Chasing the Blahs with Blacher
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Chasing the Blahs with Blacher By John Simon It is frustrating to write about the German composer Boris Blacher(1903-75). Hehadstrong leanings toward the stage, with much opera,...
...Jens Gerlach's text tells in the Prologue about the new graffiti, desecrations, andanonymous threats, relating them to the past horrors...
...The Second Quartet (1940) starts with an andante going on allegro in which two very different themes—one sober but melodious, the other defiantly rhythmical—play tag with each other...
...In 1945, Blacher married the charming pianist Gerty Herzog, and composed his three piano concertos plus other piano music for her...
...Its nostalgic 1880s watering-place scenario involves young lovers, assorted spa guests, a doctor, a coquette, a photographer, an orchestra conductor, an amorous princess, some nymphs, and a crocodile...
...Though "amiable, with a dry wit," he suffered fools ungladly...
...The Third Quartet, written in grim war times (1944), is intricately polyrhythmic and syncopated, always exciting and, in its concluding larghetto, especially tuneful and tender...
...situated midway between Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, it nonetheless contains some samba, Cakewalk and boogie-woogie...
...Based on only eight Clementi notes, trickery dominates its substance and reveals Blacher as the precursor of today's cursed minimalists...
...In a book about von Einem, Dominik Hartmann describes Blacher's teaching as "pedagogic genius...
...The music is austere, but with flashes ofbrightness...
...Three Pieces on Jewish Themes for string trio (1930...
...There follows the Second Piano Concerto (1953), with Gerry Herzog Blacher as soloist...
...Dessau, Hartmann, Henze, and Rudolf WernerRegeny contributed sections, with Blacher providing the Prologue (Berlin Classics 90162, comprising also Shostakovich's From Jewish Folk Poetry...
...An hourlong work, it had Fischer-Dieskau for soloist and Christoph von Dohnanyi as conductor in 1947...
...This includes a chameleon Violin Concerto (1948), and the Poème für grosses Orchester (1974) wherein, either from an amorphous orchestral wash or from moments of stillness, various instruments emerge, solo or in pairs, but always on independent itineraries...
...At times very jazzy, too, it features the aforementioned variable meters...
...A fast flourish abruptly ends the piece...
...Following its 1935 broadcast premiere, Blacher's Capriccio was publicly performed and aroused the wrath of Nazi critics...
...The First contains one of Blacher's prettiest melodies...
...In addition, he initiated electronic music studies at Berlin's Technical University, and he composed busily in all genres until his death...
...Four Songs, to clever lyrics by Friedrich Wolf, score mostly with the one about an enslaved circus pony dreaming of freedom...
...Still, an impressive case for him can be made out from what is...
...Two years later, however, he switched to composition at the Hochschule für Musik, supporting himself as a copyist, proofreader and arranger of commercial music...
...Since it was meant to be an urban ballet, it features popular dances (waltz, tango, rumba, ragtime, etc...
...He] worked without an artist's aura—business as usual...
...Next on the disc is Blacher's most popular work, Orchestral Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1947...
...and the Clarinet Concerto (1971), said to contain all that is modern, down to "incipient deconstructivism...
...Boris, although born in the Manchurian port city of Newchang (now Yingkou), was of mixed German, Baltic and Russian descent, and grew up all over Asia...
...Herbert Kegel conducts the Leipzig Radio Symphony and fine soloists...
...In 1937 Blacher was appointed Professor of Composition at the Dresden Conservatory...
...Magisterially performed and annotated by Horst Göbel, this CD belongs in everyone's collection...
...I hate having to be brief about the marvelous Complete Works for Piano (Thorofon 2203...
...Ungereimtes ("Unrhymed"), seven nurserysong settings, is funnier if you understand the words...
...A Divertimento for Four Woodwinds (1951) has an indifferent moderato followed by a theme, variations and coda of infectious playfulness...
