is notably absent from the Hall of Fame. Max Steiner’s music provides the sweeping musical backdrop to the fiery romance between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Frankly, my dears, we think it should be in the top 300 this year.
Lawrence of Arabia, Maurice Jarre
Peter O’Toole and his amazing blue eyes star in this epic re-telling of the life of T.E. Lawrence. Maurice Jarre’s atmospheric music includes not one but two overtures. If that doesn’t merit an entry in the Hall of Fame, we don’t know what does.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Ennio Morricone
Arguably, the most iconic score for a Western ever written, the music for this Clint Eastwood classic is unforgettable (sorry in advance for the earworm…). Surely that iconic whistle warrants a Hall of Fame vote?
Cinema Paradiso, Ennio Morricone
Can you believe the only Morricone score in last year’s Hall of Fame was The Mission? No. Neither can we. What about the completely charming Cinema Paradiso? If the film and the delightful score don't make you want to a) go to Sicily and/or b) become a projectionist, we’ll eat our standard-issue movie-director cap.
The Godfather, Nino Rota
But the most famous cinematic jaunt to Sicily is surely the trip in The Godfather . And Nino Rota’s score for Francis Ford Coppola’s American crime classic is surely part of the reason for its fame. Inhale the Sicilian atmosphere captured in Rota’s famous Love Theme and tell us you don’t want to immediately go and vote for this soundtrack.
The Piano, Michael Nyman
The 1993 film about a mute pianist and her daughter is as haunting a movie as you could wish for. Set on the coast of New Zealand, Jane Campion’s film is scored beautifully by Michael Nyman – and it’s a bit of a mystery to us why this wonderful score isn’t among the top 300 at the moment.
(C) 2015 by CLASSIC FM London

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Arnold Schoenberg - His Music and His Life

Arnold Schoenberg (September 13, 1874 - July 13, 1951) was one of the founders of musical Modernism, an incredibly influential figure from the early twentieth century to at least twenty-five years after his death – with Stravinsky, one of the two most influential composers of his time. Even those fundamentally antithetical to atonality were moved to see musical aesthetics very much as he did. As a composer, Schoenberg largely taught himself, sometimes relying on the advice of his friend, the composer Alexander von Zemlinksy. Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde became Schoenberg's first wife. The marriage came close to foundering when Mathilde left Schoenberg for an artist. She returned, but the marriage never recovered. Nevertheless, when she died in 1923, Schoenberg was devastated. Still, he remarried quickly, this time choosing the sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, Gertrud. It was a love match.
From the early twentieth century, Schoenberg was considered a leading light of the younger generation, attracting the attention of no less than Gustav Mahler. He kept up a steady stream of composition, extending the language of the day as well as striking out in new directions. However, in 1912, he underwent an artistic crisis and for close to a decade completed no major new piece. For most of these years, he made very little money, mainly from private teaching, although he had achieved international fame. During World War I, he was rejected from military service for health reasons. However, his students were called up, and he had to stop teaching for a time.
The Twenties saw a change in his fortunes. He began to compose again, this time in a new compositional language he had worked out, which he called "the method of composing with twelve tones" – what today is known as dodecaphonic serialism. He founded the Union for Private Performance, a subscription organization dedicated to new music and intended only for interested parties, rather than for the general public. Orchestral works were given in chamber arrangements, and the composers played included Claude Debussy, Mahler, and even Charles Ives. He received conducting engagements in major European music centers, as well as several honors in Germany and in Austria. He was put in charge of the composition master class at the Berlin Academy of Art and elected (supported by Kurt Weill) to the Prussian Academy.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Schoenberg left Germany for France and, later, the United States, where he eventually settled in the Los Angeles area in 1934. Schoenberg, of Jewish family, had converted to Protestantism in 1898, but he never was formally religious. Nevertheless, he saw the swastika on the wall and got out – surprising, when one considers his unworldliness in practical matters. He also formally converted back to Judaism, mostly as a protest against anti-Semitism. He became a professor at UCLA and an influential teacher in the country. For composers, southern California became a major musical center, mainly because Schoenberg taught there. However, the United States proved hard ground for his music. His health, never robust, deteriorated sharply. Nevertheless, he felt so out of place that as late as the Forties, he still considered leaving for somewhere else. Health problems forced him to resign his academic appointment, and he and his family lived on his small pension. To make ends meet, he resumed giving private lessons. The circumstances of earning a living as well as extremely high artistic ambition kept his output small – only fifty opus numbers. He died in 1951.
