Hans Pfitzner
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Hans Erich Pfitzner (5 May 1869 – 22 May 1949) was a German composer and self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina, loosely based on the life of the great sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
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[edit] Biography
Born in Moscow, Russia, Pfitzner spent most of his life in Germany, working as conductor, pianist, and teacher as well as composer. Pfitzner was the son of a professional violinist and received lessons from his father when he was quite young. The family moved to Frankfurt in 1872. His earliest compositions were composed when he was 11, and in 1884 he wrote his first songs. From 1886 to 1890 he studied composition with Iwan Knorr and piano with James Kwast at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. He taught at the Koblenz Conservatory from 1892 to 1893. In 1894 he was appointed conductor at the Stadttheater in Mainz.
His own music — which includes pieces in all the major genres except the symphonic poem — was respected by contemporaries such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, although neither man cared much for Pfitzner's innately acerbic manner (and Alma Mahler reciprocated his adoration with contempt). Particularly notable are Pfitzner's numerous and delicate lieder, influenced by Hugo Wolf, yet with their own rather melancholy charm. (Several of them were recorded during the 1930s by the distinguished baritone Gerhard Hüsch, with the composer at the piano.) His first symphony - the Symphony in C♯ minor - underwent a strange genesis: it was not conceived in orchestral terms at all, but was a reworking of a string quartet.
Pfitzner's magnus opus was his opera Palestrina, which had its premiere in Munich on 12 June 1917 under the baton of Bruno Walter. On the day before he died in February 1962, Walter dictated his last letter, which ended "Despite all the dark experiences of today I am still confident that Palestrina will remain. The work has all the elements of immortality".[1]
Easily the most celebrated of Pfitzner's prose utterances is his pamphlet Futuristengefahr ("Danger of Futurists"), written in response to Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. "Busoni," Pfitzner complained, "places all his hopes for Western music in the future and understands the present and past as a faltering beginning, as the preparation. But what if it were otherwise? What if we find ourselves presently at a high point, or even that we have already passed beyond it?" Also related is the debate between Pfitzner and Paul Bekker.
Pfitzner dedicated his Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 34 (1923) to the Australian violinist Alma Moodie. She premiered it in Nuremberg on 4 June 1924, with the composer conducting. Moodie became its leading exponent, and performed it over 50 times in Germany with conductors such as Pfitzner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hans Knappertsbusch, Hermann Scherchen, Karl Muck, Carl Schuricht, and Fritz Busch. At that time, the Pfitzner concerto was considered the most important addition to the violin concerto repertoire since the first concerto of Max Bruch, although it is not played by most violinists these days.[2]
Increasingly nationalistic in his middle and old age, Pfitzner was at first regarded sympathetically by important figures in the Third Reich (in particular by Hans Frank, with whom he remained on good terms). But he soon fell out with chief Nazis, who were unimpressed by his long musical association with the conductor Bruno Walter, who was Jewish. He incurred extra odium by refusing to obey the regime's request to provide incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that could be used in place of the famous score by Felix Mendelssohn, which was unacceptable to the Nazis because of his Jewish background. Pfitzner maintained that Mendelssohn's original was far better than anything he himself could offer as a substitute.
His home having been destroyed in the war and his membership in the Munich Academy of Music having been revoked for his speaking out against Nazism, Pfitzner was left mentally ill and homeless, but after the war he was denazified, a pension was established, performance bans were lifted, and a residence was procured at an old people's home in Salzburg, Austria, where he died. (Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted a performance of Pfitzner's Symphony in C major, at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the summer of 1949, just after the composer's death.) Following long neglect, Pfitzner's music began to reappear in opera houses and concert halls, as well as recording studios, during the 1990s.
[edit] Students of Hans Pfitzner
- Sem Dresden (1881–1957)
- Ture Rangström (1884–1947)
- Otto Klemperer (1885–1973)
- Heinrich Jacoby (1889–1964)
- Czesław Marek (1891–1985)
- Charles Münch (1891–1968)
- Felix Wolfes (1892–1971)
- Carl Orff (1895–1982)
- Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–1995)
[edit] Recordings
His complete orchestral works have been recorded by the German conductor Werner Andreas Albert.
[edit] References
- ^ Liner notes to the Rafael Kubelik/Nicolai Gedda/Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau DG recording
- ^ Kay Dreyfus, Alma Moodie and the Landscape of Giftedness, 2002
- Williamson, John (1992). The Music of Hans Pfitzner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198161603.
- Taylor-Jay, Claire: The Artist Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)
- Toller, Owen: Pfitzner's Palestrina (1997, Toccata Press)
[edit] External links
- Hans Pfitzner at Allmusic
- UbuWeb:A New Musical Reality": Futurism, Modernism, and "The Art of Noises" by Robert P. Morgan
- Free scores by Hans Pfitzner in the International Music Score Library Project
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