 Ernest Toch
Naxos 8.559716
Spectrum Concerts Berlin
Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer, Clarinet
Annette von Hehn, Violin
Hartmut Rohde, Viola
Jens
Peter Maintz, cello
Katya Apekisheva, Piano
04/2014
Total Playing Time : 1:17:25 |
Trio à cordes, op.63
I. Allegro 9:17
II. Adagio 8:47
III. Allegro 8:15Adagio Elegiaco 3:36
Sonate pour violoncelle, op.50
I. Allegro commodo 4:39
II. Intermezzo, "Die Spinne": Andante 5:21
III. Allegro 3:08
Divertimento, Op. 37, No. 1
I. Flott 3:00
II. Fliessend, sehr zart 2:16
III. Frisch 1:40
Sonate pour violon n°1, op.21
I. Allegro non troppo 11:28
II. Adagio non troppo 8:02
III. Allegro giocoso 7:56 |
| This program documents almost four decades of Ernst
Toch’s artistic development. Referred to by his friends as ‘Brahms’s Fourth’,
Toch’s First Violin Sonata wears its 19th century heritage on
its sleeve but marks the end of the composer’s early period. The
Divertimento and Cello Sonata were written when he was at his
most productive in the 1920s, while the passionate String Trio is the
work of an exile determined not to compromise a style declared ‘asphalt
music’ by the Nazis. The Adagio elegiaco commemorates the many
relatives and friends Toch lost to the Holocaust. Other chamber works can be
heard on Naxos 8.559282 and 8.559324, of which ClassicsToday.com
wrote, ‘Spectrum Concerts Berlin provides committed and powerfully rendered
performances, all captured in first-rate sound.’ |
Survey of the Life of a Creative Artist
This is Spectrum Concerts Berlin’s third recording of chamber music by Ernst
Toch. Its musicians give concerts above all in Berlin and New York and are
passionate about exploring and highlighting the cultural links between Europe
and America. As part of this focus, they revive works by composers who had
successful careers that were cut short when they were driven into exile by the
Nazis. Spectrum has played a major part in bringing about the revival of
interest in Ernst Toch in recent years.
This recording documents almost four decades of Toch’s artistic development,
from his early Violin Sonata, written before the First World War, to the
commemorative Adagio elegiaco, whose composition heralded the renewed
creative impulse of the 1950s and 1960s. It shows a composer who maintained an
intense dialogue with the world around him: with the musical trends current at
any given time and with cultural trends, but also with the course and
catastrophes of history.
Toch realised his ambition of becoming a musician against his parents’ wishes,
teaching himself composition by transcribing Mozart string quartets and noting
exactly how they were “made”, for instance, and by producing compositions based
on themes by classical composers, then comparing the results with the works of
the great masters themselves. Using this methodology, he made such good progress
that in 1909, at the age of 22, he won the city of Frankfurt’s Mozart Prize,
which included a grant for a year’s study at university. It was during this
period that he developed an ability to absorb ideas quickly, adapting them to
his own purposes and using them as a springboard for developing new ideas of his
own. He approached tradition as Goethe urged his readers to in Faust Part
I: “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!”—“Whatever
you have inherited from your forefathers you must earn for yourself, if it is to
be yours.”
From Toch’s Early Works: Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 21
The First Violin Sonata, which Toch’s friends used to refer to as
“Brahms’s Fourth”, was a product of this understanding of tradition. Two reasons
lie behind its jocular nickname. Stylistically speaking, Toch’s Op. 21
takes its cue from Brahms. But it also rounds off the latter’s three sonatas in
G major, D minor and A major—keys whose tonics each correspond to one of the
open strings of the violin—with one in E major, whose tonic corresponds to the
uppermost open string of the instrument. The Brahms connection should not be
overworked, however; Toch’s generation had no choice but to model its chamber
music on Brahms. Who else was there? Apart from Bruckner’s String Quintet,
the New German School around Liszt and Wagner produced no chamber music of any
historical consequence.
Toch’s Sonata No. 1 is close to the violin sonatas of Max Reger
(1873–1916), and perhaps also Karl Weigl (1881–1949). Like theirs, it observes
classical structure quite strictly in its sequence of themes and their
development, but introduces a greater internal freedom through the use of
colouristic passages in the piano part (first movement), dramatic interjections
(second movement), and interpolations such as the Andante central section of the
finale. The Sonata was written shortly after the period of study that the
Mozart Prize grant enabled Toch to undertake, and shortly before he took up a
teaching post at the Musikhochschule (University of Music) in Mannheim, and it
marks the end of his early-period work, which wears its nineteenth-century
heritage on its sleeve. Fundamental characteristics of his future compositional
style are just as much in evidence, however: formal clarity and liveliness,
voice-leading that creates a network of equal parts, his understanding of light
and shade in the tonal organisation of the piece.
Music from the 1920s: the Divertimento and the Cello Sonata
The duo Divertimentos, Op. 37, and the Cello Sonata, Op. 50
, were written in 1927 and 1929, during what was probably Toch’s most
productive period. In them, he engaged in a creative dialogue with his artistic
milieu in two ways: in the music itself and in the dedications of the pieces.
The Cello Sonata he dedicated to Emanuel Feuerman and the Op. 37
duos to the Vienna String Quartet, which at that time still comprised Rudolf
Kolisch (violin I), Fritz Rothschild (violin II), Marcel Dick (viola) and
Joachim Stutschewsky (cello). All of these musicians left Germany or Austria.
