Huber, Hans

[vor 1880] und die an Stelle des Scherzos für Vierte Symphonie vorgesehene Humoreske von 1907) und zwei Ouvertüren: die Symphonische Einleitung zur Oper ‚Der Simplicius’ und die hier vorgelegte Lustspiel-Ouvertüre op. 50. Die Lustspiel-Ouvertüre war ursprünglich das einleitende Stück aus Hubers außerdem aus Zwischenaktsmusiken und zur Handlung gehörender Begleitmusik bestehender Musik zum fünfaktigen Lustspiel ‚Die Lotosblumen’ von Rudolf Kelterborn (1843-1909). Die Schauspielmusik inklusive der Ouvertüre kam bei der Première am 18. Februar 1879 in Basel zur Uraufführung. Ob die Ouvertüre 1878 oder Anfang 1879 entstanden ist, wissen wir nicht. Der Rest der Schauspielmusik ist verschollen, die Ouvertüre jedoch erschien noch 1879 bei Breitkopf & Härtel im Druck.

Christoph Schlüren, Dezember 2014

Aufführungsmaterial ist erhältlich vom Originalverlag Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden (www.breitkopf.com). Nachdruck eines Exemplars der Vera Oeri- Bibliothek der Musik Akademie Basel, Basel.

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Hans Huber

(b. Eggenburg near Solothurn, 28 June 1852 — d. Locarno, 25 December 1821)

Overture to a Comedy in E major, op. 50 (1879)

Presto (p. 1) – Moderato (p. 2) – Tempo I (p. 5) – Sehr duftig. Meno presto (p. 6) – Un poco più lento (p. 18) – Tempo I (p. 34) – Ruhiger (p. 44) – Un poco più lento (p. 45) – Tempo I ma più vivace (p. 53) – Breit (p. 57) – Sempre più vivace (p. 58) – Prestissimo (p. 59)

Preface

Hans Huber, a former Leipzig pupil of Carl Reinecke (1824-1910), lived in Basel from 1877 on. In his day he was honored as Switzerland’s national composer and viewed in neighboring countries as the “leader of the Swiss school of composition.” He wrote nine symphonies, although he quickly withdrew his original Second Symphony in A major, whose première he conducted in Basel on 2 February 1890 (the first is his Tell Symphony, op. 63, premièred in Basel under his baton on 26 April 1881). As a result, the Symphony in E minor, known as the “Böcklin Symphony” (op. 115), is now called his Second. It was a huge success, as was the Third Symphony in C major (“The Heroic,” op. 118), which he premièred in Basel on 9 February 1902. They were followed in

1903 by the Fourth Symphony in A major, originally written as a Concerto grosso and later called “The Academic” (its final version was presented in Zurich on 3 February 1919) and by the Fifth Symphony in F major (“The Romantic”), first performed in Basel on 11 February 1906. The latter is actually a program symphony based on Justinus Kerner’s ballad “Der Geiger von Gmünd” (“The Fiddler at Gmünd”). In 1911 Huber completed his Sixth Symphony, and in his final years he added the Seventh in D minor and the Eighth in F major, which Hermann Suter premièred in Basel on 29 October 1921.

On Huber’s sixtieth birthday his fellow composer, the distinguished conductor Friedrich Hegar (1841-1927), wrote, “You can look back on a busy past; and if your compositions were not accorded the public success you deserve in every area, you at least have the satisfaction of knowing that those of your fellow artists who are unprejudiced in their judgments place you among the few symphonists of the last twenty years who have produced works of lasting value in this field.” Just how much esteem Huber enjoyed in Germany is shown by an inquiry from Felix Weingartner (1863-1942): “I’m very much looking forward to introducing your Böcklin Symphony in Munich next winter. Rehberg in Geneva now tells me that you’ve written a new symphony. I’d be delighted to be the first to present it in Berlin, as Nikisch did to the Böcklin.”

In an autobiographical sketch published in a commemorative issue of the Schweizerische Musikzeitung for the First Swiss Musicians’ Festival (1900), the brilliant pianist and fine-nerved composer Huber wrote as follows:

“My wild and unbridled dilettantism (I was equally enraptured by Brahms’s freshly published Paganini Variations and by the Tannhäuser March by Wagner- Liszt) was forcefully ended, with pedagogical understanding, by Carl Munzinger, who showed me the proper resources and pathways for the ‘true art of piano playing’ and theory. Thus armed, I traveled in the war year of 1870 to Leipzig Conservatory, where for four years I worked chiefly with Professor Reinecke and the teachers Wenzel and Dr. Paul in the various branches of art. There I became close friends with such outstanding figures as Dr. Hugo Riemann and Otto Klauwell and stood amidst the raucous fray

of the New Germans vs. the Classicists. We were all tossed hither and thither in this arena between Vienna and Bayreuth, Weimar and Leipzig. Our moods naturally vacillated, which may account for a certain unfortunate want of stylistic consistency that crept into my earliest works, and which only yielded to a more pronounced individuality much later. How much easier it is for younger composers today with regard to artistic morality!

