Lost in the Stars

Towards the end of last year, Alex Ross included Othmar Schoeck’s Notturno, performed by baritone Christian Gerhaher with the Rosamunde Quartett on the ECM label, among his recordings of the year. It is indeed a stunning recording – a warmly expressive performance by Gerhaher with superb playing by the Munich-based quartet – which will certainly enhance Schoeck’s growing reputation. For anyone fortunate enough to have received this superb CD in their Christmas stocking, here is Chris Walton on the Notturno, extracted from his equally splendid Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works published last year by the University of Rochester Press:

Schoeck’s torrid, obsessive, on/off affair with the Genevan pianist Mary de Senger from 1918 to 1923 had been punctuated by intermittent infidelities on his part and by broken promises of marriage on both sides. But as Schoeck admitted himself, it had proven the engine for a surge of creativity resulting in his operas Venus and Penthesilea, the orchestral cycle Elegie and many songs. One melody in particular – taken from the final scene of Venus, used as the main theme of a piano piece dedicated to her and reused again in the Elegie – was associated by Schoeck specifically with Mary. Ten years later, trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage to the German singer Hilde Bartscher, Schoeck remembered his affair with Mary and the music it had inspired as a kind of lost “golden age” in his compositional career.

It is no coincidence that Schoeck told his friend and biographer Hans Corrodi, just at the time when he began work on the Notturno, that “at least that suffering with Mary had been fruitful,” for the Notturno seems to have represented for him an attempt to rekindle the creative spark that had led to his earlier works. To judge from the remarks he made at the time, he was aware that his recent music bore little trace of the white-hot inspiration that Mary had provoked. Conjuring up her metaphorical shade to help him overcome his present shortcomings might thus have been a perfectly conscious act.

It certainly worked, for it is generally accepted that the Notturno displays Schoeck at the very height of his powers (it would even impress Alban Berg in early 1935). But it is noteworthy that the “Mary” theme is never given in its original form. The Andante appassionato alone features some forty transformations of it [see above], but none of them identical to the real source. It is a musical expression of that trick of memory we all know, whereby a familiar tune haunts one’s mind but evades all attempts to notate its precise contours. This mirrors perfectly the motto of the movement. This interlude probably represented several intermingled desires on the part of Schoeck. Its mantra-like reiteration of the “Mary” theme in its multitude of transformations is on the one hand a quasi-shamanic summoning up of a former muse to aid him in the present. On the other, given that Schoeck was at the time in a deeply troubled relationship, this sudden obsession with Mary’s theme—“always drawing near her, but never reaching her”—is surely also an expression of loss, of regret that things had not worked out differently a decade before, of an ideal that can never more be attained. In this sense, the avoidance of exact quotation could signify Schoeck’s intention (whether subconscious or no) to “hide” these now illicit desires. Hilde, as yet, knew nothing of Mary. But for Schoeck this perhaps made the act of concealment even more necessary.

In the last song of the first movement (also the final poem that Lenau wrote before he descended into madness), the poet looks down into a river and sees his own soul flowing past, weighed down with sorrow. The second movement of the Notturno is an instrumental scherzo with trio, in which the narrator describes a nightmare. The recapitulation of the scherzo overlaps with the end of the trio in a superb dramatic stroke. The third movement, cast as a rondo, is highly chromatic, and perhaps the closest Schoeck ever came to the style of Alban Berg.

The brief fourth movement is a desolate depiction of autumn in 5/4 meter, which Schoeck later claimed to have written at the time of the Elegie, though in stylistic terms, with its chromaticism and the fragmentary nature of its quartet accompaniment, it firmly belongs here. The fifth and final movement opens with another version of the Mary theme, this time with its intervals expanded to span more than an octave. The first song (“Der einsame Trinker”—“The Lonely Drinker”) represents a lapse in quality, noticeable only because of the compelling nature of the music before and after. The second song comprises only a two line poem (“O solitude, how gladly I drink / From your fresh woodland well”), and there then follows an interlude in sonata form as a kind of parallel to that of the first movement (though here there is no development section).

