German pianist and musicologist Herbert Henck has won much critical acclaim for his ECM recordings of works by important 20th- century composers such as Cage, Antheil, Mosolov, Mompou or Hans Otte and will receive a special prize for his lifetime achievement at this year’s Ernst von Siemens Preis. His new album offers world premier recordings of the surviving piano works by two masters about whose lives and careers almost nothing was known for more than half a century. Both of them adopted the twelve-tone system but while Johann Ludwig Trepulka (1903- 1945) followed the teachings of Josef Matthias Hauer, Norbert von Hannenheim (1898- 1945) took his inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg. The CD booklet includes an insightful essay on both composers and their respective works.
Johann Ludwig Trepulka / Norbert von Hannenheim: Klavierstücke und Sonaten
Herbert Henck
- Klavierstücke mit Überschriften nach Worten von Nicolaus Lenau op. 2
- 1I. Und mit den Wellen ziehen verhüllte Melodieen.03:45
- 2II. O rüttle nicht den Stolz vom Schlummer!03:31
- 3III. Weil' auf mir, du dunkles Auge!02:51
- 4IV. Frühling kommt mit Duft und Gesang und Liebe.03:04
- 5V. O Menschenherz, was ist dein Glück!02:58
- 6VI. Schlaf, melodischer Freund, woher die Flöte?02:28
- 7VII. Im Osten hebt sich der klare Mond, und Gott bedecket den Himmel..05:35
- Klaviersonate No. 2
- 8I. Andante03:37
- 9II. Allegro molto vivace03:04
- Klaviersonate No. 4
- 10I. Allegretto01:42
- 11II. Allegro molto vivace02:22
- Klaviersonate No. 6
- 12I. Allegro vivace02:05
- 13II. Andante02:46
- 14III. Vivace02:24
- Klaviersonate No. 12
- 15I. Adagio05:32
- 16II. Allegro04:01
- Konzert Nr. 2 für Klavier und kleines Orchester
- 17Satz II - Molto lento03:37
Die CD vereint Werke von zwei Schülern der Zwölftonrivalen und bietet eine sensationelle Doppelentdeckung. … Ihre Namen sind Johann Ludwig Trepulka und Norbert von Hannenheim, und ihre Musik hat in Herbert Henck einen Interpreten gefunden, der schon häufiger den mainstream erbleichen ließ. Wer das erste Klavierstück von Hauers einzigem Schüler Trepulka einfach so hört, unbelesen, wird nie und nimmer auf Zwölftonmusik tippen. … Fern von Leerlauf und Zufall leuchten die Tonkombinationen unter Hencks phänomenal sensiblen Händen, ob schlichtes Dur oder clusternahe Mehrklänge. …
Als Henck auf seinen Namen stieß, war Trepulka vollkommen vergessen. Und ebenso Norbert von Hannenheim, der einer völlig entgegengesetzten Ästhetik folgt. … Tatsächlich sprüht bei Hannenheim der Geist, als stünden sämtliche Synapsen unter Strom. Atemberaubend ist die Vielfalt dessen, was gleichzeitig geschieht, in größter Klarheit, oft mit jazzigem Schwung.
Volker Hagedorn, Die Zeit
Johann Ludwig Trepulka und Norbert von Hannenheim haben vieles gemeinsam, vor allem aber eines: Ihr Leben und Wirken wäre wohl unbekannt geblieben, hätte Herbert Henck sich nicht wieder als Archäologe der musikalischen Moderne betätigt. … Herbert Henck offenbart hier in ungemein ausdrucksvollen Interpretationen, dass ihm diese Komponisten eine Herzensangelegenheit sind, und lässt nicht die geringsten Zweifel an der lyrischen Schönheit und immensen Musikalität dieser Klavierstücke.
Dirk Wieschollek, Fono Forum
Henck führt mit dieser Einspielung den Beweis, dass Trepulka ein begnadeter Aphoristiker war, der es verstand, die expressionistische Syntax und Aura der Lenau-Gedichte mit aparten Intervallspannungen abzubilden. … Jedes Stück ist nicht mehr und nicht weniger als ein Mikrokosmos. Ähnlich verhält es sich bei Hannenheim, wenn auch unter anderen Vorzeichen: Hannenheim meidet die geschmeidig fließende Melodie, wo es nur geht. Er liebt den rauen Rhythmus, den dialektischen Moment, in dem das absolut Mechanistische ins Lyrische kippt. Wäre Hannenheim Schriftsteller geworden, er hätte an der Geschichte des modernen Romans mitgeschrieben. Henck spielt seine Musik und die Trepulkas als Verwandter im Geiste und ihm Gefühl.
