In the Shadows of World War II
An NSU Faculty Recital by Paul Christopher, cello
Program Notes by Jackson Harmeyer, NSU Alumnus 2013
Our present era is one of political tension,
racial strife, and economic catastrophe, all intensified by the devastating
COVID-19 global pandemic and a persistent crisis of disinformation. Over the
past year, we have become accustomed to socially-distanced and virtual concerts
where our separation from each other is reinforced by a facemask or computer
screen. Even these, however, can be luxuries as our larger musical
institutions—our orchestras and opera companies—have often been unable to
muster concerts at all. The three composers whose music cellist Paul Christopher plays tonight knew their own share of
crises. Their age was torn asunder by World War II, a conflict arising from economic
collapse and racial prejudices stoked by false prophets who used fear as their
greatest weapon. Our composers Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek, and Bernd Alois
Zimmermann, as Germans and an Austrian, had front-row seats to these calamities
and each was forced to respond in a different way. While Henze and Krenek fled
to countries they felt would be more hospitable to their music and ideas, Zimmermann
ultimately committed suicide, after years of depression and physical illness.
In their music, their recourse to neo-tonalities and then serialism represented
efforts to attain a rationality absent from their chaotic era. Their interest
in jazz and folk music, nevertheless, demonstrated a willingness to engage with
the larger human community. As we begin to see some glimmers of hope in the
vaccines and the promise of herd immunity, we also cannot forget the lasting
consequences this moment will have on our art.
For the German composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012), the rise of Nazism was a personal story. As a boy, he watched as his father, a school teacher, embraced Nazism and how fascist, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist books gradually replaced those by banned authors. As for himself, Henze was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. Music was an escape for him, and in 1942 he entered the Brunswick State Music School where the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart became a lifelong passion. Although two years later he was conscripted into military service, his internment at a British prisoner of war camp allowed him to hear Modernist music for the first time via BBC radio broadcasts. Henze would later reflect, “Everything that the fascists persecute and hate is beautiful to me.” These early experiences led Henze to embrace communism and construct a politically-engaged music as he began composing in the post-war years. Encouraged by his mentor Wolfgang Fortner, Henze attended the Darmstadt summer courses in 1946, their first year. Although this annual meeting of the avant-garde introduced him to twelve-tone serialism, Henze rejected its subsequent transformation into integral serialism under classmates like Karlheinz Stockhausen as another dangerous regime to be resisted. Instead Henze employed twelve-tone materials non-dogmatically and often created a tonal scaffolding around them. By 1953, he had resettled to Italy as his Marxist views and homosexuality proved obstacles to his building a career in Germany. He created works honoring Hô Chí Minh and Che Guevara; he also taught in Fidel Castro’s Cuba for a year. Nevertheless Henze is well-regarded for his operas and other theatre works, including Boulevard Solitude, The Bassarids, El Cimarrón, and We Come to the River as well as his cycle of ten symphonies, several of which have literary associations of their own.
Krenek’s Cello Suite is in five movements and lasts approximately ten minutes. The First Movement, marked Andante affettuoso, is characterized by motivic transformation. Gradually it intensifies from a tentative opening populated with isolated rhythmic figures into faster, more resolute material. Although there is at first an aspect of Webern’s pointillism, Krenek opposes and expands his motives so that they radiate energy and keep the music moving. There is further expansion in the Second Movement, Adagio, which now segregates its materials into several melodic lines identified by their timbre (arco or pizzicato) and range (low, middle, or high). The Third Movement, Allegretto, takes this yet a step further in its simulation of polyphonic writing. Motives here suggest fugal entrances and episodes, creating more of a collage of discarded archetypes than the implied counterpoint of Johann Sebastian Bach in his solo writing. The Fourth Movement, Andantino scherzando, at its outset alludes to the waltz with its characteristic steps captured in pizzicato. As the movement progresses, these steps grow increasingly distant as the bowed line seems too emotionally distracted to keep up. Especially in these two central movements, there are autobiographical elements as the intellectual rigor of Bach and a shared German past unravels in the Third Movement and the waltz with its strong Viennese associations becomes painfully undanceable in the Fourth. This fragmentation persists in the Fifth Movement, Andante, molto liberamente, which comes across as brittle and exhausted. Only near the end, at the marking Tempo I, does the music gain more resolve and fervor. Still there is no sense of resolution when the music finally terminates into silence.
