Category: Daily Dispatch

Okay, this is a few weeks out of date, as I just finally got around to reading Dan Aubrey’s cover story on the magic duo Penn & Teller in the Princeton weekly U.S. 1, dated September 20, prior to the team’s appearance at the State Theatre in New Brunswick. I once spotted Penn in the middle of the night at Diner on the Square in Philadelphia, and a few years later Teller wandered into my book shop looking for, unsurprisingly, books on magic. Yes, he can speak, and apparently, his mother lived nearby.

Be that as it may, imagine my surprise on reading Dan’s article to find the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck mentioned copiously. Schoeck, apparently, was the favorite whipping boy of Wier Chrisemer, a college friend of Teller, who discovered some of his music in the school’s radio station library and thought it was godawful – so bad that he decided to present two or three concerts a year under the auspices of the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. None of the concerts featured any of Schoeck’s music.

While I can certainly see the humor in this, I think the boys were a little hard on old Othmar, whom I’ve celebrated on this page in the past. And yes, I happen to like his music.

Schoeck (1886-1957) may be largely forgotten now, but he once enjoyed international recognition for his art songs, which he composed prolifically. He also produced opera, orchestral, and instrumental works. His ambitious Violin Concerto – some 40 minutes in length – was composed at white heat, out of love for Stefi Geyer, the same violinist who captivated Béla Bartók and inspired Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1.

Schoeck was born in Switzerland and spent most of his life there, other than a brief period during which he lived in Leipzig, where he studied with Max Reger. He had considered pursuing a career in the visual arts, as had his father, before finally committing himself to music. He was fortunate enough to secure patronage so that he could compose more or less undisturbed.

When Ferruccio Busoni settled in Switzerland during the First World War, the two developed a friendship, despite some disagreements on certain artistic matters. In fact, Busoni provided the libretto for Schoeck’s opera “Das Wandbild” (“The Picture on the Wall”), marked by the kind of chinoiserie that characterized Busoni’s own “Turandot” (in no way to be confused with the later, more famous opera by Puccini).

Schoeck’s music experienced a stylistic shift as he became acquainted with the works of Alban Berg and Arthur Honegger. A torrid affair with the pianist Mary de Senger seems to have changed him for good. When their relationship ended, so did Schoeck bid farewell to his earlier, Romantic style.

Though he was no Nazi sympathizer, Schoeck had the bad judgment or naivete to attend the premiere of one of his operas in Berlin in 1943. This led to a lot of stress at home, with the Swiss unhappy with his actions. Schoeck suffered a heart attack, but continued to compose. He died in 1957.

I seem to recall his reputation was such that the writer Hermann Hesse referred to Schoeck in one of his books – I think it was “Journey to the East” – in the same breath as Richard Strauss. I suppose it didn’t hurt that Hesse and Schoeck were friends and Schoeck set some of Hesse’s poems (as did Strauss). Hesse pitched the idea of an operatic collaboration, and even wrote a libretto, but the proposal never came to anything.

You know what? This is good. I was just writing about Frederic Chopin’s fear of premature burial yesterday, and this allows me to share a link to a song cycle by Schoeck called “Lebendig begraben,” or “Buried Alive,” from 1926. The text is from a collection of poems by Gottfried Keller. A man wakes to find himself mistakenly buried. He panics and hopes that his girlfriend or a grave robber will come to his rescue. Then he begins to reminisce in his coffin about his childhood, youth, and first love. Finally, he casts his soul into eternity with the acceptance of his fate. Perfect for the Halloween season!

This is the piece that once so moved James Joyce that he declared Schoeck a better composer than Stravinsky. So you see, he may have been a figure of fun for Penn & Teller and their friend, Wier Chrisemer, but he’s still ace with Hesse, Joyce, and me. Lucky for you, nobody’s asking you to choose sides.

What’s that? “Buried Alive” not your cup of tea? Try Schoeck’s lovely pastoral intermezzo, as the composer described it, “Summer Night.” Again inspired by a Keller poem, this time the music is purely orchestral. The poem describes a summer harvest, during which field hands come to the aid of a widow and work through the night in order to bring in her crop, before setting out for their own day jobs.

Here’s a song, “Summer Night,” on a text of Hesse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AflKXAZaUsY

And the composer’s Violin Concerto. I know one of my radio colleagues found the piece maddening when I programmed it on my syndicated show, “The Lost Chord,” since, according to him, the soloist never stops playing. It didn’t get Schoeck the girl, so to speak, either. As stated above, he wrote it out of his fondness for Stefi Geyer.

You can learn more about Penn & Teller’s connections to Trenton, Lambertville, Princeton, and Philadelphia, and Wier Chrisemer’s disdain for Othmar Schoeck, in Dan Aubrey’s article here:

https://www.communitynews.org/princetoninfo/coverstories/from-trenton-to-stardom-the-penn-teller-story/article_30d78088-56ee-11ee-bb37-bfdb5c07226c.html

In the interest of full disclosure, Dan is my long-suffering arts editor at U.S. 1. Now that I see his article runs to well over 2600 words, I don’t feel so bad!

PHOTOS: Penn & Teller, Hesse & Schoeck (sporting hats in the belfry), and the composer mustachioed