The final song is a setting of one of Gottfried Keller’s last poetic sketches. When Schoeck’s friend René Niederer brought it to his attention, he sketched it on the back of a visiting card, though in doing so he missed out three words by mistake (and intuitively improved it in the process, as he thereby removed a repetition of the word “Auge,” “eye”). In this brief prose poem, the narrator addresses the “Heerwagen,” the constellation known in English as the Plough, and imagines his soul being carried along on it, “innocent, as a child; I shall look far into the distance to see whither we are bound.” This poem might even have appealed to Schoeck on account of its superficial similarity to the final text (by Stefan George) of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet—the work that in its combining of the genres of string quartet and lied was the Notturno’s most significant precursor. Both texts are cast in the first person, both tell of other planets or stars, and both end with the poet soaring away in a quasi-pantheistic merging with the universe.

Schoeck sets this final poem as a chaconne. A final transformation of Mary’s theme is heard at its opening, with expanded intervals, hovering above the long held whole-note chords of the accompaniment. It soon sounds again, in augmentation, in the first violin, accompanied by fragments of itself in even greater augmentation, repeated over and over in the lower strings. Its contours haunt the remainder of the song.

In its gradual process of transformation, the “Mary” theme has already left its original form far behind. On the final page of the score it seems to dissolve away altogether until at the end—as the narrator’s soul is carried away into the stars—barely a memory of it remains. Whether or not this “casting off” of Mary’s theme was for Schoeck an act of personal catharsis acted out in the very substance of his music, the overall effect of the final song is undoubtedly cathartic for the listener after all the conflict that has preceded it.

We do not know how Hilde reacted to the Notturno, though the manner in which it proclaimed to the world her marital strife must have caused her deep embarrassment. When Schoeck took her on a few days’ holiday to Paris straight after the premiere, it was perhaps meant to divert them both from the problems he had so directly depicted in his music. The Notturno’s first and third movements in particular are among the darkest creations to have come from Schoeck’s imagination, and their depiction of the abyss of depression surely has few parallels in their time. But the final Keller setting, with its predominantly white-note harmony, somehow succeeds in resolving all the torments that have gone before. Where Lebendig begraben had failed to carry through its dramatic trajectory to its close, the Notturno saves its finest moments till the very end.

Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works by Chris Walton is available from your favourite bookseller. The musical example, above, is taken from the first violin part of the opening movement of Notturno and is copyright 1933 by Universal Edition. The CD of Christian Gerhaher’s performance is released by the ever-inventive ECM.

When all the notes are right: Songs, Sex and Schoeck

‘He sums up Schoenberg in twenty minutes and then spends half a bloody hour on some guy called Othmarrrr Shirk’ – I still remember the disgust with which a Scots fellow student rolled his broad Rs around Robin Holloway’s approach to music history. The occasion was Robin’s lecture course on the twentieth-century, back in 1983 in Cambridge. He had indeed dealt with Schoenberg remarkably swiftly that day (though memorably, as always – I shall never forget his summing up of the Wind Quintet as a work ‘masterly in every way except that all the notes are wrong’, which really says it all). And it was true that he had also spent a lot of time – in relative terms – on a Swiss composer called Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957), hitherto unknown to almost all of us. As it happens, I was probably the only one who had heard of him, as I’d accompanied a student’s final song recital the year before, whose programme had included ‘Herbstentschluss’ from the cycle Elegie. The song was utterly compelling. And when Robin played us the second movement of the song cycle Notturno in the recording by Fischer-Dieskau and the Juilliard Quartet, I was hooked. Being something of a Germanophile – I’d first gone to German-speaking Europe at the age of 14 with our local youth orchestra and had since spent every summer there – I was already on the lookout for a possible doctoral topic on something suitably German. Schoeck was Swiss, but German Swiss, and I reckoned that he might do as well as anything more northernly Teutonic. So I went to Robin, borrowed his Schoeck scores and records, and he put me in touch with Derrick Puffett, a friend from his own Oxford student days who had done his doctoral thesis on Schoeck’s song cycles.

