Vogel, Wladimir Rudolfovitch

Wladimir Rudolfovitch Vogel – »Spiegelungen« (Reflections) for orchestra (1952)

(b. Moscow, 17/29 February 1896 – d. Zurich, 19 June 1984)

Lento sostenuto (p. 1) – Allegro vivace (p. 25)

Preface
Wladimir Vogel was born in Moscow, the son of a German father from Dresden and a Russian mother from Taganrog near Rostov on the Sea of Azov. His father played the violin in his spare time, and his maternal grandmother was a good pianist. At the age of five, Wladimir already performed a piano composition, „Les Morts“, which referred to a black hole above the stove at home. Alexander Skriabin became the great idol of his youth: he „heard him perform his works often in Moscow in 1912-14 and was enormously impressed by his music.“ Scriabin was „the epitome of modernity for me at that time. I came into contact with him through my uncle, who was secretary of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. Scriabin‘s ecstatic nature completely captivated me. He lived exclusively in his aesthetic and esoteric world and in his works. It is precisely this atmosphere that offered me new, unheard-of things.“

With the outbreak of war, all German citizens living in Russia were immediately interned. After a short detention, the Vogel family was deported to the village of Birsk in the Ufa governorate on the Urals, where a German colony took shape in 1914-18. Wladimir received lessons in instrumentation from Alexander Lamm.
In 1918, after the end of the war, the family moved to Berlin, where Wladimir took up composition studies with the important expressionist master Heinz Tiessen (1887-1971), the mentor of Eduard Erdmann and later of Sergiu Celibidache. From 1920 he studied in Ferruccio Busoni‘s master class at the Academy of Arts, about which he reported: „As a teacher, Busoni was not a dogmatist or pedagogue in the sense of Hindemith or Schönberg. He never imposed any style or direction on a pupil. […] This attitude is perhaps the reason why the composers of his school followed such different paths, were able to develop their own personalities, do not bear a Busoni stamp today and do not belong to a special direction, an ‚ism‘. But to each of them Busoni gave as a basis an unmistakable ethical attitude towards music.“ Busoni wrote in a letter of recommendation in October 1921: „I observe in Vogel more and more clearly a great seriousness, a deep mind, a peculiar talent.“…

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