Karl Amadeus Hartmann

Hartmann’s Lamento had to wait a while in its composer’s drawer, for this ‘cantata for soprano and piano’ of 1955 was made out of the solo passages in a 1936-7 score for soprano, choir and piano. Hartmann had dedicated the original choral work to the memory of Alban Berg, the recently deceased Viennese master, and the piece won honourable mention in Universal Edition’s annual Emil Hertzka competition of 1938. However, Hartmann’s reasons for revisiting old compositions were rather special, Lamento being one of many for which he had sought no outlet during the Nazi years, and which he then felt the need to revise once that period was over, while maintaining his music’s qualities of protest and mourning.

He found, early on, a mirror for the Nazi disaster in the Thirty Years’ War of three centuries before, and looked to writers from that period to assist him: Grimmelshausen for an opera subject (Simplicius Simplicissimus) and Andreas Gryphius for texts for the choral work, whose title, ‘Friede Anno 48’, refers to the peace of 1648. The three poems that remain in the 1955 version outline a story of suffering, remembrance and hope, and altogether of fortitude that finds a correlate in the stamina demanded of the singer, who is often required to be emphatic in the upper register, with an effect of declamatory authority proper to a civic statement (though at times the declamation may quieten to a lullaby). Thereby suited in stance and expression to Hartmann’s programme, the poems also offered an occasion for neo-Baroque formality, whether in the creation of a recitative-plus-aria form for the first poem or in the broken arcs of counterpoint that arrive, not least as the work enters its final phase (at ‘Herr, es ist genug’) and seems to be asking for Bach’s blessing.

Hartmann thus calls on a distant past—or, rather, two pasts, those of Gryphius’s war-observant poetry and of Bach’s heavenward music—to help him find his present. That present, though, is bifurcated. With its incisive imagery in the piano, its vociferous yet intensely precise soprano and its constant inventive power, Lamento is a big piece, one that thoroughly engages the two formidable musicians who present it here. Juliane Banse is the kind of singer Hartmann must have imagined, one who can maintain ease, power and warmth under difficult circumstances, whose singing conveys at once authority and vulnerability, and whose musical experience runs from Bach to the present day. Aleksandar Madžar similarly brings out the depth of history and the immediacy of feeling written into this work. Yet these artists also convey the desperate silence from which the piece started, when, living through unspeakable times, its composer could only lay down strong shadows for the future.

Look at the singer: Her hair is exactly the same red as yours, the red of copper in the evening sun, the copper by which gods enter the ear drum. Does she remind you of Mara? She does me. Listen! Now fiercely tender, now declamatory, there’s depth and immediacy in her every phrase. How does she manage to combine such authority with vulnerability? Look at the pianist: The curl of his fingers, the relaxation of his wrist, as spider-like he spins out a soft, fluid legato—only to execute a violent, flat-fingered attack right after. I look at you and I am moved: The moist glow of your eyes tells me you’re thinking of Matteo. And thus, into this juxtaposition of the Third Reich and the Thirty Years War, into this song of suffering and remembrance, comes the death of a friend. Dark-hued, entreating, the singer’s voice captures your emotion.

FRIEDE | PEACE

Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) | Translated by Paul Griffiths

Despite his amicable disposition towards Webern, Hartmann quickly realized the distance between their artistic positions. Webern’s aphoristic brevity, the tremendous concentration of his musical discourse and the compositional rigidity of his twelve-tone work must have been foreign to Hartmann, who drew inspiration from whatever was at hand, freely and abundantly. Aware of the epic sweep of his creative impulse, he felt close to Bruckner, Mahler and Alban Berg. What are Hartmann’s links with these three composers? I will sketch out an answer to that question via an examination of the Adagio from his Sixth Symphony.

The long gestation of this symphony, completed between  1950 and 1953, is revealing. Made up of two movements—a long, expressive Adagio and a Toccata variata concertante—it is derived from a much earlier composition, the Symphonic Sketches of 1937, later retitled L’Œuvre, in recognition of the influence of Zola’s novel. The book tells the story of the painter Claude Lantier, a young, driven artist whose friends see as the leader of a new school. Lanier’s genius goes hand-in-hand with a fiery temperament, psychological instability and a crippling lack of self-confidence. Unwilling to compromise, refused at the Salon exhibition, his money runs out and he finds himself isolated. For years he works on a monumental painting of Paris that, he believes, will finally find favour with the public. However, overcome by despair at the thought of being unable to fully realize the work, he hangs himself before the unfinished painting.