I visited Derrick not long after, staying on a camp bed in his rooms in Wolfson College (being a student from the distant industrial north, I didn’t have the money for a hotel of even the flea-ridden variety). When I told him I was thinking of doing a doctorate on Schoeck’s operas, he said: ‘Don’t bother with that. What we need is a biography’. ‘Oh, OK’, I replied, and that was that.

Further visits to Derrick followed over the next months, I went to Zurich to do some research in the Schoeck archives at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich – making many friends who have remained friends ever since – and I got a place at Christ Church Oxford to begin my doctorate the next year. As luck had it, Derrick at the exact same time got a job in Cambridge, so we sort of crossed, metaphorically speaking, at Tring. I was allowed to retain him as my main supervisor (thus seeing rather a lot of Tring from the window of a bus over the next couple of years), but was also assigned an Oxford man in order to have someone on the spot. This was John Warrack, who was somewhat bemused, admitting readily that he knew little about Schoeck. While most of my work was obviously with Derrick, whom I visited in St John’s Cambridge about once a term, I remember my conversations with John with no less fondness, and owe him far more than I think he ever realized.

It was clear that visiting Switzerland in the summer holidays wasn’t going to be enough to get the information I needed to write a biography, so after a year in Oxford I applied for a postgraduate scholarship from the Swiss government. I left for Helvetia in July 1986, intending to return to Oxford a year later, but in fact have never lived in England since. Once the doctorate was done, I survived for a while as a freelance translator of everything from chocolate adverts (sadly no free samples) to TV thriller scripts. Then it was off to Munich on a Humboldt Fellowship, researching into Richard Strauss. But in 1990 I found myself back in Zurich with what one’s mother always calls ‘a proper job’, running the very same music library whose avid visitor I had been during my studies.

My Schoeck biography finally came out – in German translation – in 1995. I had sworn back in the mid-80s that three or four years researching into an obscure Swiss composer would be enough for any healthy young fellow, for as such I regarded myself. But I found that the man’s music had a remarkable hold on me. It wasn’t anything exclusive or obsessive, thank god (my desert island discs remain Parsifal, the Magic Flute and Mendelssohn’s Octet), but rather like the advert for a certain beer back in England, I still find that Schoeck reaches parts that many other composers don’t. Of course he also wrote some weak music. But of his three hundred songs with piano, the majority are very fine, while his best half-dozen works (above all the instrumental song cycles Lebendig begraben and Notturno) are wonderful and can bear comparison with the greatest works of the age. His orchestration at its best has the luminescence of Berg and the delicacy of Ravel. Of how many composers could one say that?

My research also led to close ties to the Schoeck family, in particular to the composer’s nephew Georg, his wife Elisabeth and their seven children (yes, seven, and they’re not even Catholic!). Elisabeth became godmother to our first daughter, who bears her name, while our third child and only son has Elisabeth’s eldest daughter Salome as his godmother; he is also named after Salome’s three brothers: Alvaro Wolfgang Konrad Walton. (Confused? Never mind, so’s my son.) As I write this, I’m about to go off to the Schoeck family home in Brunnen, where the eldest son (called Alvaro, of course) is getting married tomorrow. Perhaps unusual for composer families, the Schoecks have always been wholly supportive of my research, helping wherever they could, and never once batting an eyelid whenever I criticized in print their ‘Denkmal-Onkel’, as they occasionally call him. As Derrick once said of another composer: it’s a poor tribute that confines itself to praise. And as a family of scholars, the Schoecks knew that any serious biography can’t discuss the good without offering a critique of the bad. Two years ago, Georg and Elisabeth died within five weeks of each other; I miss them still, much, just as I often think of Derrick, who died just before his fiftieth birthday over a decade ago.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death approached in 2007, I began to think about publishing the original English version of my Schoeck biography. After all, most of his works have since been released on CD, which means that the potential Anglo-American reading public now has access to the actual music (a complete recording of his songs on eleven CDs was published back in the 1990s on the Swiss label Jecklin, featuring singers such as Ian Bostridge, Kurt Streit, Lynn Dawson and Christiane Banse). But there were two problems. First, I had in the meantime published so much more on Schoeck, and had discovered so much more about him, that I couldn’t really regard the old book as up-to-date any more. Secondly, the rights to the book lay with the original publisher. So I decided to write a whole new book.