...Here are the seeds of what was to evolve into Blacher's invention of variable meters, in which rhythms are used in different mathematically predetermined orders, rather like the rhythmical equivalent of 12-tone rows, something Blacher turned to by 1950...
...Foreground and background then trade places, and the entire movement climaxes in great dignity...
...These 16 variations include, to quote Michael StruckSchloen, "lush parades for strings, atmospheric visions with morbid oriental tinge, a clarinet tango, and several rhythmically vibrant studies that split the theme into its elements and build on the virtuoso style...
...Intended as a farewell piece, it was first performed on the anniversary of the composer's death...
...Here are all of Blacher's techniques: 12-tone, variable meters, collages, frequent changes of tempo...
...Brecht disagreed, but Blacher was right about his own 13 operas...
...from 1968 to '71, he was its president and, thereafter, honorary president...
...The second edition of Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (1943) revealed that composers with one Jewish grandparent had slipped through in the first edition, Blacher being the prime example...
...taking as much pleasure in hard liquor as in cutting repartee...
...We come, finally, to Jüdische Chronik (1960-61), a joint work organized by Paul Dessau in response to new outbursts of anti-Semitism in Germany...
...Resorts and Summit Meetings (Largo 56664) offers some of Blacher's ballet music, conducted by his pupil, the Israeli composer-conductor Noam Sheriff...
...He also wrote the librettos for von Einem's early operas...
...It is all a marvelous smorgasbord of raffish or childishly innocent delights, working up to a finale that sounds like an orchestral version of a frenetic Greek round dance ending in a terse, slashing fortissimo...
...Noble and daring as a gesture, they do not shine as music...
...On Signum X91 -00 you will find the quirky Cello Concerto of 1964, with Nikos Athinaos conducting the Frankfurt State Orchestra...
...One eagerly awaits more, much more...
...Martin Willenbrink describes him as someone who "always had a mockingly humorous remark on his tongue," and who "preferred baggy trousers and sweaters to dark suits...
...the choral writing is expert, sparing with melody yet ingeniously diverse...
...The Three Psalms (1943),with their Hebrew origin, are Blacher's defiant response to Nazi censorship...
...which does not set itself any other goal than developing the possibilities based on the students' talent, and unfolding them down to their most secret, often perhaps not yet conscious intentions and impulses...
...This disc further has the lively Two Inventions (1954...
...The pianist Horst Göbel, a friend and disciple of the composer, quotes the eminent music critic H. H. Stuckenschmidt: "The strokes of Boris Blacher's pen are so delicate and fluid that he might seem to have used a silken Chinese brush...
...Music for Cleveland (1957), which in 10 minutes delivers an overview of contemporary modes as well as some sophisticated snoot-cocking...
...This, in FischerDieskau's words, is "close to baroque models...
...Francesca da Rimini (1954), a fragment from Dante for soprano and violin, fails despite fine singing from Katharina Richter, who also sings the notorious Jazz-Koloraturen, a slow fox trot and a Charleston on the syllable "Ah" with saxophone and bassoon accompaniment...
...The disc begins with three arias from the chamber opera Romeo und Julia that sound better with orchestra (I was at the Salzburg performance in 1950...
...My favorites are the three piano sonatas...
...As he grew in stature there were extensive travels and commissions from abroad—e.g., from the BBC, the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, and the New York-based Modern Jazz Quartet...
...Fog," a German setting of Carl Sandburg's famous miniature, has "little cat's feet" more canine than feline...
...More symphonic music comes on Signum X40-00, with the same forces as on X91 -00...
...The other competent singers are Cornelia Wosnitza and Markus Kohler, with Göbel at the piano...
...This promptly devolves into a dialogue chiefly between the strings and woodwinds...
...Wolfgang Bürde remembers him as "a skeptic with no talent for melancholy...
...The symphonic poem Hamlet (1940) has some fine passages, and in an expanded version became a highly successful ballet...
