Peters, Guido

Guido Peters

(b. Graz, 29. November 1866 – d. Vienna, 11. January 1937)

Third Symphony in F-sharp minor

Preface
Although a bas-relief memorial tablet by the Styrian sculptor Wilhelm Gösser, commissioned for his 60th birthday, adorns his former Graz residence in Hartiggasse on the Karmeliterplatz, nobody these days has heard of Guido Peters (29.11.1866 – 11.1.1937), even in his home city. Once again we stand amazed before the extraordinary, highly original music of a composer who is unjustly quite forgotten, in this instance a significant Austrian symphonic composer at the turn of the century, before the treasures to be excavated here, and we wonder how such a sustained amnesia could have come about and, most of all, what our cultural establishment proposes to do about it.

Guido Peters was born in Graz in 1866, the son of the geologist Carl Ferdinand Peters who came from Liebhausen (today Libčeves) and his second wife Leopoldine von Blumfeld. A great-great-aunt of Guido’s and her husband were friends of Beethoven (the latter sharing the guardianship of Beethoven’s nephew Karl) and she was likewise acquainted with Schubert. They retired to Peggau, to the north of Graz. A great-grandmother had been a member of Goethe’s social circle.
From 1875 – 1882 Guido attended the Society of Friends of Music Conservatory in Vienna, where he would later teach himself, from 1905 – 1908; from that point on he identifies himself in autobiographical sketches as an autodidact. There followed studies in philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, along with visits to the Bayreuth Festival in 1889 for Tristan, Parsifal and Meistersinger. Return visits to Graz and Vienna, then Berlin and finally Munich were the departure-points for his double career as pianist and composer. Peters performed as a soloist with conductors such as Siegmund von Hausegger, Franz Schalk, Oswald Kabasta, Erich Wolf Degner and – certainly the climax of his career – played Mozart’s D-minor Concerto KV 466 with the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter; in the same concert Peters’ own Ländliche Symphonie (the First) was on the programme and was later (1895) also performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.
As a pianist he was much admired for his interpretations of the classics, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, which were tasteful and unpretentious whilst, according to a variety of newspaper reviews, seeming to be “independent inspirations” (improvisations) 1. Wilhelm Kienzl judged his interpretation of the Hammerklaviersonate to be superior to [Eugen] d’Albert’s. Reports emphasise “richness of colour” and “warmth”, but he “never brings colour arbitrarily to bear for the sake of effect.” Constantly recurring phrases: “full-bodied colouring…chaste contouring…direct, childlike freshness of perception”, “simple, warm, intimate” 2
A departure from all purely external lustre, it is ethos, internalisation – in fact, in the light of the search for solitude in the countryside of his beloved home, almost escapism – that characterise both the artistic personality and the human being Peters, who was to be found every year in the mountains. Nature, as an almost religious dimension and source of inspiration, represents alongside music the other fundamental constant of his life. He himself in turn, in one of his autobiographical sketches: “His sensibility is deeply religious (in the broadest and most profound sense of the word) and it is expressed, among other things, in the Ländliche Symphonie…” In the Grazer Tagesblatt 3: “He kept faith with the Styrian mountains, most of his works had their origin here.” However: “These days, innermost feelings are a little-valued currency in the stock market of musical art…”

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