The original doctorate had been a ‘life’, with the music discussed only in passing. But since it was unlikely that a book on Schoeck in English would prompt a rapid flood of further studies of him, any new biography would have to go the full Monty and deal with the music as well as the man. So I went ahead and wrote it in my last year as a professor in Pretoria, before we returned to Switzerland. Having already brought out a book with a Boydell imprint (my Richard Wagner’s Zurich), I was keen to repeat the experience, and so approached the University of Rochester Press. To my delight, they accepted it. The manuscript was dreadfully long, but upon re-reading it, I saw that there was much ballast that could be excised easily. I naturally hope that the result is a leaner, fitter Schoeck. It’s a pretty meaty Schoeck all the same, as the text alone is over 150,000 words, not counting the bibliography and all. But still – I hope – within the bounds of what the average public is prepared to read. And it has some very nice photos.

The second biography parallels the first in many ways, but that’s only because they are both about the same composer writing the same music, married to the same wife and with the same friends. I could no more change my ‘cast list’ than could a Beethoven biographer leave out nephew Karl, the Immortal Beloved or Beethoven himself. But my two biographies are in fact very different, especially because the new book discusses the music in some detail (offering a plethora of music examples compared to the first book’s none). I’ve also allowed rather more sex to penetrate the new book, as it were, and there’s a bit more deconstruction too (though to the reader, I hope it will smack more of common sense than of anything remotely theoretical). The more observant reader might even spot a reference to the Dead Parrot Sketch in the first chapter – as I plummet into middle age, I become ever more convinced that mainstream musicology can only benefit from a good deal more Python. As for me personally, I can never read Adorno without thinking of the Spanish Inquisition.

What’s been oddest for me, writing this new book, is that the quarter-of-a-century since I began its predecessor has seen the passing of most of the witnesses upon whose memories I depended so much. When I started my research on Schoeck, he had been dead for just twenty-six years, and many of those who had known him were still alive. I also found them remarkably candid – aged 70, 80 or more as they were, they obviously felt themselves too old to be embarrassed about anything. Thus it was that as a twenty-four-year-old student, I on one occasion sat listening to a lady in her 70s, reminiscing about her mother’s death-bed confession of how fantastic Schoeck had been between the sheets. I’m afraid you’ll have to read the book for more details. You’ll also learn how the humble sandwich takes on a whole new meaning in Schoeck scholarship.

As I wrote the book – and as I write now – the faces and (above all) the voices of the men and women I interviewed, but who are now no more, were and are as fresh as when I met them. In some cases, even their exact words and their tone of voice are etched into my memory. I realize now that they in their turn had equally vivid memories of Schoeck himself, and how lucky I was to meet them. They are almost all dead, so Schoeck researchers present and future must content themselves with second- and third-hand information. I shall remain ever grateful to have been granted instead the privilege of such proximity to the source.

Othmar Schoeck is available from all good booksellers, along with Chris Walton’s previous book, Richard Wagner’s Zurich. Read a sample from Schoeck here and an earlier post by Chris here. We congratulate Chris on winning the 2009 Max Geilinger Prize.

Schoeck, Shaken and Stirred

This month sees the publication of Chris Walton’s superb Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works. As in all good biographies, Walton’s book brings Schoeck’s endearing, irritating, charming, frustrating, magnetic personality to life, as well as the rather turbulent times in which he lived. He also demonstrates why we should pay his music – increasingly available on CD - more attention than we have until quite recently. No mere academic butterfly pinned inside a glass case, Schoeck lives and breathes in this compelling biography. In this extract, we see how the composer dealt with lost love. The first paragraph sets the scene:

In August 1923, Schoeck was abandoned by his lover of the past five years, Mary de Senger. That same month, he encountered the musical avant-garde for the first time at the Salzburg festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. The loss of Mary, plus the realization that musical progress had left him far behind, had an impact on him that resulted in a stylistic shift as sudden as it was drastic: within a few months of finishing the song cycle Elegie with its neo-Brahmsian tonality, he was writing the atonal first scene of a new opera, Penthesilea.

