Is a Work’s Composer Always the Best Judge?

The question in the title of this entry is down to my near obsession with a recording made by the baritone Christian Immler with pianist Helmut Deutsch of works that Hans Gál “discarded”. Thank goodness, he couldn’t bring himself to destroy them. They were simply placed in large envelops with the word “Weggelegt” on the outside. Shortly before his death in 1987, he assured Leo Black in an interview that “Weggelgt” meant requiescant in pace – RIP. And yet, how wrong he was. Anyone coming to Gál for the first time would find these discarded, unpublished songs the finest of entry-points into Gál’s understated,  unique beauty. The question of what the composer considered an important work and what would stand the test of time are two entirely different things. And yet listening to these Lieder and comparing them with his string quartet from 1916, I’m struggling to understand why one was discarded and the other kept. Gál had a melodic genius that allowed him to write something that sounded both new and familiar at the same time.

My generation, born in the decade following the war had the good fortune to grow up surrounded by previous generations who experienced the dizzying changes of the twentieth century. One of my grandmothers told me how frightened she was the first time she was driven in a car. From car to air and space travel, progress was what the previous century was all about and inevitably it took its toll on the arts as well. More than once, I have returned to Julius Korngold’s 1901 feuilleton published on the front page of the ‘Neue Freie Presse’, the Habsburg paper of record. The headline over the essay was the Modern in Music. His first sentence opens with: “What’s ‘modern’ in music? Well, the question itself.” No writer, painter or musician came away without the heavy burden of having to ‘move forward’. Few had a clear concept where ‘forward’ might be. During such dynamic years, direction and development were one and the same. Essentially, everyone made up their own idea of where ‘forward’ could be found and composed accordingly. It led to a fascinating plurality of options throughout the first half of the last century. Avoiding stagnation is fundamentally a good thing. One can cite any number of instances of composers from Donizetti to Rossini to Lloyd-Weber attempting to ‘move forward’ only to be drawn back to previous formulas. Everyone who is successfully creative finds themselves stuck in a market that demands, “We want what you wrote last year…only different. Only… not TOO different!” Is it any wonder that trying to escape such a gerbil wheel, composers decide their ‘best’ works are the ones everyone else decided were ‘too different’ from what they had previously written?

Another characteristic of my generation was to be more or less ten to fifteen years different in age from the children of prominent composers born in the nineteenth century and productive in the early twentieth. As music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum, I’ll never forget the number of times I heard the offspring of composers tell me that such-and-such was the work their father (and in some instances) mother believed to be their ‘most important’/’best’/’most significant’. With constant pressure applied to ‘move on, and keep changing’ these works almost always represent the transformative moment when a composer broke loose from what they believed to be idiomatic and stylistic chains.

Gál never claimed to belong to the most advanced front of the avant-garde. He was unapologetically part of the Austro-German mainstream, and the mainstream demanded a distinctive voice that could be heard and appreciated on aesthetic and intellectual levels in the way that Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse were in twentieth century German literature. In a century so lumbered with the obligation to progress, without any clear direction as to where ‘progress’ might lead, Gál obviously wanted to develop and worried some of his best works were too representative of the Brahmsian mainstream that dominated Vienna at the time, and less representative of Hans Gál, the composer. And here we come to an important point: ‘conventional’ and ‘mainstream’ only appear to have become pejorative after the Second World War when it was assumed it was the ‘mainstream’ that had cossetted the aesthetics of authoritarianism.

In Gál’s case, he had studied with Brahms’s close friend Eusebio Mandyczewski, with whom he co-edited the first critical edition of Brahms’s works. Why this is significant can be partially explained in two lectures given by Gál’s contemporary Egon Wellesz. In a lecture at Oxford’s Lincoln College, he stated the composer who dominated the end of the nineteenth- and early twentieth century was Johannes Brahms. In another lecture given in Vienna in 1961 in German, he said the same thing, only instead of Brahms, he cited Gustav Mahler as the defining musical voice of the period.  

