Gürzenich-Orchester Köln

During his career Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) turned to the literary legacy of Svatopluk Čech on several occasions, most notably in his opera The Excursions of Mr. Brouček. In 1912, while he was working on the first part of the opera, he wrote the symphonic poem The Fiddler’s Child, based on Čech’s ballad of the same name first published in 1873 in Lumír magazine.

Čech’s gloomy tale tells of a poor itinerant musician who dies in his hut leaving behind only his fiddle and his child. The mayor entrusts the orphan to the care of an old woman. During the night she sees an apparition of the dead fiddler above the cradle trying with his violin playing to lure the infant to a better world, where there is no more hunger or wretchedness. In the morning the mayor arrives to find the old woman rocking the “dead Infant Jesus”; there is no sign of the fiddle.

Janáček treated the story loosely, endeavouring to support the strong social implications of the poem through his music. In an analysis of the work printed in Hudební revue magazine in 1914, he pointed out the connections drawing together the characteristics of each musical motif with a specific instrument. For example, via the four-part viola figure that weaves its way through the piece, he sought to convey “an expression of the soul of these people, who live their bitter lives in rundown huts scattered about our villages”; the solo violin is a projection of “the fiddler’s life and his death, his sorrow and his joy. […] Several moans from the ailing child are heard only in the oboe.” The figure of the mayor – merely episodic in Čech’s poem – is a powerful presence in the musical narrative: “He is all over the village; wherever he casts his gaze, everything succumbs to his will. If his footsteps are measured by the cellos and double basses, the fear he instils is heightened by the bass clarinet playing the same motif; the harshness of his decisions is borne by the trombones.” The subtle instrumental mesh of organically woven, characteristic motifs gave rise to a score which, in comparison with other orchestral works by Janáček, sounds unusually like a chamber piece.

The premiere of The Fiddler’s Child was to have been given in 1914 by the Czech Philharmonic with Janáček standing on the rostrum. For reasons that cannot be ascertained today, perhaps an insufficient number of rehearsals for what was an unusual and challenging work (officially, however, due to the “indisposition of the conducting composer”), the performance never went ahead. After the score was published Otakar Ostrčil requested it with a plan to perform the work with his Prague Orchestral Association. The Association ceased to function during the war, however, thus the piece was, in fact, premiered by the Czech Philharmonic after all, at a concert conducted by Ostrčil on 14 November 1917. Janáček was clearly delighted with the result, a fact he conveyed in a letter to Ostrčil soon after the premiere: “Highly esteemed friend! After the suspense I experienced in Prague I am now coming to my senses. I was aware of the importance of the performance of The Fiddler’s Child. Through your outstanding execution you helped steer the work towards victory […] From our very first meeting I thought you agreeable; now I have a great fondness for you: you penetrated deep into my soul, since this piece lay deep within it as well. It was not easy to grasp.”

Before the Second World War Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) had become the most significant composer in Germany. Nevertheless, with his internationally recognised, pacifist compositional and organisational endeavours, he was at the same time a thorn in the side for the Nazi regime, which considered him one of the chief symbols of Entartete Musik (degenerate music). His name was erased from the regulated German cultural scene; the persecution against Hindemith was not even averted by a defence published by conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler who – without success – used his authority to attempt to exonerate the composer in the eyes of the regime. Hindemith retreated to the seclusion of Lenzkirch, a mountain village in the Black Forest of Baden-Württemberg, to work on his magnum opus, the opera Mathis der Maler, set in medieval times. It was this creative atmosphere which also gave rise to his concerto for viola and chamber orchestra Der Schwanendreher (1935–1936), named after the old German folk song “Seid ihr nicht der Schwanendreher”, whose melody provides the main theme of the concerto’s final variation movement.

The word Schwanendreher, literally “swan turner”, was used in the Middle Ages to denote a cook’s assistant who would turn the handle of a spit on which swans were roasting. Nevertheless, Hindemith chiefly had in mind a different meaning for the term, referring to the culture of medieval wandering minstrels who played the barrel organ or hurdy-gurdy, whose cranks were shaped like a swan’s neck. The concerto thus suggests an image of a folk musician who, in convivial society, performs the songs he encountered on his travels. By escaping to the distant past Hindemith was shielding himself from the fearful reality of the present; at the same time, however, he felt compelled to reflect this in his composition, expressing his sorrow most fervently in the intensely melancholic middle movement.

Der Schwanendreher was first performed in Amsterdam on 14 November 1935. The composer himself undertook the solo part, accompanied by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under conductor Willem Mengelberg; he then presented the piece in other parts of Europe (though, naturally, not in Germany) and in America. The Prague Spring programmed the work in 1961; on this occasion Hindemith himself stood on the rostrum, conducting violist Jaroslav Karlovský and the Prague Symphony Orchestra. Today Der Schwanendreher is a pillar of the modern viola repertoire. Tabea Zimmermann performs it regularly with some of the world’s finest orchestras, as she did in 2021 with the Berlin Philharmonic under François-Xavier Roth.

Among the symphonic poems written by Richard Strauss (1864–1949), his fortieth opus, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), completed in December 1898, is quite exceptional. Not only is it intended for the largest orchestral ensemble Strauss had used to date (he considerably reinforced the woodwind and brass sections and required two harps on this occasion), but it also represents the culmination of the composer’s endeavour to project himself into his own works.

In his previous symphonic poems, Strauss had achieved this aim through the figures of Eulenspiegel, Don Juan or Macbeth, into whose musical images he had partly cast his own personality as well. Yet in Ein Heldenleben he no longer concealed himself behind anyone and created “a grandiose sound backdrop of an era intoxicated by its exploits, in whose midst he placed the creative artist, embodied by himself,” as Ernst Krause wrote in his monograph of the composer.

The premiere of Ein Heldenleben was held in Frankfurt in 1899, performed – as in the case of the Hindemith piece – by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam conducted by Willem Mengelberg. The opulent orchestral sound, a superb example of late Romantic instrumentation, reveals the confident, creative power of the hero as he fights a caricatured army of “adversaries”, as he admires and courts his “companion”, as he again enters into battle with his adversaries, and then seeks the meaning of existence in his “works of peace” (quotations from Strauss’s earlier opuses Tod und Verklärung and Don Juan, among others); finally the hero amicably “retires from this world”. The final “completion”, in the form of fanfares and an extension of the hero’s theme, reinforces the artist’s victory and the sense of fulfilment his work has brought him.

“Let us consider this hero. […] Now that he has proved his power by victory,” wrote Romain Rolland in 1904, “his pride knows no limit; he is elated and is unable to see that his lofty visions have become realities. But the people whose spirit he reflects see it. There are germs of morbidity in Germany today, a frenzy of pride, a belief in self, and a scorn for others. […] Germany had hardly attained the position of empire of the world when she found Nietzsche’s voice and […] the Secession. Now there is the grandiose music of Richard Strauss.”

We are now able to look upon this, Strauss’s most subjective and rarely performed work with a sense of detachment and the benefit of hindsight. The image of the contradictory nature of its creator speaks to us through the singular fervour, the monumental, sumptuous symphonic current, and also through the highly distinctive introspection, based – perhaps consciously, perhaps only intuitively – in Freudian psychoanalysis, as François-Xavier Roth notes: “Strauss wrote this music at the time he was discovering psychoanalysis, and it is – perhaps inadvertently – Freudian music,” he considers. “The symphonic poem tells us much about the role of women, the role of the father, and also about the subconscious mind; Strauss develops a multi-layered, autobiographical weave, thus creating his own story.”