This is the theme that runs through the symphony, premiered in 1939. Hartmann had this to say about what inspired it: In the Spring of 1939 I dove into Zola’s novel, L’Œuvre. I did not want to write a symphonic poem; I only set out to express in music the impression the book made on me. I tried to represent this dark tragedy, to convey all the beauty and all the horror that true artists experience. Like its literary model, Hartmann’s L’Œuvre is in two movements, a Toccata variata and an Adagio whose ending depicts the novel’s tragic conclusion. When Hartmann reworked his composition at the beginning of the 1950s, he changed the order of the movements, rewrote practically all of the Toccata and deleted any mention of literary reference.

The first movement of the symphony is indeed entitled Adagio, but its form is original. Beginning slowly and quietly, the music gradually gains in authority, attains ever-greater peaks until reaching its apogee, then subsides, slows down and ends softly. The progression towards the apogee occurs in several stages. Except for a few ritardando passage, the agogic is in constant acceleration. It goes without saying that the acceleration is expressed in the metronome indications. If in the first section (Adagio) ♩ = 60, the Allegro moderato con fuoco requires a much faster tempo: ♩ = 104. The tempo of the last section is closer to that of the beginning: ♩ = 66. See the table below.

Hartmann had a predilection for this type of Adagio that integrates various symphonic elements, including the Allegro. Like the Adagio of the Sixth Symphony, that of the Second Symphony (1946) and the second movement of the Third Symphony (1948-49) are also characterized by great amplitude and gradual intensification. Having no comparable model in the symphonic literature before Hartmann, this is an original structure. Most of Bruckner’s Adagios are distinguished by successive waves of intensification, of which the greatest conclude in one or several apogees, in particular in his Seventh and Eighth symphonies. The originality of the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony must have impressed Hartmann: in the fifth part of this movement, the main theme undergoes four variations whose agogic intensification totally modifies the character of the part.

On first hearing the Adagio from the Sixth Symphony, one cannot help but admire its expressive power: Hartmann’s inimitable musical language has been fully realized. His idiom is a particular kind of free atonality. Series of eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve notes are the norm of horizontal writing, and sometimes even of vertical. Rarely do the tonal lines intersect. The sonic concentrations of the apogees are generally composed of eight, nine or ten notes (measures 108-109, 110-111, 126-127). The polyphonic density of the structure recalls Bruckner, Mahler and especially Alban Berg, whom Hartmann venerated. Like Berg, he had a weakness for the expressive gesture but also for sonic luxuriance.

Hartmann used to say that his slow movements were the most faithful reflection of his attitude toward existence. This declaration enabled Hans Werner Henze, in a subtle eulogy for the composer that says as much about Hartmann as it does about himself, to attempt a humanist interpretation of the Adagio of the Sixth Symphony. Henze refers to the music of L’Œuvre and stresses the extent to which Zola was an example for Hartmann, both as an artist and as a critical social activist. Henze sees the L’Œuvre symphony as Hartmann’s profession of faith: It’s author is on the side of the damned, the outlawed, the defeated and the imprisoned. His music is born in the underground, in solidarity with the victims: he cries for and with them, he fights for them, he struggles for them through his creative work and, like Zola, works for the humanist ideal of a world free of injustice and reactionary ideas.

Henze’s interpretation is based on a process of association: he wanted to link himself to Hartmann via the ‘bridge’ of Alban Berg. Certain passages of the Adagio remind him of Wozzeck, and more precisely of Act I Scene 2 (Wozzeck and Andres in an open field) and Act II Scene 3 (Wozzeck confronting Marie). It is clear that the term ‘association’ brings to mind the preponderant role of reminiscence and allusion in the Adagio of the Sixth Symphony. The solo episodes of the violas (measures 43-47 and 144-148) recall numerous moments in the Adagio of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. In this regard, the passage a little before the end of the movement when the brass plays an ‘epilogue’ (measures 152-158) is fundamental for the interpretation of the Adagio, since it evokes the type of funeral music inaugurated by Mahler. The horns, the trombones and the tuba, powerfully backed up with percussion, break into an austere choral. This strikingly evocative passage is akin to an epitaph. Hans Werner Henze, a great friend of Hartmann, once called him the ‘little brother’ of Bruckner and Mahler. Hartmann, for his part, inscribed himself in the lineage of Alban Berg. Whatever the case may be, he maintained very close links with Austrian music.