This was a duality that inevitably must have weighed on Gál. He was not alone in seeing Brahms as the aesthetic North Star. Vienna was full of Brahms disciples such as Richard Stöhr or Robert Fuchs, the teacher of Mahler and Zemlinsky.  Both had composition classes that tended to encourage a Brahmsian, Hegelian purity. Early works by Schoenberg or Schreker or even Ernst Toch (also a Fuchs pupil) sound like Brahmsian epigons. Gál sounds like Gál, but the shadow of Brahms hovered over him to an extent he felt inhibited his further development.

I’ve listened to experts and family members tell me that Christophorus was Schreker’s greatest work, or König Kandalus Zemlinsky’s ultimate masterpiece, or Die Harmonie der Welt, Hindemith’s life-changing triumph or Love Life, the greatest stage work Kurt Weill ever wrote. What these important operas have in common is a break with the past, even if there’s a partial return to the tried and true later on. Even Erich Wolfgang Korngold was convinced that his Sursum Corda was his finest orchestral work. The public was reluctant to agree, only strengthening Korngold’s resolve. Such was the tyranny of moving forward in a century in which continuity equalled compliance if not outright subjugation. Certainly, after the defeat of Hitler, this was the message that permeated every Western university music department and conservatory. Composers such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian were often dismissed as apologists for repressive governments that didn’t allow artists the freedom to experiment, grow and develop. Yet Hanns Eisler, writing from East Germany declared that what the west called musical progress was in fact ‘nihilistic’. Listening to the aleatoric, prepared pianos jangling with car keys and lightbulbs, electronic feedback and magnetic tapes played backwards – not to mention string quartets performed in four helicopters, who could with hindsight argue otherwise? I’ve just heard a concert that presented Szymon Laks’s quintet for piano and strings based on Polish folk themes from 1967. No doubt this gorgeous work would also have been dismissed by the great and good teaching composition in American and Western European elite institutions, as a musical codification for tyranny.  I predict it will have more performances than Stockhausen’s Quartet for helicopters. The search for progress without a clear idea of where one was progressing, truly was ‘nihilistic’.

Nor would I be so bold as to say Gál was composing in a world in which Arnold Schönberg was the Karl Heinz Stockhausen of his day. Schönberg knew where he was going in his search for the music of tomorrow. I’m not sure the same can be said for the sound-design experiments that came out of Yale, Cologne, Hamburg, downtown Manhattan or Darmstadt in the 1950s and 1960s. Listening to electronic pulses with a direct input cello improvising was no doubt, ‘exciting’, to use the language of the time, but it failed in providing the linear comprehension that Schönberg himself was capable of.

And we return to these early works by Gál – each one a jewel – bullied off the play ground by bolder and bigger kids writing bolder and bigger music for tomorrow. This was taking place when Gál was growing more and more concerned that what he was writing wasn’t standing out in an ocean of Brahmsian sound-alikes. Gál heard and admired Mahler and with hindsight, it’s understandable that these wonderful early works may have felt to be lacking in individuality, while with the ears of today, one can easily attest that each of these Lieder could only have been composed by Hans Gál.

After nearly forty years of working in the recording studio as producer, I’ve avoided writing about CDs on this blog. But this particular release, produced by Gál’s grandson Simon Fox-Gál could hardly be bettered. In addition to the excellent audio, Gál’s unpublished, “Weggelegt” Lieder gain enormously with the performances by Christain Immler and Helmut Deutsch. Immler, whom I have known for a long time, is a singer whose voice is not just unusually beautiful, but flexible and augmented by interpretive intelligence. This results in the listener never experiencing the voice-fatigue that often occurs after 70 or 80 minutes of hearing the same vocal timbre. Hopefully, there might be a vol. 2 of Gál’s “Weggelegt” Lieder.  Helmut Deutsch has long been an institution in the field of art-song accompaniment.  He’s not just a lied-expert who can play the piano, but a pianist who also happens to be an expert – perhaps the expert – in the genre. It was his knowledge of the repertoire and recognition of the quality of these early works along with his powers of persuasion that freed them from their RIP status.

The CD is completed with Immler’s third recording of the five Lieder of Gál’s op. 33. He’s justified in his belief in these works. They need to be heard and heard again in order to enter the recital repertoire, which is where they rightfully belong.