“In 1874 I followed in the footsteps of my friends Munzinger, Kogel, Gustav Weber, and Freund and accepted a comfortable private position in Wesserling (Alsace), where I could work to my heart’s content in bounteous nature and distinguished households. Forced by the need to achieve a broader range of

impact and to enter more immediate relations with art altogether, I relocated to Basel in 1887 without employment. With much toil and hardship (I was suspected of being a ‘modernist’ at the time), I managed through years of perseverance – and with help from the neighboring town of Mülhausen – to become a sought-after piano teacher. The unsavory thing for my artistic evolution was that I had to publish many a work prematurely and uncritically to make ends meet. The consequences inexorably followed. Mea culpa, mea culpa!

“The popularity of my festival score of 1892 bore my name into the wider circles of Basel, and a year later I was placed in charge of the advanced classes at the School of Music, where I succeeded Bagge as the institute’s director following his sudden death, and where I was handed the directorship of the Choral Society – my most recent honorary appointment. I am thus happily occupied in my beloved Basel, and in conclusion I will merely confide to my younger fellow-professionals the innermost wish of my heart (unfortunately unfulfilled): to be able to start all over again and do everything better.”

Over the following two decades Huber would receive the highest accolades from his fellow-professionals, whether from Richard Strauss or Arthur Nikisch, Max Reger or Siegmund von Hausegger, Eugen d’Albert or Ferruccio Busoni, Henri Marteau or Rudolf Louis, Volkmar Andreae or Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who referred to him, in the program booklet for the Zurich Musicians’ Festival of 1901, as the “véritable chef de la musique Suisse.” Especially noteworthy is the broad range of styles and world-views of those who valued his music and activities. Indeed, Huber, much like a composer of completely different disposition, Hugo Wolf (whose genius Huber fully recognized and appreciated), had a remarkable position as a link between musical generations in the German-speaking countries, connecting Bruckner, Brahms, and the early-deceased Hermann Goetz to the subsequent generation of Strauss, Mahler, Hausegger, Reger, and Pfitzner. His musical language is a perhaps typically Swiss mélange of gnarly pithiness and life-affirming elegance; the works of his maturity reveal a consummate mastery of form and all compositional resources; his originality far transcends the learned epigonism of his day. Being a pupil of Reinecke, his role models always remained, to a certain extent, Mendelssohn and still more Schumann; but he did not share the academic conservatism of his former teacher, to whom he always remained bound in loyalty. He had tasted too much of the innovatory spirit of Liszt and Wagner and expressed utmost appreciation for Richard Strauss (the “greatest of all living composers”), Siegmund von Hausegger, and even Max Reger without ignoring their limitations. Huber still awaits rediscovery – a situation unaltered by the estimable complete recording of his symphonies made for Sterling Records by the Stuttgart Philharmonic under Jörg-Peter Weigle. Top-caliber concert performances of his works are needed; listeners must be given an opportunity to imbibe the great expanses of his large-scale forms and to continuously savor the inexhaustible wealth of invention in his symphonic dramas.

In addition to eight numbered symphonies (plus one that was withdrawn and another left unfinished), two serenades, four concertos for piano and another two for violin, and the late Suite for cello and orchestra, Huber wrote several smaller orchestral works, including the symphonic ode An das Vaterland (1898), the symphonic poem Im Kloster von Amalfi (after 1900), a Grand Festive March for the inauguration of the Swiss Music

Festival in Basle (1893), two humoresques, including Roman Carnival (before 1880) and the Humoresque of 1907 (intended to function as a scherzo in the Fourth Symphony), and finally two overtures: Symphonic

Introduction to the Opera “Der Simplicius” and the present Lustspiel-Ouvertüre (Overture to a Comedy, op.

50). The latter piece originally served to open Huber’s incidental music to the five-act comedy Die Lotosblumen by Rudolf Kelterborn (1843-1909), a score otherwise consisting of entr’actes and music to accompany the plot. This theater score, including the overture, was premièred at the play’s first performance, given in Basel on 18

February 1879. Whether the overture was composed in 1878 or early 1879 is a matter of conjecture. The rest of the incidental music has vanished, while the overture was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in the year of its première, 1879.

Translation: J. Bradford Robinson, 2014

For performance materials please contact the original publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden (www.breitkopf.com). Reprint of a copy from the Vera Oeri- Bibliothek der Musik Akademie Basel, Basel.