Unlocking Winterberg: A Composer’s Return from Exile and Oblivion

It was in 2015 when the lawyer Randol Schoenberg sent me a copy of a contract that not only embargoed access to, but also any information on the musical estate of Hans Winterberg. It also expressly forbade any reference to Winterberg as a Jew.  Originally, there was a financial penalty attached to this condition that was subsequently removed. The contract was agreed in 2002 between a publicly funded institution called the Sudeten German Music Institute and someone named Christoph Winterberg. Another extraordinary condition in the contract was that Winterberg was always to be referred to as a “Sudeten German composer”. This was under the assumption that people would even know, remember or care about Winterberg after having locked his music away for forty years after his death. The contract had been sent to Randol Schoenberg by Peter Kreitmeir, Hans Winterberg’s grandson. After publication of the contract on this blog, journalists delved into how such an agreement was possible in modern (officially, at least) de-Nazified Germany in 2002. Under media pressure, Christoph Winterberg and the Sudeten German Music Institute removed the embargo and Christoph Winterberg handed all of the Winterberg rights to Kreitmeir.  Winterberg’s music could once again be heard. And this “once again” is important because after Winterberg’s arrival in Germany in 1947 and until his death in 1991, his works were a regular feature for both performance and broadcast by Bavarian Radio.

Contract between the Sudeten German Music Institute and Christoph Winterberg, signed 2. Sept. 2002

In those very early days following the lifting of the embargo, there was significant confusion as to who Hans Winterberg was and the nature of his story.  Initially, we believed Winterberg was a Sudeten German who like millions of other German-speaking Czechs had been forcibly expatriated and removed from Czechoslovakia following the Beneš Decrees of 1945.  They arrived in their millions in defeated Germany where circumstance were hardly welcoming.

The American composer and academic Daniel Asia read my account on Winterberg and was instantly determined to be the first to revive Winterberg’s music after the lifting of the embargo. Winterberg was incorporated into his 2016 “Composer Festival” at incredibly short notice. Members of the music faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson took on the job of taking Winterberg’s manuscripts and putting them into music programs that made them more legible.  This was a challenge as a great deal of editorial input was also required, but the members of the music faculty along with the Amernet Quartet were outstanding musicians who were also adept at putting the material into order despite having to refer to often difficult to read manuscripts. For the Americans, and all of us attending the festival, it was a genuine discovery.  I can never forget the enthusiastic response of the audience following the Amernet’s breath taking performance of Winterberg’s Third Quartet. It wasn’t just a standing ovation, the audience was catapulted from their seats with the sheer excitement generated by the work.

Recordings were soon released by Toccata Classics by the Arizona performers. Even if research into Winterberg’s musical estate was still in its infancy, meaning the recordings did not, indeed, due to lack of archival material, could not represent Winterberg’s final thoughts, the performances themselves are so strong and flawlessly performed that they already exceeded the historic broadcasts from Bavarian Radio. Toccata also managed a release of two volumes of the piano works. There is hardly an area of “classical music” that has remained so static as the piano repertoire with Prokofiev and Shostakovich being possibly the last significant contributors to the genre. First came a recording by the French pianist Christophe Sirodeau of Winterberg’s Theresienstadt Suite. There soon followed two CDs with pianist Brigitte Helbig. And coming shortly on EDA, a recording of the piano sonatas with Jonathan Powell. All of these can confirm Winterberg’s important contribution to the piano repertoire. The names behind these early supporters and believers are really too numerous, but without their input and dedication, Winterberg’s significance would have gone unnoticed. These facilitators did not just consist of the musicians but the recording and label executives who produced and released the CDs mostly at personal expense. In today’s market, this is proof that with Winterberg, we are dealing with a true twentieth century phenomenon. Winterberg was not just an important composer, but he represented the post-Janáček generation, perhaps even more idiomatically than Martinů.

