Reznicek, Emil Nikolaus von

Preface

Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek
(b. Vienna, 4 May 1860 – d. Berlin, 2 August 1945)

Symphony No. 2 („Ironic“)

Preface
Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek was a composer, conductor and editor active from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was especially productive as a composer of operas, the most famous of which was Donna Diana (composed in 1894, revised in 1908 and again in 1933), orchestral music including five symphonies, chamber music, organ works, and religious works for chorus.

Reznicek was born in Vienna on May 4, 1860, educated at the University of Graz beginning in 1878, and subsequently attended the Leipzig Conservatory, studying composition with Carl Reinicke and Salomon Jadassohn, both composers in their own right. Reznicek graduated in 1884, and thereafter became active as a conductor, beginning in Graz and gradually moving into increasingly important centers of activity including Mainz, Berlin, Prague, Weimar and Warsaw during the quarter of a century from 1884-1909. He first began to occupy teaching positions in Berlin in 1902-06, and augmented his commitment to teaching after World War I, when he taught at the Hochschule für Musik 1920-26. Thereafter he devoted himself to composition.

His professional course, which reads like the diary of a nomad, was by no means unusual. His exact contemporary, Gustav Mahler, who was born less than two months after Reznicek, followed a comparable course, and in fact the two composer-conductors were active in similar venues including Berlin, Prague and Weimar, where both worked between 1886 and 1907, although they never occupied concurrent positions with a single organization. Mahler, a Jew from the Czech Lands, left to posterity a more powerful musical influence than Reznicek did, but it is interesting to note that Reznicek — perhaps influenced by his Jewish teacher Jadassohn — composed several works that indicated interest in the vexed question of „Jewish“ music raised by Richard Wagner and others. Jadassohn‘s own setting for piano of the Kol Nidrei (a Jewish prayer for the Yom Kippur holiday), composed in the 1880s, may have influenced Reznicek‘s Symphonische Variationen über das „Kol Nidrei“ for orchestra of 1929, although he was not the only non-Jew to become involved with this chant, since Beethoven and Max Bruch had anticipated his version. In addition, two stage works — the opera Holofernes of 1922, and the ballet Das goldene Kalb of 1935 — show dramatic interest in Biblical stories which had been the basis of important works by composers from Serov to Schoenberg, who were both Jewish. Schoenberg‘s opera Moses und Aron, was essentially contemporary with Reznicek‘s ballet.

While Mahler devoted himself less to operatic compositions than Reznicek did, both of them contributed heavily to the symphonic repertoire. Mahler composed ten symphonies (the last semi-finished) and two additional symphonic movement, Reznicek, in the course of his long life, composed five symphonies:

Symphony no. 1 in d minor („Tragic“) (1902)
Symphony no. 2 in B-flat major („Ironic“) (1904)
Symphony no. 3 in D major („Im alten Stil“) (1918)
Symphony no. 4 in f minor (1919)
Symphony no. 5 („Tanz-Symphonie“) (1924)

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