...His programming such "degenerate" composers as Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud got him fired by 1939, whereupon he had to resort to private teaching in Berlin...
...limited...
...Still, I could have used a little less recitative and a touch more tunefulness...
...For openers, there is an entrancing 1938 ballet score, commissioned by Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes forthe 193 9-40 London season that World War II pre-empted...
...In his journals, Bertolt Brecht records a 1950 conversation at von Einem's where Blacher despaired of any post-Rosenkavalier future for opera...
...Jew croak...
...alternating with short, purely symphonic interludes—concision is another Blacher characteristic...
...one group gives out with a whimsical melody while the other reiterates an assertive rhythmic figure...
...The Third, subtitled Variations on a Theme by Muzio Clementi (1961), is less appealing...
...The contralto and baritone soloists chant more than sing with scarcely contained fury the chronicle of new outrages...
...InApreslude Blacher tackles four poems by the great Gottfried Benn, but the grayish music does no justice to them...
...These 16 variations on the theme also used by Brahms, Rachmaninov and Witold Lutoslawski comprise, in Norman Lebrecht's words, "march rhythms, blues, bleak lamentations and blazing affirmations, amounting to a 15-minute concerto for orchestra...
...In another moderato, the strings intone a version of the opening as rhythmic background while the oboes offer a thoughtful, somewhat discursive melody, picked up first by the other woodwinds and afterward by the brasses, always in that rocking rhythm, a kind of scansion inherited by the strings and building up to a brassy climax...
...Works for Orchestra (Ondine 912-2), with Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the German Symphony Orchestra, Berlin, contains a winning four-movement suite from the opera Princessin Tarakanowa (1940), a work bannedby the Nazis...
...Variable meters were to influence Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze and Pierre Boulez...
...is spoken unaccompanied, to chilling effect...
...The Fourth Quartet, subtitled Epitaph—In Memoriam Franz Kafka (1951), is a brief, mournfully lovely piece that ends in a boisterous pizzicato—Kafka's posthumous triumph...
...Two additional miniatures are pleasant but negligible...
...the baritone solos are compelling recitatives...
...and the short, exotic radio opera Habemeajaja...
...It sandwiches moments of memorable melancholy between lightsome quasi-improvisation and barely contained chaos.The Orchester-Fantasie (195 6), on the same disc, is really a concerto for orchestra, an equal employer and displayer of all instruments,but it fails to achieve full cumulative impact...
...But little of his ballet music and next to nothing of his operas is available on CD...
...One realizes that dominant rhythm and precipitous endings are Blacher hallmarks...
...By way of revenge, he composed the oratorio The Grand Inquisitor (1942), adapted by Leo Borchardt from Dostoyevsky...
...I am somewhat less taken with the piano-accompanied Lieder (Signum X73-00...
...The ugliest of them, the old slogan "Germany awake...
...Entitled La Vie, the score was presumed lost until 1976, when it was heard as Dance Scenes on the Irish radio...
...even on CD little of them survives...
...From 1945 to '48, Blacher taught at the International Institute of Music in Berlin...
...Elected to the Academy of Arts, he was named director of its musical section in 1961...
...Early on, he composed a Symphony and the Jazz-Koloraturen (1929...
...Blacher's father, Eduard, director of the Russian-Asiatic Bank, moved from one Far-Eastern branch to another, but he and his wife considered Reval, Estonia, their home base...
...He loved to discourse dryly, in his Berlin German with the Russian overtone, on music, culture in general, life, and money...
...The second movement, sostenuto turning into vivace, begins with an elegant, aloof melody in the higher strings, while the lower strings offer a strongly rhythmed background ostinato...
...In his memoirs, Henze stressed Blacher's kindness...
...Yet what seems to have been casually jotted down reveals all the signs of meticulous work and a strong sense of form...
...Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1957), set in English, is no better than the overrated poem...
...More chamber music appears on Thorofon 2206, starting with a clownishly captivating Divertimento for Trumpet, Trombone and Piano (1946), jazzily and bluesily proclaiming the end of war...