In the meantime, there have been surprising developments in digging out the facts of the Winterberg story, most of which I already covered in my Winterberg article.  But to summarise, Winterberg was by no means or manner of speaking a “Sudeten German”.  His fourth wife, Luise Maria (née Pfeifer), was a Sudeten German and the afore mentioned Christoph Winterberg was her son, born in 1946, whose biological father was a member of the SS.  Winterberg took the decision to adopt Christoph when he was already an adult and living independently. Winterberg adopted Christoph on the advice of Luise Maria, in recognition of the fact that his own daughter Ruth, was now so estranged as to be an unreliable custodian of his legacy. Winterberg’s first wife, Maria Maschat, Ruth’s mother was also a composer whose musical estate was destroyed following Ruth’s death.  In hindsight, leaving Christoph as heir and executor was questionable, but ultimately it was a wise decision that saved his work. Nobody at the time could have predicted Christoph’s complex issues concerning his own identity as a Sudeten German and as the adopted son a Jew. The story of Christoph Winterberg is complex and tragic. It remains a parable of much that was un-spoken in post-war German life.   

Christoph sold the Winterberg musical estate to the Sudeten German Music Institute for a paltry 6,000DM or about $2900. Fascinating that the contract was signed in September 2002 with the amount expressed Deutschmarks when Germany had already introduced the euro. In any case, the Sudeten German Music Institute currently maintains the position that with this purchase, it is the legal owner of the estate. Ruth’s son and therefore Hans Winterberg’s grandson, Peter Kreitmeir disputes this on the basis that A) in light of the antisemitic condition of sale, it was acquired in bad faith and B), more to the point, Hans Winterberg, a Jew from Prague was no more of a “Sudeten German” than Franz Kafka or Franz Werfel.  The intended embargo was malicious and could have removed Winterberg’s legacy entirely had it remained in place until January 1. 2031.  When the question of ownership was put to the Bavarian court, all manner of compromises were put forward, none of which the Sudeten German Music Institute agreed to follow. 

Kreitmeir who had neither the means nor the emotional wherewithal to pursue matters any further had already taken the precaution of making high-resolution scans of every scrap of paper found in the Sudeten German Music Archive and deposited these with the Exilarte Center at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts. Frank Harders of the publisher Boosey & Hawkes suggested a joint publication venture between Exilarte and Boosey & Hawkes. It is due to Harder’s tireless focus on Winterberg that interest has grown, recordings and performances are taking place.

So far, a number or orchestral works and a good deal of Winterberg’s chamber music have been edited and published. The chamber music is an excellent entry point for Winterberg because it is a genre that accompanied him from his early promising days in Prague through to his subsequent immigration to Germany. Hopefully, the music examples on this page will illustrate the characteristics of Winterberg as a representative of the post-Janáček generation of Czech, rather than “Sudeten German” composers.  Janáček explained that his individual rhythmic constructions were based on the Czech language. In any case, polyrhythm is certainly a characteristic one finds in Winterberg, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Gideon Klein. Added to rhythmic complexity, which in itself generates engagement with listeners and performers, is the use of quite organic lyricism. Indeed, one can even view this as emotional counterpoint, often using melodies that resemble folk tunes intertwined and accompanied by syncopations and polyrhythms. Winterberg takes these ideas beyond the conventional two beats-against-three, and adds the further Janáčekian touch of abruptness: a thematic idea cut off, a melody that takes flight in an unexpected direction or the application of the musical equivalent of the handbrake and a juddering halt. 

Interwar Modernism in Prague was perhaps closer to Paris than it was to Berlin or Vienna. Its application of the absurd, Dada and surrealism is more typically Slavic than Germanic. Winterberg was too creative and imaginative to allow his musical ideas to be constrained by French neo-classicism.  His chamber works often resemble the musical equivalent of a necklace made up of different coloured stones. The stones are perfect on their own but unthinkable if randomly thrown together. Once they are organised in an intelligent sequence, however, the necklace comes across as its own perfectly crafted work. With Winterberg, one automatically assumes upon hearing a new idea that it must be an inversion or a variation of something that has gone before only to be catapulted into the next, totally unexpected musical thought.  The magic of rhythmic complexity holds the heterogenic material together and like the necklace of different coloured stones, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  

Boosey & Hawkes and the Exilarte Center are in constant contact with musicians in the hope of taking on Winterberg’s substantial orchestral works. The strongest of these sit comfortably with Bartók and Martinů. The discovery and recovery of Hans Winterberg can be compared with the recovery of Mieczysław Weinberg. It was not just the discovery of an important, distinctive voice, but the recovery of a lost chapter of music in the twentieth century.