Schoenberg began plying the post-Wagnerian super-chromaticism typical of Vienna in the mid-to-late 1890s. The music is tonal, but highly chromatic. Major works include the String Quartet #1 (1904), the Chamber Symphony #1 (1906), the lush choral Friede auf Erden (1907), the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899; probably his most popular piece), and the massive, Mahlerian Gurre-Lieder (1900-1911). Toward the end of the decade, he began to move toward a free atonality – that is, music with no key center, usually exhibiting an Expressionist aesthetic. The String Quartet #2 (1908) is literally a transitional work – the early movements in the older style, the final movements in the new. Other highpoints from this time include the song cycleDas Buch der hängenden Gärten (1909), the mini-operas Erwartung (1909) and Die glückliche Hand (1910-1913), 5 Orchestral Pieces (1909), and Pierrot lunaire (1912). In many of these works, Schoenberg not only tests and throws away tonality, but defines modern orchestration, especially in the 5 Orchestral Pieces and in Pierrot lunaire.
In the Twenties, Schoenberg produces scores in his dodecaphonic serial method. About this, many writers, pro and con, have misinformed their readers and missed the point of Schoenberg's achievement. Fundamentally, it's a very simple idea. A composer arranges the twelve notes of the chromatic scale in an order of his choosing. This arrangement is called the row, or series (hence, "serial"). Everything that happens in a classically-dodecaphonic score depends on this order, although certain manipulations are allowed: you can transpose the row to begin on another note but keep the intervals, play it backwards, play it upside-down, and play it backwards and upside-down. You can even break the row up into two, three, or four parts and manipulate each of the parts. It sounds easy to the point of simple-minded, but its very conceptual simplicity made it an extremely flexible and powerful compositional tool. It makes no sense to consider all twelve-tone music as monolithic, any more than it makes sense to treat all traditionally tonal music as the same. Good composers have their own personalities and their own sounds. It is no more difficult to distinguish Schoenberg from Berg than to pick out Haydn from Mozart. It comes down to an experienced ear. Serial Stravinsky doesn't differ all that much from tonal Stravinsky. Schoenberg's procedures don't lead all by themselves to the New Jerusalem, and to Schoenberg's credit, he never claimed that they did. Composers still need the poetry and vision they always needed. According to Schoenberg himself: "Of course, a soul you have to have." His own masterpieces of this period include the Wind Quintet (1924), 3 Satires (1925), Variations for Orchestra (1926), the Third and Fourth String Quartets (1927, 1934), the grand opera Moses und Aron (1932), and the Violin Concerto (1936). In the late Thirties, Schoenberg began to seek a stronger rapprochement with the German classical tradition, writing pieces that made analogies to sonata form, for example, as in the Piano Concerto of 1942, the String Trio (1946), and the choral Dreimal tausend Jahre and De Profundis (1949, 1950).
One should also note that Schoenberg sprinkled "wrong pieces" throughout these phases. For example, he never gave up writing tonal music even after he came up with his serial technique. He was blest with a powerful talent for harmony – indeed, one of the great ears of Western music. Such scores include the tender Weihnachtsmusik (1921), 3 Folksongs (1930), the cello and string quartet concerti (both from 1933), the magnificent Suite in G (1934), the Chamber Symphony #2 (1916; 1939), and the Theme and Variations for Band (1943).
Why did Schoenberg feel compelled to pursue thorny paths? He believed that the harmonic freedom of the late Nineteenth Century had led to a crisis in compositional form. The traditional classical forms – sonata, rondo, scherzo and trio, and so on – depended on the establishment of a key center and a modulation or change to another key center in order to articulate structural components. If you had an A-B-A form, for example, changes of key would mark the beginning of the B section and the return of the A. However, music after Wagner tended to change key far more often than the music before. Indeed, keys morphed so quickly, that it was hard to say whether a key had even been established. No established key meant that structural boundaries blurred, and the listener got lost in an aural swamp. Schoenberg's solution was to find principles of organization other than tonality. By removing tonality, Schoenberg also emphasized the independence of each musical line and the importance of a set of intervals, rather than what most listeners thought of as themes. It was a radically new way of perceiving music, while remaining curiously faithful to fundamental principles of the classical tradition. Indeed, one can view Schoenberg's compositional method as remarkably similar to Beethoven's. One also grasps an emotional complexity – from the same intellectual milieu as Freud, Benjamin, Schiele, and Kokoschka, especially in works like Moses und Aron, the Piano Concerto, and the gripping A Survivor from Warsaw (1947).
I must admit, however, that many listeners don't see things in this way. Schoenberg's music has the same appeal to the general public as broccoli to a six-year-old. On the other hand, one must also admit that most people haven't heard anywhere near all of Schoenberg's catalogue and very often a work not more than once. Furthermore, until recently, good performances have been few and far between. It took even professionals decades to grasp this music. Pioneering recordings, like those of Robert Craft, notable mainly for the fact that they exist at all, have been superseded by those of a younger generation. Schoenberg is gradually becoming less a twelve-tone composer and more a great one. ~ Steve Schwartz