Our final composer, Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970), was the most tragic and his aesthetic, the most complex. Like Henze, compulsory military service in World War II exposed him to music which had been banned by the Nazi regime. In his case, a posting in occupied France gave him his initial acquaintance with the scores of Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud. It also left him with a severe skin disease for which he was discharged in 1942. Formal musical studies in Cologne, begun before the war, now continued followed by three summers at Darmstadt from 1948 to 1950. Zimmermann too embraced basic serial techniques, although his primary expansion came in the temporal realm where he posited a “spherical shape of time.” By this he meant that time is perceived as a unity of past, present, and future where one is not separate from any other. In other words, the past coexists within the present and together they determine the future, so that collage and the simultaneous stratification of distinct elements become essential musical features. In his single opera, Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), composed from 1957 to 1964, Zimmermann demonstrates this pluralist vision by constructing scenes around Baroque genres, including the ciaccona, ricercar, and toccata; incorporating a wide array of musical idioms from jazz to Gregorian chant into his aural fabric; and staging multiple actions simultaneously, conveying some on film and pumping others through loudspeakers. Furthermore Zimmermann in his writings positions Die Soldaten as the inevitable descendent to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck—a present to their past as well as a vision of opera’s future, especially in its multimedia exploits.
This spherical time also factors into a purely instrumental work like the Sonata for solo cello of 1960. Zimmermann subtitles his Sonata, et suis spatiis transeunt universa sub caelo—the familiar line from Ecclesiastes which in English reads, “…and a time to every purpose under Heaven.” The poem offers certainty in uncertain times in its reassurance that everything has a purpose and a natural consequent. Past experience assures us that present struggles resolve as time ticks toward the future. Zimmermann represents this cycle in a score where smaller time events like individual rhythms, meters, and tempi are fixed, but where overarching structure is left indeterminate. Staves are not linked as in a conventional score, but instead measures are grouped together individually and assigned numbers. Each group contains distinct musical ideas which can still be heard distinctively when played. In effect, particulars are deprived of larger meaning, so only the present is known while the context of past and future must be negotiated by performer and listener alike. Yet Zimmermann, as stand-in for God and the universe, assures his audience through his Biblical inscription that every particular has its purpose even if not presently or immediately known. Furthermore collage happens through the diversity of the materials, but without the actual stratification that the soloist instrument necessitates; materials must be and will be reassembled mentally. The Sonata lasts about sixteen minutes and is in five movements, each with a poetic title in Italian—Rappresentazione, Fase, Tropi, Spazi, and Versetto. The cellist Siegfried Palm, who was responsible for commissioning and premiering so many avant-garde works for cello in the second half of the twentieth century, premiered the Sonata on April 24, 1960 at the Stuttgart Days for Contemporary Music.
© Jackson Harmeyer 2021
About Jackson. Jackson Harmeyer is a freelance concert annotator based in Alexandria, Louisiana. He serves as Director of Scholarship to the Sugarmill Music Festival and as Marketing Chair to the Chamber Music Society of Louisville. A project he is developing for the 2021 Sugarmill Music Festival, “A Scholarly Presentation in Lecture and Music: Solomon Northup in the Central Louisiana Sugarhouse,” has been awarded a prestigious Rebirth Grant by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In August 2020, Jackson began a Master’s of Library Science with a specialization in Music Librarianship at Indiana University where he is the recipient of a May Copeland Fellowship and serves as Secretary/Web Administrator to the Students of Music Librarianship Group. Previously Jackson earned an M.M. in Music History and Literature from the University of Louisville with a thesis entitled, “Liminal Aesthetics: Perspectives on Harmony and Timbre in the Music of Olivier Messiaen, Tristan Murail, and Kaija Saariaho.” There he was a recipient of the Gerhard Herz Music History Scholarship and was employed at the Anderson Music Library where he did archival work for the unique Grawemeyer Collection of Contemporary Music. Jackson has shared research at two meetings of the South-Central Chapter of the American Musicological Society; the University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival; the Music by Women Festival; and the University of Louisiana System Academic Summit. Aside from his studies, Jackson is a music blogger, composer, choral singer, CD collector, avid reader, and award-winning nature photographer.
Read additional program notes by Jackson at www.JacksonHarmeyer.com.
