Tiessen, Heinz

Heinz Tiessen

(b. Königsberg, 10 April 1887 — d. Berlin, 20 November 1971)

Rondo in G Op. 21 for Orchestra

(1914/orchestr.1915/rev. 1924)

Sehr lebhaft und heiter (p. 1) – Äußerst lebhaft (p. 3) –

Etwas ruhiger, sehr graziös (p. 9) – Äußerst lebhaft (p. 13) –

Schlicht, innig (p. 19) – Schneller (p. 21) – Etwas ruhiger, sehr graziös (p. 27) – Ruhiger (p. 36) – Schlicht, innig (p. 37) –

A tempo, belebt und steigernd (p. 38) – Äußerst schnell (p. 41)

Preface

Heinz Tiessen was one of those musical personalities, whose neglect can only be regarded as a deficiency of German culture and a major loss for international music. In the twenties, particularly at the outset of his Expressionist “second creative period”, when his creative powers were at their peak, he was considered as one of the leading avant-garde composers in Berlin and Germany, personifying the ideals of a “New Classicism”. He was to align himself during the following years with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in his two dramatic cantatas, Ein Frühlings-Mysterium Op. 36 and Aufmarsch Op. 40, consciously aimed at a wider audience. However, as a conductor of socialist choral societies, he fell out of favour when the National Socialists seized power but still earned a living as a highly respected professor of composition. After the War his creative powers had deteriorated and the public no longer took much interest in the unrestrained exuberance of the Berlin expressionism of the twenties, when Tiessen had composed incidental music for plays directed by such famous personalities as Jürgen Fehling, Max Reinhardt, Paul Legband, Victor Barnowsky or Erich Engel, and had developed a terse style notable for its originality and imagination and its strong sense of drama and also for the density of its structure.
Heinz Tiessen was very much influenced by Richard Strauss, especially Salomé, and also by Arnold Schönberg, whose lead in the direction of abstract atonality, however, he never followed. “In spite of similarities of sound, I remain opposed to Atonality as a fundamental denial of harmonic relationships despite the fact that both systems have a certain tonal rapprochement. To me, even the most obscure harmonies and their concatenations, in terms of cadential logic, seem to have a potential for gradual expansion and development grouped around the Tonic. As I see it, the interaction of tension and release is a fundamental Law that is eternally valid, no matter how diverse the forms in which it is expressed, no matter how broad or narrow the range of harmonic tension latent in the style of the music or its author.” (Heinz Tiessen in “Selbstzeugnis des Künstlers”, an article in Musica). These thoughts and experiences were the foundation of Tiessen’s teaching activity. He took on his first pupil in 1915, Eduard Erdmann (1896-1958), who was born in Riga and was soon to become one of the foremost German pianists and exponents of modern music, an important composer in his own right, who wrote four symphonies amongst other works in a very personal idiom. In the thirties Sergiu Celibidache (1912-96) studied under Tiessen who was to become his most influential music teacher and who still had greater influence on him as Celibidache set out on his meteoric career on being appointed conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1945. Celibidache’s ‘musical phenomenology’ would be inconceivable without the stimulating inspiration of Heinz Tiessen. Tiessen’s other pupils included Wolfgang Steffen, Josef Tal, Klaus Sonnenburg, Rolf Kuhnert and the Finn, Erik Bergman.

Tiessen made the following comments on his development after obtaining his leaving certificate from the Humanistisches Gymnasium in Allenstein, East Prussia:
“At the end of October 1905 I moved to Berlin and enrolled at the Faculty of Law at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, according to my father’s wishes. At the same time I registered at the Sternsches Conservatory,…

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