How does one cope with losing the love of one’s life, the woman whose very existence seems to define one, and without whom the mere fact of being seems to lose its purpose? The answer, felt Schoeck, was to have lots of sex with lots of other women as soon as possible. That is precisely what he did within a fortnight of losing Mary. In compensation for his loss, he also began to display a heightened sexual bravado among his (male) friends, once more claiming that fidelity was different for men and women: women remained faithful by remaining faithful, while men could sleep around without being unfaithful per se. Furthermore, he claimed, not one of his friends’ wives had ever failed to make a pass at him, with the sole exception, he remarked pointedly, of Stefi Geyer. He now boasted for weeks on end of how many women he was sleeping with, and of how many came to beg him for sex. All this macho posturing was presumably to compensate for the fact that the one woman he really wanted was the one he had lost—through no one’s fault but his own—and would never win back. And while he might have somewhat exaggerated the number of his conquests, he nevertheless was indeed consoling himself in the arms and orifices of several women. The least fleeting of them was Annie Gottlieb-Sallenbach, whom Schoeck called “Angelie.” She was Swiss, was married to a Dane, and had two children. Although resident in Dresden, she frequently visited her mother back in Zurich, into whose care she had placed her children during the inflation years in order to spare them the economic privations inevitable in Germany. Angelie’s family knew the local music scene well. Her mother’s home on the Bellerivestrasse was used as a rehearsal venue by de Boer’s Zurich String Quartet, and Angelie had probably got to know Schoeck through one or both of their mutual friends Ilona Durigo and Stefi Geyer. She had been in love with Schoeck for some time—she would later claim that he had been the love of her life—and when she appeared at his apartment two weeks after the break with Mary and found him in need of consolation, she bestowed it amply.

At about the same time that Angelie appeared, Schoeck composed the song “Die Entschwundene” (“The Girl Who Disappeared”), a setting of the first poem in Gottfried Keller’s cycle Erstes Lieben (“First Love”). If it was meant as a farewell to Mary, its obsessive two-measure ostinato accompaniment and its vocal line hovering around the notes of a broken chord make it just as much a farewell to the sound-world of the Elegie. But it also points the way forward, inasmuch as Schoeck’s songs for the next five years would be to poems by Gottfried Keller alone—a poet whom he had long avoided. While we must be suspicious of spotting all-too-convenient parallels between biography and work, Schoeck’s life “post-Mary” undeniably coincides almost exactly with a phase in his compositional life that was breathtakingly new. It is not really “the girl” who disappears, for it is the Schoeck of the Elegie who is “der Entschwundene.” The first signs of the new direction in his music are to be found in a “Lento” movement that he added in early September to his suite for string quartet (soon to be renamed simply “Second String Quartet”), in which sustained dissonant chords in parallel motion suspend tonality for much of the time; he called it an “Abendbild” (“Picture of Evening”).

This summer also brought Schoeck in closer contact with one of the leading proponents of modern music, Hermann Scherchen, conductor of the Winterthur City Orchestra. To judge from a letter that he sent his wife at this time, Scherchen seems to have been somewhat swept off his feet by the strength of Schoeck’s personality: “I love Schoeck. . . . The fellow has all the marks of the exceptional in his overflowing personality, in the fire of his eye. A highly robust chap, but without being crude. Talented down to the tips of his fingers. Full of eroticism, wit, and with it all, above all, likeable . . . not intelligent in the sense of ‘clever,’ but at times almost enlightened in his physical/emotional intelligence. That’s the source of his marvellous judgments and insights.” A performance of the Elegie that Scherchen had scheduled in Frankfurt in September 1923 had to be cancelled because of a lack of rehearsal time, but his passion for Schoeck and his music would remained undimmed over the coming decades.

