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December 04, 2008
Wolfgang von Schweinitz, "Variations on a Theme by Mozart)"
Variationen iiber ein Thema von Mozart(Variations on a Theme by Mozart)
In 1977 the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, in its concert series "Musik der Zeit" presented two "mini-festivals" on revealing topics. One of these, in January, was on "New Simvlicity". This was explained as follows: "New Simplicity refers to cross-connections beyond historical and geographical boundaries. It stands outside all categories of style and genre. The 'new' thing- about it is that it reflects the complications of serial and post-serial music, which forms a backdrop for its basic procedures. 'New Simplicity' means the close kinship of periodic music from the USA (Steve Reich) to gamelan and African music, of new European monophony (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Walter Zimmermann) to the musical tradition of Korea. 'New Simvlicity' is a stance towards contemporary music which can be observed in many different countries: the basic simplification of the sound and the displacement of complex structures into the 'interior' of musical forms and performance."
The second topic, obviously closely related to the first, was called "Encounters with Traditions". Here there was no confrontation between young composers and their immediate forebears such as Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono; instead they completely avoided these potential mentor figures and cast a backward glance a.t the great composers of the past. Several of them took up Beethoven and then Schubert - and not simply for extrinsic reasons such as centennial celebrations. They were seeking a foothold in the past which they could no longer find in the present.
One of the composers who probed deeply into both of these topics - and not just in 1977 - was Wolfgang von Schweinitz. As early as 1974 his search for new freedom in fixed forms as a response to aleatoric music and the "anything goes" attitude of the years immediately preceding had led him to write a piece for three winds and two strings with the revealing title "Motetus". Allegiance was pledged to the uncoinpromising "simplicity" of Morton Feldman. Monistic form united with strongly constructivist principles and novel harmonic and rhythmic constellations, resulting in clear sonorities which increased and decreased in density without sacrificing formal stability.
In Schweinitz's Second String Quartet op. 16 of 1978, an "Hommage A Franz Schubert", he took up what might be termed Schubert's early attempts to break the bonds of tonality. At first one has the impression one is sitting in an airplane 1isteni.ng to Schubert amidst the surrounding noise. Scarcely does the original appear than it is destroyed, rent asunder, rhythmically displaced, harmonically distorted. A feeling of despair is invoked as the composer compresses the layers of sound. sometimes cleverly, sometimes with heartringing expression. Exhausted, the piece ends in a fade-out of heightened tensions or, as the composer calls them, harmonic "pollutions".
In this work Schweinitz attempted to "think back to the music and expressive universe of late Schubert: images emerge as in the labyrinth of memory, their former utopian beauty now contorted and thus apparent only to the imagination". In later works he sought a "tension between the yearning for beauty and the awareness of an unresponsive and forbidding reality" and trcied to project a "message about the present world with its hypertrophized rationalism and materialism, a world in which our need to overcome our increasing alienation is becoming more and more urgent and less and less possible".
These words mark the composer. Wolfgang von Schwein, itz was born on 7 February 1953 in Hamburg, where he also received his first instruction in music. From 1973 to 1975 he studied with Gyorgy Ligeti. He then spent a year at the Center for Computer Research in Music at Stanford University, California. A further grant enabled him to spend 1978-9 at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Even before his term with Ligeti he had visited the USA, studying theory and composition with Esther Ballou at the American University in Washington, DC. He was made a fellow of the "Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes", and received the Hamburg Bach Prize and the Stuttgart Prize for Young Talent. When the city of Darmstadt celebrated its 650th anniversary Schweinitz wrote a concert overture which he referred to as a particularly radical "experiment in tonality as a utopian allegory of a non-alienated, psychically integrated harmonic language. Whereas in earlier works the harmonic progressions were subjected to a precompositional process and were limited to a few elementary tonal roots, in this work the harmonic connections are more varied: rather than being pre-programmed they are largely allowed to form their own spontaneous functional relations".
Remarks of this sort indicate that Schweinitz does not wish to be categorized in a narrow "group" of "neo-tonalists", as all too hastily happened. Like his like-minded friends Wolfgang Rihm, Hans-Jurgen von Bose and Detlev Muller-Siemens, his aim is to "give a hearing to individual spirit and expression", not by turning back to the 19th century but by confronting afresh the music of the 50s and 60s as well.
Notwithstanding this outlook Schweinitz repeatedly provokes "encounters with traditions", as for example in his "Variationen uber ein Thema von Mozart" of 1976 for full orchestra. This piece was given its premiere on 20 May 1977 at the ISNM International Music Festival in Bonn, with Hans Zender conducting the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra. As the composer himself commented the work was written in California and uses an eight-bar excerpt from Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music KV 477 as its theme: "In their sequence of moods the Variations resemble a symphonic cycle in miniature - as it were, an extreme compression of the symphonic principle: Introduction: Adagio; Theme: Adagio (bars 13-20); Variation I: Largo (measured, quietly intense); Variation 2: Scherzo I (very fast and emphatic); Variation 3: Trio, Pastorale (Andantino - mild, dreamily indistinct); Variation 4: Scherzo 2 (as for Scherzo I); Variation 5 : Adagio (slowly and with utmost intensity of expression); Variation 6: Funeral March (march tempo, with emotion); Coda (tripartite).
"Variation 6 leads to the climax of the piece, marked by a solo gong stroke. Once the gong has faded away the coda begins with a quotation of the final eight bars of Mozart's piece (very soft, as though dimly recollected). The final chord (C major) grows into a quotation from the First String Quartet by the Munich composer Hans-Jurgen von Bose, here used to obscure the harmony. This quotation leads to the final section which integrates the chorale 'Es ist vollbracht' from Bach's St John Passion and musical material from Variation 5 (with utmost intensity of expression). The harmony of the piece is quasi-tonal in that it derives rigorously from the harmonic progression of Mozart's theme in the manner of a passacaglia. However, it is permeated with trenchant microtones, and these form the main vehicle of expression within the harmony. A similar process takes place in the melody: the expression is heightened by the heterophonic splitting of the melodic lines, at times intensified almost to the breaking point."
In short, a composer of strong sentiment with a wealth of ideas. -- Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)
Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Dec 4, 2008 at 05:11 AM