Huber, Hans

Preface

Hans Huber – Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor

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

(1886)

I Adagio (ma non troppo) (p. 1) – Allegro appassionato (p. 12) – Molto più tranquillo (p. 26)

Allegro (Tempo primo – con fuoco) (p. 32) –

II Adagio (p. 59) – Più animato (p. 65) – Adagio (Tempo primo) (p. 67) –

III Adagio (Tempo der ersten Einleitung) (p. 71) – Allegro appassionato (p. 74)

Molto più tranquillo (p. 82) – Tempo primo (più con fuoco) (p. 88) – Tranquillo (p. 94)

Allegro appassionato (p. 95) – Sempre più animato (p. 102)

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! …
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