Music: New Picks from Old Friends

From recent releases, I have found a number of intriguing additions to the discographies of composers previously reviewed in this column, as well as several discoveries of note.

More than ten years ago, Crisis publication committee member Stephen Hough started the Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) revival with his brilliant, prize-winning performances of what are probably Hummel’s two best piano concertos, Opp. 85 and 89, on the Chandos label. Much to its credit, Chandos has continued its traversal of Hummel’s concertos, albeit with another pianist, Howard Shelley. The latest offering includes the Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 110, and the Concerto for Piano and Violin, Op. 17. Hummel was the heir to Mozart and the bridge to Chopin. If that sounds appealing, you will no doubt enjoy these scintillating works.

A somewhat younger contemporary of Hummel, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) found lasting fame as a student and friend of Beethoven. He also became a famous teacher, numbering among his pupils Thalberg, Hiller, and Liszt. Czerny composed about 1,000 works, including many piano studies and paraphrases. His serious efforts encompassed six symphonies, eleven Masses, a substantial amount of chamber music, and many sonatas and sonatinas for his own instrument, the piano. Signum has released a CD containing Czerny’s Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5. We now can hear what a student of Beethoven might dare to say after the master had spoken. Czerny’s symphonies make fascinating listening, not because they are masterpieces, but because they give a glimpse into a complex transitional period of music that is hard for us to appreciate because we see it from the perspective of Beethoven’s total triumph and domination. Czerny captured Beethoven’s energy, if not his power. The First Symphony starts with repeated jolts of electricity in an exciting Allegro that seems about to accumulate the kind of power Beethoven generated. But then Czerny introduces a secondary theme that seems to arrive from a Ludwig Spohr serenade; the effect is, if not lost, attenuated. The listener who is used to a diet of Beethoven may be left a little confused as to what this composer was after, without realizing how hard it must have been to assimilate the lessons of Beethoven’s achievement. Nonetheless, this is an impressive work, with a wonderfully jaunty, puckish scherzo that prefigures Mendelssohn and a thrilling finale. The Fifth is only slightly less impressive.

Though unmentioned in the authoritative New Grove Dictionary, Friedrich Kiel (1821-1885) is quite a discovery. I was able to find a full page on him in my secret treasure, a massive three-volume Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, published in 1889. Posterity seems to have ignored the advice of famous conductor Hans von Billow, who wrote, “Everything that this composer has so far passed for publication is fitted only to win him the high esteem and sympathy of cultivated people. From the outset he has full claim to be treated with the respect due to a master.” On the evidence of a new mid-price Capriccio CD that offers Kiel’s Missa solemnis, Op. 40, von Billow was exactly right. Contrapuntally complex without ever becoming academic, richly melodic and expressively dramatic, this Mass from 1865 is a fairly conservative work for its time, but brims with fresh inspiration and true genius. One high point comes after the beautifully plaintive Kyrie, when the Gloria joyously bursts forth with the male and female choirs seeming nearly to stumble over each other in their excitation at praising God. One can only hope that this superb CD is a major commercial success so that Capriccio will go on to record Kiel’s Requiem, Op. 20, which was greeted with universal enthusiasm in 1862, and then his Christus oratorio, then the Stabat Mater, then the Te Deum, then….

Another fairly conservative composer whom posterity and the New Grove has chosen to neglect is Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900). Courtesy of my Cyclopedia (in which he is listed as “still living”), I learned that Herzogenberg replaced Kiel as director of the composition class at the Berlin Academy in 1885. He also shared with Kiel an extraordinary contrapuntal mastery and gift for melody that are amply exhibited in a new CPO release of his hour-long Missa, Op. 87. Herzogenberg was in thrall to Wagner as a youth, but seems to have fully recovered. There is not a whit of Wagnerism in this work, nor is there any especial trace of Brahms, who became one of Herzogenberg’s closest friends. What is evident is Herzogenberg’s love of the tradition in which he was writing, going back to Bach. In fact, together with his friend Philipp Spitta (to whose memory the Missa is dedicated), Herzogenberg founded the Leipzig Bach Society in 1874. One has the feeling that Herzogenberg was trying to gather up the whole of this magnificent tradition in one work. How can he have come so close to doing so, and yet have fallen into such neglect? The Missa begins with a powerful and tumultuous Kyrie with several shattering cries from out of the depths. There is a subdued, almost hushed beginning to the Gloria that finally blazes forth at the Laudamus te, but then returns to a reflective, supplicatory stance. If you have never heard a lullaby for adults, listen to the Et vitam venturi at the end of the Credo—surely music to conduct the soul to its eternal rest. Conservative in idiom, steeped in tradition, but dramatically bold in conception, this is a magisterial, radiant work. The only drawback is the boomy acoustic in which the recording was made.