...The music abounds in saucy anachronisms...
...although we do not hear them as such, they increase the variousness of the piece as it fluctuates between gently melodious and vehemently rhythmic strains...
...His former student, Gottfried von Einem, then gave him refuge in his house at Ramsau, where he worked in total isolation until War's end...
...most of the Ornamente (1950), subtitled Seven Studies on Variable Meters, each dedicated to a different fellow composer, and the 24 Preludes, cherishable sparklers dedicated to Gerty...
...The last two of the Five Maxims of Omar the Tentmaker (from the Rubaiyat) come off with epigrammatic crispness...
...presently a molto allegro from the orchestral tutti takes over rambunctiously...
...Blacher's music, beginning and ending with muted drumbeats, is extremely sparse, like a line drawing for the ear...
...His first international success came with the Paganini Variations (1947...
...This masterly work is also found on The Three Piano Concertos, played by Horst Göbel (Thorofon 2167...
...In 1922, at his father's insistence, Boris arrived in Berlin to take up architecture...
...A final allegro is a jazzy variation on the recurring melody taken up by one of the other groups...
...Particularly effective is having the bluesy 1 Oth variation precede the very short, nervously jazzy 11th...
...Nevertheless, in 1936 the distinguished conductor Carl Schuricht conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Concertante Musik, a 10-minute piece greeted with such enthusiasm—people stood on their seats to applaud—that Schuricht had to repeat it...
...He started his serious musical studies in Irkutsk, Siberia, and was for a while lighting assistant at the opera there...
...Consider now the String Quartets on Edition Abseits (EDA 006-2) with the Petersen Quartet...
...Elimination, concision, and at times witty summation were his special strengths...
...Also on the record is La Chiarina (1946), staged in Berlin in 1950...
...Hehadstrong leanings toward the stage, with much opera, ballet and other theatrical music to his credit...
...The First Quartet (1930) places mood above melody: an allegro of determination without aggression, an adagio of resignation without passivity, and a marvelously sassy presto with a typically Blacher headlong ending...
...But perhaps the best evocation is in Reverberations, the memoirs of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: "Lean and not very tall, Blacher moved loosely, deliberately, and with exaggerated relaxation...
...A GOOD TASTE of Blacher's music is afforded by his breakthrough piece, Concertante Musik, with his student Herbert Kegel conducting the Dresden Philharmonic (Berlin Classics 009015).The 10-minute work begins with an unassuming moderato wherein the woodwinds seem to be sweetly, subduedly doodling...
...He became Professor of Composition at—and from 1953 director of—the Berlin Hochschule für Musik...
...Eventually brasses enthusiastically enter as well...
...The Fifth Quartet (1967) is amazing: 14 variations on a C-minor triad in variable meters, whose emotional range and manifold invention seem boundless, the four instruments stretched to their utmost...
...to small vocal increments [revealing] clearly that [Blacher] always aimed at the tersest solution, persuasive in small passages...
...The Grand Inquisitor (Ars Vivendi 2100234) is well sung by Siegmund Nimsgern and the Leipzig Radio Chorus, and played by the Dresden Philharmonic conducted by Herbert Kegel...
...The story concerns Christ's return to the world, his condemnation to the stake by the ancient Grand Inquisitor, and Jesus' overpowering response to the old man's recriminations: a kiss on the lips...
...That is most of what exists today of Blacher on CD, and it is not easily findable...
...Ultimately all is rhythm with plentiful percussion, abutting on an apotheosis for tutti, with the rhythmic and melodic elements competing ever more vociferously...
...The first three movements of the Octet for Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon, and String Quintet (1965) are unexciting, but the fourth— allegro, four variations, andante—is memorable: part brazenly obsessive, part discreetly wistful...
...Pages could be written about these 11 pieces...
Vol. 86 • March 2003 • No. 2