Most of them emigrated to the United States, as Toch did; Stutschewsky went to
Palestine (which would later become Israel). The Divertimentos are
composed in such a way that all the members of the quartet get to play: No. 1 is
for violin and cello (the two outer parts), No. 2 for violin and viola (the two
inner parts). When performed one after the other they ought, logically, to be
followed by a quartet.
In the Divertimentos and the Cello Sonata, Toch engages with
the classical three-movement form of the sonata. In the first movement of
Divertimento No. 1 the urgent first subject with its moving triads is
answered by a cantabile second subject. Both are stated at length then,
in the following section (which corresponds to the development section in
classical sonata form), they are extended, clothed in richer tone colours,
transformed into disconcertingly beautiful polyphony, subjected to canonic
tricks, and crossed over themselves. Each is kept separate and given its own
space, however. In the third section, the recapitulation, Toch omits the return
of the second subject, which was treated at length in the central section.
The Cello Sonata opens with an apparently innocuous theme stated
simply by the piano. This is taken up by the cello, before finally appearing in
the lower register of the piano as well. The movement has various layers of
narrative, through which the theme makes its way. It is structured like a fugue,
but also like a sequence of variations—everything revolves around the one theme:
the passages of heightened motion and power, the ebbing away, the way in which
the movement dissolves at the end. Classical forms are here no longer normative;
they have become the subject of the composition.
Toch headed the central movements of both works “intermezzo”, but they
are anything but short intermezzos or interludes. Toch employs the term in the
late Brahmsian sense, as a deliberate understatement, indicating a particular
limitation of the musical material. The pieces grow out of a short initial idea,
which Toch immediately makes more complex, turning it, paradoxically, into a
kind of open circling; the basic motifs rotate, changing in length, structure,
proportions and inner propulsion.
the third movements. In the finale of the Divertimento, Op. 37, No.
1, a hyped-up march rhythm morphs into a perpetuum mobile, which suddenly
breaks off with amusing arbitrariness. The last movement of the Cello
Sonata is reminiscent of music for a ballet mécanique. In its strict
tempo, its subtle allusion to dances then in vogue and in the way he plays with
classical forms, Toch unites characteristic traits of the kind of urbane music
cultivated in France by composers such as Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and
the American George Antheil, in Germany by Stefan Wolpe and in Hindemith’s early
work, and in Russia above all by the young Shostakovich. The Nazis declared war
on it when they coined the term “Asphaltkultur” (“asphalt music”).
Exile and in memoriam: the String Trio and the Adagio elegiaco
On 1 December 1942 Anneliese Landau, who had once been the leading light
behind the Jüdische Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Foundation) in Berlin and had
emigrated to London in 1939 and to the United States at the beginning of 1940,
sent a letter to Ernst Toch, asking him about various biographical matters and
questions of principle. With regard to the former, Toch replied on 18 December
1942: “I left Germany in April 1933 and went to London where I lived until
September 1934. […] I came to USA upon a call of the New School of Social
Research in September 1934 and taught composition there for two years. In August
1936 I went to California. I am teaching composition (occupying the Alchin-chair)
at the University of Southern California.” (The two of them corresponded in
English.) That year (1936), with his first Hollywood film score under his belt
and a second in the pipeline, Toch wrote his String Trio, Op. 63. It is
the work of an exile in that it both helped its creator to regain his sense of
equilibrium and in the way in which it went unheeded. It was not published until
1955, and was Toch’s first experience of what Ernst Krenek once described as
“the unresponsiveness (Echolosigkeit) of the American milieu”, and it
affected him deeply. But above all it bolstered the composer’s confidence in his
own approach to composition. Anyone who had been driven into exile by the Nazis
had every reason to hold fast to their style and not give it up, even if it
didn’t meet with any immediate positive response.
Like the Divertimentos and the Cello Sonata, the String Trio
is in three movements. As in the other works, the form of the first movement
grows out of varied circulations of its basic motif. But Toch’s music is more
emotional, harsher, more passionate. In places, the thematic development
threatens to break out of the circle, as though there were centrifugal forces at
work. The second movement is no longer headed “Intermezzo” and is almost as long
as the first. Toch develops it out of a fabric of cantabile lines, some
long-spun, others almost shoe horned in. He brings them to a climax of excited
activity, where the parts seem to go their own ways. Here, too, there are
centrifugal forces in play. In the finale, passages of suspended motion make the
vitality of the 1920s feel broken, while on the other hand it is rendered more
intense by a greater compositional complexity. In the middle the music almost
fades out, withdrawing into the depths of a cello solo. After this, the reprise
of the opening motif begins almost like a film edit.
In 1948 Toch suffered a severe heart attack. “Once he had recovered, he began
to write with a fresh sense of purpose”, writes Charlotte Erwin. “For the first
time in his life, he essayed a symphony.” The first work he completed, however,
in Zurich on 15 October 1950, was the Adagio elegiaco. It is headed
“Greetings to Grete and Hans Fuchs”. The entire piece is based on a motif
derived from those letters of the family surname that could be rendered in
German musical notation: F, C, H, Es (pronounced “S”)—English F, C, B natural, E
flat. The sequence is quoted verbatim eleven times, and Toch flagged it eight
times in the printed edition. The Adagio is a commemorative piece whose
title recalls other musical hommages like Rachmaninov’s Trio élégiaque
or Ferruccio Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque. It was written by a
composer who suffered greatly from having been unable to save many of his
relatives and friends from the Holocaust.
Habakuk Traber
English translation by Susan Baxter