Schubert, Heinz

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Schubert, Heinz

Concertante Suite for violin and chamber orchestra

SKU: 3092 Category:

16,00 

Heinz Schubert – Concertante Suite (1931-32)

(b. Dessau, 8 April 1908 — d. Oderbruch, February 1945)

for violin and chamber orchestra

I Recitativ (p. 3) – attacca:
II Fughetta. Allegro moderato (p. 7) – attacca:
III Aria. Sehr ruhig fließend (p. 11) – attacca:
IV Finale. Vivace assai (p. 14) – Vivace possibile (p. 27)

Preface (Christoph Schlüren, February 2018)
When Heinz Schubert died in World War II, barely thirty-seven years old, he was considered, both as a composer and conductor, one of the most eminent musicians in the circle around Heinrich Kaminski (1886-1946). His death meant a severe loss for German contemporary music. Yet Heinz Schubert was quickly forgotten after the war – by a society that turned its back, as if in flight, on everything that had gone on before, a society in which the prevailing motto was to burn the bridges to the past and to invent the world anew. A symbol for such amnesia is an inner-German solution whose despicable nature still awaits revelation to a larger public: When Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG, the standard German encyclopedia of music) was published at the end of the 1950s, the editors (who themselves had collaborated with the Nazi régime and now tried to find scapegoats in an attempt to whitewash their own past) decided not to include Heinz Schubert – a composer who had resisted the temptations and pressures of the Third Reich and shown remarkable civil courage. With his name omitted, the memory of his accomplishments, especially after the deaths of his supporters and admirers, was over the years almost completely extinguished. It is symptomatic that in some cases the parts of his works were destroyed when the publisher’s archive had been burnt in the Battle of Berlin in 1945, and the score of another important work, Das ewige Reich after Wilhelm Raabe (to choose but one example), seems to have vanished utterly. No doubt, Heinz Schubert from Dessau must be seen, from today’s perspective, as one of the most tragic figures in German music history.

Heinz Schubert studied initially with Franz von Hoeßlin (1885-1946) and Arthur Seidl (1863-1928) in his native Dessau, then in Munich with Hugo Röhr (1866-1937) and, especially, with Heinrich Kaminski, to whom he owed his “grounding” in ethos, style, and craftsmanship, and with whom he remained bound in gratitude to the end of his days. From 1926 to 1929 he was a student in the master classes of Siegmund von Hausegger (1872-1948) and Joseph Haas (1879-1960) at the Munich Academy of Music. From 1929 he worked as a conductor in Dortmund and Hildesheim, then at the Flensburg Opera (1933-35). From 1938 until the complete mobilization toward the end of World War II, he was music director and superintendent at the Civic Theater in Rostock. Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) effectively supported Schubert’s works and frequently performed them in Berlin, even though the composer had long fallen out of favor with the régime. In the final months of the war he was drafted into the Volkssturm; the exact place and time of his death can no longer be ascertained.

The works of Heinz Schubert were listed in a commemorative essay (Zeitschrift für Musik 1, no. 52) by Erich Valentin (1906-1993). Here is an amplified version of Valentin’s incomplete list:
Krippenmusik for soprano, small mixed chorus and seven instruments; 1927
Drei Lieder (Walther von der Vogelweide, Des Knaben Wunderhorn) for soprano, clarinet and violoncello; 1927
Abend (Rilke) for alto and chamber ensemble; 1928
Five a cappella motets; 1928
Sinfonietta; 1929
Chamber Concertino for piano and string trio; 1929
Geistliche Hymnen (Rilke) for baritone and organ; 1929
Choräle vom Tod (St. Ambrose, Luther, Gramann, Klopstock) for bass and organ; 1929
Te Deum for five women’s voices and double a cappella chorus; 1929
Concertante Suite for violin and chamber orchestra; 1931-32
Die Seele (Upanishads) for alto and organ (or orchestra); 1932
Hymnus (from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra) for soprano, chorus, organ and orchestra; 1932
Lyric Concerto for viola and chamber orchestra; 1933
Chamber Sonata for string trio; 1934-37
Verkündigung (Upanishads) for soprano, women’s chorus, mixed chorus and orchestra; 1936
Das ewige Reich (Raabe) for baritone, male chorus and orchestra; 1936
Prelude and Toccata for double string orchestra; 1936
Fantasia and Gigue for string quartet; 1937
Hymnic Concerto for soprano, tenor, organ and large orchestra; 1939
Vom Unendlichen (Yasna) for soprano and three string quintets; 1941
Fantasy (Prelude and Toccata) for solo violin; 1943
Ambrosian Concerto: Chorale fantasy on “Verleih’ uns Frieden gnädiglich” for piano and orchestra; 1943

Valentin comments: “This is only the bare listing of a series of works performed at one time by artists such as Wilhelm Furtwängler (to whom the Hymnic Concerto is dedicated), Hermann Scherchen [1891-1966], Bruno Walter [1876-1962], Peter Raabe [1872-1945], Wilhelm Sieben [1881-1971], Karl Straube [1873-1950], and Hermann Dubs [1895-1969]. And today? The oppressive silence is inexcusable. Some works are not even published. […] Heinz Schubert, the conductor, gladly fulfilled his duty by supporting contemporary works. And what do we do?”

He then continues: “The spiritual grounding appears, time and time again, as the determinant force that elevated the “musicianship” in the work of Heinz Schubert (who, granted, was a student of Joseph Haas, but in his inner core close to Kaminski) far above the levels of playfulness, musical interaction, and virtuosity. It indeed makes no sense to speak of stylistic influences or echoes, of Gothic and Baroque, even if one considers it necessary to recognize such features. The growth that manifests itself from the Motets of 1928 to the Ambrosian Concerto of 1943 is rooted so completely in the composer’s own core that one recognizes here an artist who matured from within. This is the most astonishing quality in an oeuvre that was terminated prematurely.
Knowledge about things transcendental is revealed most concretely in the words coming to us from the Persian of Zarathustra (Hymnus, Vom Unendlichen); from the India of the Upanishads (Verkündigung, Die Seele), which also had a tremendous impact on Schopenhauer; from the Christian poems of St. Ambrose, Luther, Klopstock, and Gramann; and from the poetic language of Rilke. This tendency toward the hymn-like is free of pathos. It is essentiality in the sense of Angelus Silesius, and it touches us so deeply in Schubert because it belongs to the totality of his being and, as in the fantasies on “Verleih’ uns Frieden gnädiglich” (Ambrosian Concerto) or the secular gifts of Walther von der Vogelweide and Wilhelm Raabe, it manifests his singular striving for truthfulness.
For this reason, Schubert’s music that is not bound to a text – in other words, his instrumental music – does not appear to be something different. It originated from the same spiritual core. […] His instrumental music combines the freedom of improvisation with the rigor of “written-out” composition. What contributes to the organic quality of the music is that these heterogeneous elements do not oppose each other but permeate each other to achieve unity. […] The spaciousness of Brucknerian sonorities can be heard alongside filigree solo work. Grandiose climaxes, such as the one in the finale of Hymnic Concerto, have rarely been composed since Bruckner.
Eschewing any sensational display of innovations, Schubert nevertheless entered new avenues. They can be found especially in formal aspects of his music, and here not in idiosyncratic exhibitions imposed from the outside but through necessity emanating from the structure. That, it seems, is Schubert’s contribution to the music of our time: taking his point of departure from the spirit of Kaminski and of Bach and also having encountered the world of Stravinsky and Hindemith (Sinfonietta), Schubert, on the whole, is a composer with his own voice.”…

 

Read full preface > HERE

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