Annette Eckerle, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
Hatte auf den aus Siebenbürgen stammenden Norbert von Hannenheim schon der Musikkonzepte-Band „Arnold Schönbergs Berliner Schule“ hingewiesen, so ist Johann Ludwig Trepulka vollends eine Entdeckung. … In deutlicher Anlehnung an Hauers „Klavierstücke mit Überschriften…“ schrieb Trepulka seine „Klavierstücke mit Überschriften…“ – quasi Meditationen, zu denen die Titel, ähnlich wie bei Debussys „Preludes“, in eher vager Beziehung stehen. Die Stücke klingen erstaunlich tonal, ja bisweilen diatonisch, kaum dissonant: sanft schwebende, in sich kreisende, oft homophone Klang-Mobiles. Einheitlich und differenziert zugleich, haben sie ihren ganz eigenen Ton. Norbert von Hannenheims knappe Sonaten verraten Schönbergs Einfluss gleichermaßen markant in der linearen Strenge, der dissonierenden Schärfe, zwölftöniger Verzahnung und kontrapunktischer Energetik. Auch bei diesen Stücken erlebt man eine persönliche kompositorische Physiognomie. Es ist kein geringes Verdienst Hencks, die wenigen, noch erhaltenen Noten dieser beiden wahrhaft „Verlorenen“ ausfindig gemacht zu haben.
Gerhard R. Koch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
In your new recording you mostly play music by two little known twelve-note composers, one a pupil of Josef Matthias Hauer, the other a Schoenberg pupil. The works date from the 1920s, but they sound almost diametrically opposed.
Hauer and Schoenberg invented their twelve-note systems independently but almost simultaneously around 1920. Schoenberg’s aimed to avoid tonal sonorities wherever possible, which gives his music its often highly dissonant and acerbic flavour. Things were different with Hauer: octaves are allowed, and tonal harmony is not forbidden; at times, thanks to his employment of triads, it even stands in the foreground. When I started to play Hauer’s piano music I often had to count the notes to see if it really was twelve-note music. Yet Hauer, with his ‘tropes’, mathematically systematised the myriad ways of these twelve notes can be combined and handled them with increasing rigor as his career progressed. Hauer’s sound is thus much more familiar than Schoenberg’s, but his structure is just as rigorous.
As we know, Schoenberg had important and famous disciples. Is there a ‘Hauer school’?
Schoenberg drew special attention after the war – he’d been persecuted and thrown out of the Berlin Academy, a victim of Nazism. Hauer, you might say, was less favoured by history, though he too was blacklisted. Because his music was judged on the basis of verbal reports, he was lumped together with the atonalists, and a symphony of his was displayed in the ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition. Hauer’s output definitely overshadows Schoenberg’s in purely quantitative terms, and a lot of it still remains unpublished today. For far too long modern music was lopsidedly equated with atonality and dissonance. This overlooks a chapter of the 1920s that has never been properly examined by historians and that many people today are still not aware of.
What people are most likely aware of is the famous question of who came up with the twelve-note technique first – actually a secondary issue ...
True, that goes back to Schoenberg, who said in a letter of 1923 that he was afraid of being considered a Hauer imitator. Schoenberg came later in committing his ideas to paper, and he published them later than Hauer, but of course he gained a much wider hearing.
Could Trepulka be called an orthodox Hauer disciple?
We mustn’t forget that he was in his early twenties when he wrote these pieces, and thus stood at the outset of his artistic evolution. So naturally he was more closely attached to his teacher. On the other hand, in one of his writings Hauer himself claimed in 1923 that Trepulka had already achieved great mastery at the age of twenty, Basically I chose these pieces only because I like them a lot. I think I would have played them even if they weren’t dodecaphonic or didn’t come from the Hauer school.
What we’ve got here is Trepulka’s complete surviving output for piano. Have any other works by him survived?
Yes, there’s a big symphonic poem of 1937, Die Göttliche. It’s dedicated to the ‘divine’ Greta Garbo and was premièred by Vienna Radio at the time. The performance was even recorded. There are also a couple of scores owned by Trepulka’s son Johannes, orchestral and chamber pieces, but nothing for solo piano. In contrast, von Hannenheim wrote huge amounts of music for piano. Only a small part of it survives, pieces written roughly between 1929 and 1932, and thus in a fairly short span of time that can hardly illustrate his artistic evolution.
You’ve just written a big book on von Hannenheim that’s about to be published.
True, but not in the form of a chronological biography. It’s in six long chapters dealing with unknown or imperfectly explained aspects. Thanks to detailed research I can show, for example, that he died shortly after the war and not, as previously assumed, a few months earlier in the Obrawalde euthanasia facility. One chapter deals with the critical year 1932, when he won several major prizes but suffered physical and mental collapse with deliriums and hallucinations. Another discusses the search for his countless lost works. We know that his friends deposited a lot of them in a bank safe because von Hannenheim was always changing residence and probably showed signs of mental illness. I was able to find out which bank it probably was. We can assume that Russian soldiers cleared out the safe when they occupied Berlin and possibly used the material as heating fuel. Another possibility is that the musical manuscripts were carted off to the Soviet Union as war booty; after all, anything stored in a safe must have some value. I’ve written to countless institutes in Russia but never received a positive reply. Conceivably there might still be a suitcase somewhere; after all, stray Bach and Mozart manuscripts still crop up today. We can only hope, though the likelihood isn’t very great.
The piano repertoire, even the 20th century’s, is huge both quantitatively and qualitatively, yet time and again you manage to throw light on its hidden crannies. Are you trying to fill in the blank spaces on the map, or are you searching for previously ignored ‘missing links’?