One does not usually associate the name of Charles Gounod (1818¬1893), prolific composer of operas and Masses, with chamber music. However, it seems in his old age, perhaps in the late 1880s, he turned to the string quartet. Thanks to a public sale of Gounod manuscripts in 1993, the Bibliotheque Nationale of France acquired three unknown quartets, now presented by the capable Quatuor Danel on an Auvidis Valois CD. Gounod was not charting new seas in these works, and apparently was not especially anxious that anyone see them. Camille Saint-Saens said that Gounod told him, with “mocking good-naturedness,” that “they are bad and I will never show them to you.” Their stylistic reference points are from Haydn to Mendelssohn, not a bad pedigree for these highly accomplished, immensely enjoyable pieces. Like Gounod’s two symphonies and his Petite Symphonie for wind instruments, they pay homage to the traditions from which they come. Though they may not break new ground, the three quartets have both charm and a seriousness of purpose that is especially evident in the pervasive melancholy of several slow movements.

Completing a dead composer’s unfinished work seems an irresistible temptation for those who ask the “what if?” question. Thus, we are treated to “realizations” of Mahler’s and Beethoven’s tenth symphonies and other such intriguing enterprises. Now, expressly against the wishes of Edward Elgar (“Don’t let anyone tinker with it”), a composer has “realized” his Symphony No. 3, left unfinished in 130 pages of sketches at the time of Elgar’s death in 1933. Composer Anthony Payne undertook the task out of a sense of inevitability and obvious love for Elgar’s work, which, from the results, he seems to have thoroughly assimilated. The greatest compliment Payne has enjoyed for his controversial efforts is that it is very hard to tell where Elgar ends and Payne begins. Payne has fleshed out the sketches by interpolating music from Elgar’s other compositions and filling in the rest with his own educated and inspirational guesses at what the master would have done. The results are impressive, especially in the commanding first movement, which is mostly Elgar’s own. This is certainly not the place to begin with Elgar; first try his Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 and the Enigma Variations. But if you love this great composer, you will find Payne’s elaboration more than a curiosity.

Are you lining up your listening for the approaching millennium? If so, I recommend Franz Schmidt’s the Book of the Seven Seals, an oratorio based on St. John’s Book of Revelation. This 1938 work is the most ambitious setting ever attempted of this most difficult book of the New Testament. Schmidt said, “my approach to the work has always been that of a deeply religious man and of an artist.” Since I last wrote of Schmidt in March 1996, a magnificent new recording of the Book of the Seven Seals has been issued by EMI (7243 5 56660 2 4) on a two-CD set. As I wrote then, Franz Wesler-Möst is the one conductor to have gotten Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony exactly right, so it is no surprise that he excels with this difficult work. First of all, he trust his materials. He finds the right pulse to Schmidt’s music and lets it unfold without ever letting it lag. The glorious results have been given one of the most dramatically transparent recordings I have ever heard. The clarity of detail is startling and fully reveals Schmidt’s genius.

Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) made a huge splash in the ’60s with the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and his St. Luke’s Passion. These harrowing works used most of the advanced techniques of their times and then some. The shrieking choral glissandi Penderecki employed communicate the horror of the events the two works depict: Clearly, things unholy, unearthly and truly evil have taken place. As unforgettable as these experiences are, one would not readily seek to repeat them. The works also presented the composer with a problem: Where does one go next? The answer for Penderecki has been his gradual evolution into a neo-romantic. It is in this idiom, spiced with a dash of Carl Orff, that he has produced his most recent work, Credo. As a Christian composer, Penderecki sees it as his duty to compose religious works: “This is my task!” Originally intended as part of a new Mass, the Credo grew into a massive, nearly hour-long piece that stands on its own, with the traditional Latin text and eight interpolations of Holy Week liturgical texts and Polish hymns. It is an impressive achievement that presents few problems for the listener; there is hardly a whiff of the avant-garde about it. In fact, the means Penderecki employs are surprisingly conventional considering his past. This does not prevent him from communicating with real fervor the crux of the Credo, with all its awe and dread, even if one occasionally feels that he is straining for effect in some of the big orchestral passages. What will poor Pierre Boulez think of this!

Author

  • Robert R. Reilly

    Robert R. Reilly is the author of America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, forthcoming from Ignatius Press.

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