On the next “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll have works by two German composers who traveled widely divergent paths.
As the aging elder statesman of Romantic opulence, Richard Strauss was in his late 60s when the Nazis seized control of Germany in 1933. He was 75 at the outbreak of World War II. Controversially, he remained at home, hoping to preserve and promote German music (including his own) and to shield his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren. While comprehending Strauss’ importance as a propaganda tool, Goebels wasn’t actually fond of his music, referring to him privately as a “decadent neurotic.”
All that was still decades in the future at the time Strauss wrote his Piano Quartet in C minor, in 1883-84, at the tender age of 20. Interestingly, for a composer who became celebrated for the apotheosis of the lavish tone poem, Strauss here channels his admiration for Johannes Brahms, and in a genre not generally associated with a follower of the post-Wagnerian “New Music School.” Brahms was at the height of his fame while the young Strauss was living in Berlin. In fact, Strauss attended the premiere of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, following his appointment as music director in Meiningen at 21.
We’ll hear Strauss’ quartet, performed at the 1972 Marlboro Music Festival, with Walter Klien at the keyboard, in his early 40s and at the peak of his pianistic powers. The string players will include violinist Edith Peinemann, violist Philipp Naegele, and cellist Miklós Perènyi.
Violinist Adolf Busch lived with his family – and friend, future son-in-law Rudolf Serkin – in Berlin in the 1920s, as Serkin established himself as one of Europe’s outstanding young pianists. The musicians remained in Germany until 1927. The much-respected Busch, who was not Jewish, vehemently opposed the National Socialists. He was one of the first prominent non-Jews to do so. With the rise of Hitler, Serkin and the Busches relocated to Switzerland. Busch repudiated Germany entirely in 1933.
He and Serkin arrived in the United States, with the rest of Busch’s family, in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war. They settled in Vermont in the 1940s. There, alongside flutist Marcel Moyse, they founded the Marlboro Music School and Festival in 1951, having successfully eluded the horrors that had claimed so many others to create something of lasting beauty – a chamber music retreat in what must have seemed like a bucolic paradise.
In addition to being one of the great violinists, Busch was also a talented composer. We’ll hear his “Divertimento for 13 Solo Instruments,” from 1925, in a 1982 recording featuring Marlboro musicians: Isidore Cohen and Irene Serkin, violins; Caroline Levine, viola; Robie Brown Dan, cello; Carolyn Davis, double bass; Odile Renault, flute; Rudolph Vrbsky, oboe; Cheryl Hill, clarinet; Stefanie Przybylska, bassoon; Robin Graham and Stewart Rose, French Horns; Henry Nowak, trumpet; and Neil Grover, timpani, all under the direction of Sol Schoenbach.
The path of least resistance leads to misery, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
More about Strauss’ complicated relationship with the Third Reich here:
http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/reichskulturkammer/strauss-richard/
PHOTO: Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin in 1928