Something like this can’t be planned in advance. Usually it involves accidental discoveries I make while studying history. Whether I like the discoveries enough to really want to play them is another question. I make that decision as a musician, though here too certain basic priorities apply. The music must have a definite originality, honesty and truthfulness. I wouldn’t want to play the music of a Nazi, for example, even if I liked it, for I couldn’t separate it from the nightmare of history. In that sense, it’s not only the notes that count.
Interview: Anselm Cybinski
Hauer and Schoenberg invented their twelve-note systems independently but almost simultaneously around 1920. Schoenberg’s aimed to avoid tonal sonorities wherever possible, which gives his music its often highly dissonant and acerbic flavour. Things were different with Hauer: octaves are allowed, and tonal harmony is not forbidden; at times, thanks to his employment of triads, it even stands in the foreground. When I started to play Hauer’s piano music I often had to count the notes to see if it really was twelve-note music. Yet Hauer, with his ‘tropes’, mathematically systematised the myriad ways of these twelve notes can be combined and handled them with increasing rigor as his career progressed. Hauer’s sound is thus much more familiar than Schoenberg’s, but his structure is just as rigorous.
As we know, Schoenberg had important and famous disciples. Is there a ‘Hauer school’?
Schoenberg drew special attention after the war – he’d been persecuted and thrown out of the Berlin Academy, a victim of Nazism. Hauer, you might say, was less favoured by history, though he too was blacklisted. Because his music was judged on the basis of verbal reports, he was lumped together with the atonalists, and a symphony of his was displayed in the ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition. Hauer’s output definitely overshadows Schoenberg’s in purely quantitative terms, and a lot of it still remains unpublished today. For far too long modern music was lopsidedly equated with atonality and dissonance. This overlooks a chapter of the 1920s that has never been properly examined by historians and that many people today are still not aware of.
What people are most likely aware of is the famous question of who came up with the twelve-note technique first – actually a secondary issue ...
True, that goes back to Schoenberg, who said in a letter of 1923 that he was afraid of being considered a Hauer imitator. Schoenberg came later in committing his ideas to paper, and he published them later than Hauer, but of course he gained a much wider hearing.
Could Trepulka be called an orthodox Hauer disciple?
We mustn’t forget that he was in his early twenties when he wrote these pieces, and thus stood at the outset of his artistic evolution. So naturally he was more closely attached to his teacher. On the other hand, in one of his writings Hauer himself claimed in 1923 that Trepulka had already achieved great mastery at the age of twenty, Basically I chose these pieces only because I like them a lot. I think I would have played them even if they weren’t dodecaphonic or didn’t come from the Hauer school.
What we’ve got here is Trepulka’s complete surviving output for piano. Have any other works by him survived?
Yes, there’s a big symphonic poem of 1937, Die Göttliche. It’s dedicated to the ‘divine’ Greta Garbo and was premièred by Vienna Radio at the time. The performance was even recorded. There are also a couple of scores owned by Trepulka’s son Johannes, orchestral and chamber pieces, but nothing for solo piano. In contrast, von Hannenheim wrote huge amounts of music for piano. Only a small part of it survives, pieces written roughly between 1929 and 1932, and thus in a fairly short span of time that can hardly illustrate his artistic evolution.
You’ve just written a big book on von Hannenheim that’s about to be published.
True, but not in the form of a chronological biography. It’s in six long chapters dealing with unknown or imperfectly explained aspects. Thanks to detailed research I can show, for example, that he died shortly after the war and not, as previously assumed, a few months earlier in the Obrawalde euthanasia facility. One chapter deals with the critical year 1932, when he won several major prizes but suffered physical and mental collapse with deliriums and hallucinations. Another discusses the search for his countless lost works. We know that his friends deposited a lot of them in a bank safe because von Hannenheim was always changing residence and probably showed signs of mental illness. I was able to find out which bank it probably was. We can assume that Russian soldiers cleared out the safe when they occupied Berlin and possibly used the material as heating fuel. Another possibility is that the musical manuscripts were carted off to the Soviet Union as war booty; after all, anything stored in a safe must have some value. I’ve written to countless institutes in Russia but never received a positive reply. Conceivably there might still be a suitcase somewhere; after all, stray Bach and Mozart manuscripts still crop up today. We can only hope, though the likelihood isn’t very great.
The piano repertoire, even the 20th century’s, is huge both quantitatively and qualitatively, yet time and again you manage to throw light on its hidden crannies. Are you trying to fill in the blank spaces on the map, or are you searching for previously ignored ‘missing links’?
Something like this can’t be planned in advance. Usually it involves accidental discoveries I make while studying history. Whether I like the discoveries enough to really want to play them is another question. I make that decision as a musician, though here too certain basic priorities apply. The music must have a definite originality, honesty and truthfulness. I wouldn’t want to play the music of a Nazi, for example, even if I liked it, for I couldn’t separate it from the nightmare of history. In that sense, it’s not only the notes that count.
Interview: Anselm Cybinski