Besides finishing his new string quartet in autumn 1923, Schoeck now also planned a setting of Keller’s narrative cycle of fourteen poems entitled Lebendig begraben (“Buried Alive”). It proved intractable, however, and after considering having certain sections spoken, not sung, he put it to one side (he would return to it three years later). He turned instead to Keller’s Gaselen (“Ghazels”), a brief cycle of ten poems that mix erotic love lyrics with satire, and whose only real unifying factor is the verse form (aa–ba–ca–da, etc.). These poems are even more abstruse and awkward than those of the Lebendig begraben cycle, and Schoeck at first found them just as intractable. He considered setting them to an accompaniment of cello and piano, with the most difficult verses once more spoken, not sung; but he soon decided instead to have all the verses sung to the accompaniment of an ensemble of trumpet, flute doubling piccolo, oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion. Derrick Puffett has suggested that this “top and bottom” instrumentation was influenced by Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, though the opening of the work, with its brash solo trumpet followed by the nasal, almost “vulgar” sound of the woodwind scoring, actually takes us into a sound-world that is perhaps most reminiscent of Kurt Weill. Once Schoeck had begun, the floodgates opened by themselves, for five of the ten poems were apparently sketched in the space of two hours, and the cycle was finished by early November 1923, with the exception of the very ending. Schoeck claimed to have been disturbed by a visitor just as his moment of inspiration came (his “Einfall”), and it took him till December to find an ending that truly satisfied him.

The opening poem of Gaselen runs: “Ours is the fate of the Epigones who live in the vast halfway-world; look how you squeeze one more drop from old lemon rinds!”. The final poem tells of the poet’s old hat whose rim is crumpled and attracts the mockery of passers-by; so he turns it round, but then people only laugh behind his back; and he then turns it round again, as he would rather face down his critics than have them mock him out of sight. Schoeck’s friends assumed that it was such satirical verses that had attracted him to the cycle, but if the strength of the music is a reliable guide, then it was the love songs that appealed to him the most. They contain some of the most blatantly erotic imagery that he would ever set to music. The central poem runs thus:

I hold you in my arms, tenderly you hold the rose,

And the rose holds deep within it a young bee;
Thus we arrange ourselves like pearls on life’s single thread,
Thus we rejoice as petal upon petal gathers round the rose,
And when my kiss glows on your mouth, a flame darts
Into the heart of the bee as it mates with the chalice of the rose.

—and its music is suitably erotic, the flute and bass clarinet weaving a canon around the voice to a background of luscious triplet figurations in the piano. The song climaxes on a top F for the voice as the flame darts into the heart of the mating bee before subsiding into “an expansive Straussian postlude” (thus Puffett), whose aesthetic effect is, obviously and intentionally, the musical equivalent of the post-coital cigarette.

Gaselen was also Schoeck’s first continuous song cycle. The model he chose, as Puffett has demonstrated cogently, was An die ferne Geliebte, “Beethoven’s continuous cycle with interludes, a recapitulation, and a well-balanced tonal scheme. All these devices [Schoeck] incorporated into Gaselen, almost as if he were afraid that the work would not stand up without them.” What Puffett did not know was that An die ferne Geliebte was the song cycle that Schoeck admired above all others and already knew well as an accompanist—he had played it just over a year before, on 30 March 1922 in St. Gallen, with Alfred Jerger as soloist. “Weisch,” Schoeck once said to his nephew Georg, “d’bescht Zyklus isch d’ferni Geliebti” (“You know, the best cycle is the Distant Beloved” ). The significance of the model might even go beyond the merely musical, given that Schoeck’s longings were still very much for his own beloved in distant Geneva. He had interrupted his composition of the cycle to go on a brief concert tour to Holland with Ilona Durigo and had summoned up the courage to write to Mary from The Hague. He received no answer.

In a later post, Chris Walton will tell us how he came to write about Othmar Schoeck. In the meantime, Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works will soon be available from all good booksellers. The photograph of the composer above is reproduced in the book courtesy of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich.