Photograph of Hugo Wolf

Hugo Wolf (13 March 1860 – 22 February 1903) was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but utterly unrelated in technique.

Though he had several bursts of extraordinary productivity, particularly in 1888 and 1889, depression frequently interrupted his creative periods, and his last composition was written in 1898, before he suffered a mental collapse caused by syphilis.

Early life (1860–1887)[link]

Hugo Wolf was born in Windischgrätz (now Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia), then a part of the Austrian Empire. From his maternal side, he was related to Herbert von Karajan.^[1][2] He spent most of his life in Vienna, becoming a representative of "New German" trend in lieder, a trend which followed from the expressive, chromatic, and dramatic musical innovations of Richard Wagner.

A child prodigy, Wolf was taught piano and violin by his father beginning at the age of four, and once in primary school studied piano and music theory with Sebastian Weixler. However, subjects other than music failed to hold his interest; he was dismissed from the first secondary school he attended as being "wholly inadequate", left another over his difficulties in the compulsory Latin studies, and after a falling-out with a professor who commented on his "damned music", quit the last. From there, he went to the Vienna Conservatory to the disappointment of his father, who had hoped Wolf would not try to make his living from music; again, however, he was dismissed for "breach of discipline", though the often-rebellious Wolf would claim he quit in frustration over the school's conservatism.

After eight months with his family, he returned to Vienna to teach music. Though his fiery temperament was not ideally suited to teaching, Wolf's musical gifts—as well as his personal charm—earned him attention and patronage. This support of his benefactors allowed him to make a living as a composer, and a daughter of one of his greatest benefactors inspired him to write: Vally ("Valentine") Franck was Wolf's first love, with whom he was involved for three years. During their relationship, hints of his mature style would become evident in his Lieder. Wolf was prone to depression and wide mood swings, which would affect him all through his life. When Franck left him just before his 21st birthday, he was despondent; he returned home, though his family relationships were also strained; his father remained convinced that Wolf was a ne'er-do-well. His brief and undistinguished tenure as second Kapellmeister at Salzburg only reinforced this opinion—Wolf had neither the temperament, the conducting technique, nor the affinity for the decidedly non-Wagnerian repertoire to be successful, and within a year had again returned to Vienna to teach in much the same circumstances as before.

Hugo Wolf (1885)

Wagner's death in February 1883 was another deeply moving event in the life of the young composer. The song "Zur Ruh, zur Ruh" was composed shortly afterward and is considered to be the best of his early works; it is speculated that it was intended as an elegy for Wagner. Wolf often despaired of his own future in the years following, in a world from which his idol had gone, leaving tremendous footsteps to follow and no guidance on how to do so. This left him often extremely temperamental, alienating friends and patrons, though his charm helped him retain them more than his actions merited. His songs meanwhile had caught the attention of Franz Liszt, whom he respected greatly, and who like Wolf's previous mentors advised him to pursue larger forms; advice he this time followed with the symphonic tone poem on Penthesilea. Wolf's activities as a critic began to pick up; he was merciless in his criticism of the inferior works he saw taking over the musical atmosphere of the time (Anton Rubinstein in particular he considered odious) and fervent in his support of the genius of Liszt, Schubert, and Chopin. Known as "Wild Wolf" for the intensity and expressive strength of his convictions, his vitriol made him some enemies. Though he composed little during this time, what he did write he could not get performed: the Rosé Quartet would not even look at his work after it was picked apart in a column, and the premiere of Penthesilea was met by the orchestra with nothing but derision for the man who had dared to criticize Brahms.

He abandoned his activities as a critic in 1887 as he began composing once more; perhaps not unexpectedly, the first songs following his compositional hiatus are settings of texts by Goethe, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Joseph Viktor von Scheffel on themes of strength and resolution under adversity. Shortly thereafter Wolf completed the Italian Serenade, which is regarded as one of the first works of his mature style as a composer. Only a week later his father died, leaving Wolf devastated, and he did not compose for the remainder of the year.

Maturity (1888–1896)[link]

1888 and 1889 proved to be amazingly productive years for Wolf, and a turning point in his career. After the publication of a dozen of his songs late the preceding year, Wolf once again desired to return to composing, and travelled to the vacation home of the Werners—family friends whom Wolf had known since childhood—in Perchtoldsdorf (a short train ride from Vienna), to escape and compose in solitude. Here he composed the Mörike-Lieder at a frenzied pace. A short break, and a change of house, this time to the vacation home of more longtime friends, the Ecksteins, and the Eichendorff-Lieder followed, then the 51 Goethe-Lieder, spilling into 1889. After a summer holiday, the Spanisches Liederbuch was begun in October 1889; though Spanish-flavoured compositions were in fashion in the day, Wolf sought out poems that had been neglected by other composers.

Wolf himself saw the merit of these compositions immediately, raving to friends that they were the best things he had yet composed (it was with the aid and urging of several of the more influential of them that the works were initially published). It was now that the world outside Vienna would recognize Wolf as well. Tenor Ferdinand Jäger, whom Wolf had heard in Parsifal during his brief summer break from composing, was present at one of the first concerts of the Mörike works and quickly became a champion of his music, performing a recital of only Wolf and Beethoven in December 1888. His works were praised in reviews, including one in the Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung, a widely read German newspaper. (The recognition was not always positive; Brahms's adherents, still smarting from Wolf's merciless reviews, returned the favor—when they would have anything to do with him at all. Brahms's biographer Max Kalbeck ridiculed Wolf for his immature writing and odd tonalities; another composer refused to share a program with him, while Amalie Materna, a Wagnerian singer, had to cancel her Wolf recital when allegedly faced with the threat of being on the critics' blacklist if she went on.)

Only a few more settings were completed in 1891 before Wolf's mental and physical health once again took a downturn at the end of the year; exhaustion from his prolific past few years combined with the effects of syphilis and his depressive temperament caused him to stop composing for the next several years. Continuing concerts of his works in Austria and Germany spread his growing fame; even Brahms and the critics who had previously reviled Wolf gave favorable reviews. However, Wolf was consumed with depression, which stopped him from writing—which only left him more depressed. He completed orchestrations of previous works, but new compositions were not forthcoming, and certainly not the opera which he was now fixated on composing, still convinced that success in the larger forms was the mark of compositional greatness.

Wolf had scornfully rejected the libretto to Der Corregidor when it was first presented to him in 1890, but his determination to compose an opera blinded him to its faults upon second glance. Based on The Three-Cornered Hat, by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the darkly humorous story about an adulterous love triangle is one that Wolf could identify with: he had been in love with Melanie Köchert, married to his friend Heinrich Köchert, for several years. (It is speculated that their romance began in earnest in 1884, when Wolf accompanied the Köcherts on holiday; though Heinrich discovered the affair in 1893 he remained Wolf's patron and Melanie's husband.) The opera was completed in nine months and was initially met with success, but Wolf's musical setting could not compensate for the weakness of the text, and it was doomed to failure; it has not yet been successfully revived.

Final years (1897–1903)[link]

Wolf's last concert appearance, which included his early champion Jäger, was in February 1897. Shortly thereafter Wolf slipped into syphilitic insanity, with only occasional spells of wellbeing. He left sixty pages of an unfinished opera, Manuel Venegas, in 1897, in a desperate attempt to finish before he lost his mind completely; after mid-1899 he could make no music at all, and once tried to drown himself, after which he was placed in a Vienna asylum at his own insistence. Melanie visited him faithfully during his decline until his death on 22 February 1903; however her lack of faith to her husband tortured her, and she killed herself in 1906.

Wolf is buried in the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) in Vienna, along with many other notable composers.

Music[link]

Wolf's greatest musical influence was Richard Wagner, who, in an encounter after Wolf first came to the Vienna Conservatory, encouraged the young composer to persist in composing and to attempt larger-scale works, cementing Wolf's desire to emulate his musical idol. His antipathy to Johannes Brahms was fueled partly by his devotion to Wagner, and partially by misunderstanding and clash of personality, rather than any ill-will on Brahms' part.

His true fame is his lieder; Wolf's temperament and abilities led him to more private and personal forms. Though he initially believed that mastering the larger forms was the hallmark of a great composer (a belief that his early mentors reinforced), the smaller scale of the art song provided an excellent basis upon which to develop basic compositional skills and later came to be his greatest strength. Wolf's lieder are noted for compressing expansive musical ideas and depth of feeling; his skill at interpreting and depicting texts musically is suited to the form. Though Wolf himself was obsessed with the idea that to compose only short forms was to be second-rate, his organization of poem settings into complete dramatic cycles, finding connections between texts not explicitly intended by the poet, as well as his conceptions of individual songs as dramatic works in miniature, mark him as a talented dramatist despite having written only one not particularly successful opera.

Early in his career Wolf modelled his lieder after those of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, particularly in the period around his relationship with Franck; in fact, they were good enough imitations to pass off as the real thing, which he once attempted, though his cover was blown too soon. It is speculated that his choice of lieder texts in the earlier years, largely dealing with sin and anguish, were partly influenced by his contraction of syphilis. His love for Franck, not fully requited, bore the intellectual children of the Wesendonck Lieder: impassioned settings of works by Nikolaus Lenau. The others were as distant from those in mood as possible; lighthearted and humorous. Penthesilea, too, is tempestuous and highly colored; though Wolf admired Liszt, who had encouraged him to complete the work, he felt Liszt's music too dry and academic, and strove for color and passion.

1888 marked a turning point in his style as well as his career, with the Mörike, Eichendorff, and Goethe sets drawing him away from Schubertiana and into "Wölferl's own howl". Mörike in particular drew out and complemented Wolf's musical gifts, the variety of subjects suiting Wolf's tailoring of music to text, his dark sense of humor matching Wolf's own, his insight and imagery demanding a wider variety of compositional techniques and command of text painting to portray. In his later works he relied less on the text to give him his musical framework and more on his pure musical ideas themselves; the later Spanish and Italian songs reflect this move toward "absolute music".

Wolf wrote hundreds of lieder, three operas, incidental music, choral music, as well as some rarely heard orchestral, chamber and piano music. His most famous instrumental piece is the Italian Serenade (1887), originally for string quartet and later transcribed for orchestra, which marked the beginning of his mature style.

Wolf was famous for his use of tonality to reinforce meaning. Concentrating on two tonal areas to musically depict ambiguity and conflict in the text became a hallmark of his style, resolving only when appropriate to the meaning of the song. His chosen texts were often full of anguish and inability to find resolution, and thus so too was the tonality wandering, unable to return to the home key. Use of deceptive cadences, chromaticism, dissonance, and chromatic mediants obscure the harmonic destination for as long as the psychological tension is sustained. His formal structure as well reflected the texts being set, and he wrote almost none of the straightforward strophic songs favoured by his contemporaries, instead building the form around the nature of the work.

Notable works[link]

Opera[link]

• Der Corregidor (1895)
• Manuel Venegas (unfinished, 1897)

Lieder[link]

• Mörike-Lieder (1888), to texts by Eduard Mörike.
• Eichendorff-Lieder (1889), to texts by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff.
• Goethe-Lieder (1890), to texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• Spanisches Liederbuch (1891)
• Italienisches Liederbuch (1892, 1896)
• Michelangelo Lieder (1897), to texts by Michelangelo.

Instrumental[link]

• String Quartet in D minor (1878–84)
• Penthesilea (1883–85)
• Italian Serenade (1887, string quartet; orchestrated in 1892)

Recording projects[link]

Individual songs have been included in the recorded repertoire of many singers. Significant early Wolf recording artists included Elisabeth Schumann, Heinrich Rehkemper, Heinrich Schlusnus, Josef von Manowarda, Lotte Lehmann, Karl Erb and others.^[3] Early post-War collections were recorded by Suzanne Danco, Anton Dermota and Gérard Souzay (all before 1953), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1954), Hans Hotter (1954), Erna Berger (1956), Heinrich Rehfuss (1955) and Elisabeth Schumann (1958), and important individual songs by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, and Elisabeth Höngen.^[4] Gerald Moore was a distinguished accompanist in Wolf song recordings. Fischer-Dieskau published a large collection of Mörike songs with him in March 1959.^[5] Two major projects stand out for more comprehensive coverage.

The Hugo Wolf Society was formed in September 1931 for the recording, under the aegis of English His Master's Voice records, a substantial proportion of the song repertoire, in limited editions for subscribers.^[6] The selection of artists was restricted to singers under contract to this company. Each volume consisted of six HMV red-label discs (unobtainable separately) and retailed new at $15.00 Am.
Volume I, entirely performed by Elena Gerhardt accompanied by Coenraad V. Bos, presented a selection mainly from the Spanish and Italian songbooks and the Mörike songs. For many years this scarce set^[7] was regarded as a collector's prize, and forms a distinct corpus within her recorded art. Later volumes always included more than one singer. Volume II: 16 of the 51 Goethe songs, all (apart from McCormack) accompanied by Coenraad V. Bos, but with Friedrich Schorr's Prometheus with the orchestral accompaniment. Volume III: A selection of 17 items, including three Michelangelo songs, three Mörike songs, four from the Spanisches Liederbuch and six from the Italienisches Liederbuch. All accompanied by Coenraad V. Bos. Volume IV: 30 items from Italienisches Liederbuch. Accompaniments by Coenraad V. Bos, Michael Raucheisen and Hanns Udo Müller. Volume V: A selection of 20 songs (mainly Mörike and Spanisches Liederbuch). Volume VI: Various. Artists included Alexander Kipnis (III, IV, V); Herbert Janssen (II, V); Gerhard Hüsch (II, III, IV, V); John McCormack (accompanied by Edwin Schneider) (II); Alexandre Trianti (II, III); Ria Ginster (IV, V); Friedrich Schorr (II); Elisabeth Rethberg (IV, V); Tiana Lemnitz ^[8] Each volume was accompanied by a booklet containing a short essay by Ernest Newman (I: Words and Music in Hugo Wolf, II: Wolf's Goethe Songs, III: A Note of Wolf as Craftsman, IV: The Italienisches Liederbuch) together with German texts, English translations (by Winifred Radford) and notes on each song (by Newman).^[6]

A Hugo Wolf Lieder Edition was recorded by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Daniel Barenboim during the 1970s for DGG, each volume containing three records. Volume I (1974): Mörike Lieder (Paris Grand Prix du Disque). Volume II (1976): Lieder on poems by Goethe, Heine and Lenau. Volume III (1977): Lieder on poems by Eichendorff, Michelangelo, Robert Reinick, Shakespeare, Byron, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Joseph Viktor von Scheffel, etc. The accompanying volumes include essays by Hans Jancik, texts of the poems, and translations by Lionel Salter (English) and Jacques Fournier and others (French).^[9]

The first project to record every song by Wolf was commenced in 2010, the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth, by Stone Records and the Oxford Lieder Festival. This series of live recordings, featuring a wide variety of singers and Oxford Lieder Festival's artistic director Sholto Kynoch at the piano, is expected to run to 11 or 12 discs and is due to be completed in 2013.^[10]

Notes and references[link]

• Newman, Ernest, Hugo Wolf (Methuen, London 1907).
• Sams, Eric and Susan Youens: 'Hugo Wolf', Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy, (subscription access)

External links[link]

• The Lied and Art Song Texts Page
• Free scores by Hugo Wolf in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free scores by Hugo Wolf in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
• Free scores by Hugo Wolf at the International Music Score Library Project
• Hugo Wolf's birthplace
• Hugo Wolf Quartett

Béla Bartók in 1927

Béla Viktor János Bartók ( /ˈbɑrtɒk/; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒrtoːk]; March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology.

Biography[link]

Childhood and early years (1881–98)[link]

Béla Bartók was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on March 25, 1881. Bartók's family reflected some of the ethno-cultural diversities of the country. His father, Béla Sr., considered himself thoroughly Hungarian, because on his father's side the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsod county (Móser 2006a, 44; Bartók 1981, 13), though his mother was from a Roman Catholic Serbian family (Bayley 2001, 16). His mother, Paula (born Paula Voit), had German as a mother tongue, but was ethnically of "mixed Hungarian" origin: Her maiden name Voit is German, probably of Saxon origin from Upper Hungary (Since 1920 in Czechoslovakia, since 1993 in Slovakia), though she spoke Hungarian fluently.^{[citation needed]} Among her closest forefathers there were family names like Polereczky (Magyarized Polish or Slovak) and Fegyveres (Magyar). Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990, 6). By the age of four, he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano; his mother began formally teaching him the next year.

Béla was a small and sickly child and suffered from severe eczema until the age of five (Gillies 1990, 5). In 1888, when he was seven, his father (the director of an agricultural school) died suddenly. Béla's mother then took him and his sister, Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős (today Vinogradiv, Ukraine) and then to Pozsony (German: Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia). In Pozsony, Béla gave his first public recital at age eleven to a warm critical reception. Among the pieces he played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube" (de Toth 1999). Shortly thereafter László Erkel accepted him as a pupil.

Early musical career (1899–1908)[link]

Bartók's signature on his high school graduation photograph, dated September 9, 1899

From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who influenced him greatly and became his lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem which honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work. When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his life-long dedication to folk music.

From 1907 he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements.

In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy. This position freed him from touring Europe as a pianist and enabled him to work in Hungary. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer.

In 1908, he and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies. Their growing interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. They made some surprising discoveries. Magyar folk music had previously been categorised as Gypsy music. The classic example is Franz Liszt's famous Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Magyar folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia and Siberia.

Bartók and Kodály quickly set about incorporating elements of such Magyar peasant music into their compositions. They both frequently quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. An example is his two volumes entitled For Children for solo piano, containing 80 folk tunes to which he wrote accompaniment. Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romanticism elements.

Middle years and career (1909–39)[link]

Personal life[link]

In 1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla III, was born on August 22, 1910. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in 1923.

He then married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student. She had his second son, Péter, born in 1924.

Opera[link]

In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a prize by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage (Chalmers 1995, 93). In 1917 Bartók revised the score for the 1918 première, and rewrote the ending. Following the 1919 revolution, he was pressured by the new Soviet government to remove the name of the librettist Béla Balázs from the opera (Chalmers 1995, 123), as he was blacklisted and had left the country for Vienna. Bluebeard's Castle received only one revival, in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the remainder of his life, although he was passionately devoted to Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.

Folk music and composition[link]

After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin (the then-Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia and in 1913 in Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17, both influenced by Debussy.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist. He believed that the existence of God could not be determined and was unnecessary. He later became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916. As an adult, his son later became president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church (Hughes 1999–2007).

Bartók wrote another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which are harmonically and structurally some of his most complex pieces. The Miraculous Mandarin, a modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content.

In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his third and fourth string quartets, after which his compositions demonstrate his mature style. Notable examples of this period are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra BB 118 (1939). The String Quartet No. 5 was composed in 1934, and the sixth and last string quartet in 1939.

In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana (Özgentürk 2008; Sipos 2000).

World War II and last years in America (1940–45)[link]

In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary. He was strongly opposed to the Nazis and Hungary's siding with Germany. After the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s, Bartók refused to give concerts in Germany and broke with his publisher there. His anti-fascist political views caused him a great deal of trouble with the establishment in Hungary. Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the U.S. with Ditta Pásztory in July that year. They settled in New York City. After joining them in 1942, his younger son, Péter Bartók, enlisted in the United States Navy where he served in the Pacific during the remainder of the war and later settled in Florida where he became a recording and sound engineer. His oldest son, Béla Bartók, Jr., remained in Hungary where he survived the war and later worked as a railroad official until his retirement in the early 1980s.

Bartók never became fully at home in the US. He initially found it difficult to compose. Although well known in America as a pianist, ethnomusicologist and teacher, he was not well known as a composer. There was little American interest in his music during his final years. He and his wife Ditta gave concerts. Bartók, who had made some recordings in Hungary also recorded for Columbia Records after he came to the US; many of these recordings (some with Bartók's own spoken introductions) were later issued on LP and CD (Bartók 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 2003, 2007, 2008).

Supported by a research fellowship from Columbia University, for several years, Bartók and Ditta worked on a large collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs in Columbia's libraries. They also translated some old Hungarian textbooks into English which were also from Columbia's libraries.^{[citation needed]} Bartók's economic difficulties during his first years in America were mitigated by publication royalties, teaching and performance tours. While his finances were always precarious, he did not live and die in poverty as was the common myth. He had enough supporters to ensure that there was sufficient money and work available for him to live on. Bartók was a proud man and did not easily accept charity. Despite being short on cash at times, he often refused money that his friends offered him out of their own pockets. Although he was not a member of the ASCAP, the society paid for any medical care he needed during his last two years. Bartók reluctantly accepted this (Chalmers 1995, 196–203).

The first symptoms of his health problems began late in 1940, when his right shoulder began to show signs of stiffening. In 1942, symptoms increased and he started having bouts of fever, but no underlying disease was diagnosed, in spite of medical examinations. Finally, in April 1944, leukemia was diagnosed, but by this time, little could be done (Chalmers 1995, 202–207).

As his body slowly failed, Bartók found more creative energy, and he produced a final set of masterpieces, partly thanks to the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner (Reiner had been Bartók's friend and champion since his days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). Bartók's last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6 but for Serge Koussevitsky's commission for the Concerto for Orchestra. Koussevitsky's Boston Symphony Orchestra premièred the work in December 1944 to highly positive reviews. Concerto for Orchestra quickly became Bartók's most popular work, although he did not live to see its full impact. In 1944, he was also commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. In 1945, Bartók composed his Piano Concerto No. 3, a graceful and almost neo-classical work. He began work on his Viola Concerto, but had not completed the scoring at his death.

Béla Bartók's portrait on 1,000 Hungarian forint banknote (printed in 1983; no longer in circulation).

Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City from complications of leukemia (specifically, of secondary polycythemia) on September 26, 1945. His funeral was attended by only ten people. Among them were his wife Ditta, their son Péter, and his pianist friend György Sándor (anon. 2006).

Bartok's body was initially interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. During the final year of communist Hungary in the late 1980s, the Hungarian government, along with his two sons, Béla III and Péter, requested that his remains be exhumed and transferred back to Budapest for burial, where Hungary arranged a state funeral for him on July 7, 1988. He was reinterred at Budapest's Farkasréti Cemetery (Chalmers 1995, 214).

The Third Piano Concerto was nearly finished at his death. For his Viola Concerto, Bartok had completed only the viola part and sketches of the orchestral part. Both works were later completed by his pupil, Tibor Serly. György Sándor was the soloist in the first performance of the Third Piano Concerto on February 8, 1946. The Viola Concerto was revised and polished in the 1990s by Bartók's son, Peter; this version may be closer to what Bartók intended (Chalmers 1995, 210).

Statues[link]

• A statue of Béla Bartók stands in Brussels, Belgium near the central train station in a public square, Spanjeplein-Place d'Espagne.
• A statue stands outside Malvern Court, south of South Kensington Underground Station, and just north of Sydney Place, where he stayed when performing in London.
• A statue of him was installed in front of one of the houses which Bartók owned in the hills above Budapest. It is now operated as a house museum.
• A bust and plaque located at his last residence, in New York City at 309 W. 57th Street, inscribed: "The Great Hungarian Composer / Béla Bartók / (1881–1945) / Made His Home In This House / During the Last Year of His Life".
• A bust of him is located in in the front yard of Ankara State Conservatory, Ankara, Turkey right next to the bust of Ahmet Adnan Saygun.

Compositions[link]

Bartók's music reflects two trends that dramatically changed the sound of music in the 20th century: the breakdown of the diatonic system of harmony that had served composers for the previous two hundred years (Griffiths 1978, 7); and the revival of nationalism as a source for musical inspiration, a trend that began with Mikhail Glinka and Antonín Dvořák in the last half of the 19th century (Einstein 1947, 332). In his search for new forms of tonality, Bartók turned to Hungarian folk music, as well as to other folk music of the Carpathian Basin and even of Algeria and Turkey; in so doing he became influential in that stream of modernism which exploited indigenous music and techniques (Botstein [n.d.], §6).

One characteristic style of music is his Night music, which he used mostly in slow movements of multi-movement ensemble or orchestral compositions in his mature period. It is characterised by "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies" (Schneider 2006, 84). An example is the third movement Adagio of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

His music can be grouped roughly in accordance with the different periods in his life.

Youth: Late-Romanticism (1890–1902)[link]

The works of his youth are of a late-Romantic style. Between 1890 and 1894 (nine to 13 years of age) he wrote 31 pieces with corresponding opus numbers. He started numbering his works anew with ‘opus 1’ in 1894 with his first large scale work, a piano sonata. Up to 1902, Bartók wrote in total 74 works which can be considered in Romantic style. Most of these early compositions are either scored for piano solo or include a piano. Additionally, there is some chamber music for strings. Compared to his later achievements, these works are of less importance.

New influences (1903–11)[link]

Under the influence of Richard Strauss (among other works Also sprach Zarathustra) (Stevens 1993, 15–17), Bartók composed in 1903 Kossuth, a symphonic poem in ten tableaux. In 1904 followed his Rhapsody for piano and orchestra which he numbered opus 1 again, marking it himself as the start of a new era in his music. An even more important occurrence of this year was his overhearing the eighteen-year-old nanny Lidi Dósa from Transylvania sing folk songs, sparking Bartók’s lifelong dedication to folk music (Stevens 1993, 22). When criticised for not composing his own melodies^{[citation needed]} Bartók pointed out that Molière and Shakespeare mostly based their plays on well-known stories too. Regarding the incorporation of folk music into art music he said:

The question is, what are the ways in which peasant music is taken over and becomes transmuted into modern music? We may, for instance, take over a peasant melody unchanged or only slightly varied, write an accompaniment to it and possibly some opening and concluding phrases. This kind of work would show a certain analogy with Bach’s treatment of chorales. [...] Another method [...] is the following: the composer does not make use of a real peasant melody but invents his own imitation of such melodies. There is no true difference between this method and the one described above. [...] There is yet a third way [...] Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music. In this case we may say, he has completely absorbed the idiom of peasant music which has become his musical mother tongue. (Bartók 1931/1976, 341–44.)

Bartók became first acquainted with Debussy’s music in 1907 and regarded his music highly. In an interview in 1939 Bartók said

Debussy's great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities. In that, he was just as important as Beethoven, who revealed to us the possibilities of progressive form, or as Bach, who showed us the transcendent significance of counterpoint. Now, what I am always asking myself is this: is it possible to make a synthesis of these three great masters, a living synthesis that will be valid for our time? (Moreux 1953, 92)

Debussy's influence is present in the Fourteen Bagatelles (1908). These made Ferruccio Busoni exclaim ‘At last something truly new!’ (Bartók, 1948, 2:83). Until 1911, Bartók composed widely differing works which ranged from adherence to romantic-style, to folk song arrangements and to his modernist opera Bluebeard’s Castle. The negative reception of his work led him to focus on folk music research after 1911 and abandon composition with the exception of folk music arrangements (Gillies 1993, 404; Stevens 1964, 47–49).

New inspiration and experimentation (1916–21)[link]

His pessimistic attitude towards composing was lifted by the stormy and inspiring contact with Klára Gombossy in the summer of 1915 (Gillies 1993, 405). This interesting episode in Bartók's life remained hidden until it was researched by Denijs Dille between 1979 and 1989 (Dille 1990, 257–77). Bartók started composing again, including the Suite for piano opus 14 (1916), and The Miraculous Mandarin (1918) and he completed The Wooden Prince (1917).

Bartók felt the result of World War I as a personal tragedy (Stevens 1993, 3). Many regions he loved were severed from Hungary: Transylvania, the Banat where he was born, and Pozsony where his mother lived. Additionally, the political relations between Hungary and the other successor states to the Austro-Hungarian empire prohibited his folk music research outside of Hungary (Somfai, 1996, 18). Thrown largely onto himself, he experimented with extreme compositional practices, the peak being his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 (Op. 21) and No. 2.^{[citation needed]} Bartók also wrote the noteworthy Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs in 1920, and the sunny Dance Suite in 1923, the year of his second marriage.

"Synthesis of East and West" (1926–45)[link]

In 1926, Bartók needed a significant piece for piano and orchestra with which he could tour in Europe and America. In the preparation for writing his First Piano Concerto, he wrote his Sonata, Out of Doors, and Nine Little Pieces, all for solo piano (Gillies 1993, 173). He increasingly found his own voice in his maturity. The style of his last period—named "Synthesis of East and West" (Gillies 1993, 189)—is hard to define let alone to put under one term. In his mature period, Bartók wrote relatively few works but most of them are large-scale compositions for large settings. Only his voice works have programmatic titles and his late works often adhere to classical forms.

Among his masterworks are all the six string quartets (1908, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, and 1939), the Cantata Profana (1930, Bartók declared that this was the work he felt and professed to be his most personal "credo", Szabolcsi 1974, 186), the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), the Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and the Third Piano Concerto (1945).

Bartók also made a lasting contribution to the literature for younger students: for his son Péter's music lessons, he composed Mikrokosmos, a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces.

Analysis[link]

Analytic approaches[link]

Paul Wilson lists as the most prominent characteristics of Bartók's music from late 1920s onwards the influence of the Carpathian basin and European art music, and his changing attitude toward (and use of) tonality, but without the use of the traditional harmonic functions associated with major and minor scales (Wilson 1992, 2–4).

Although Bartók claimed in his writings that his music was always tonal, it rarely uses the chords or scales of tonality, and so the descriptive resources of tonal theory are of limited use. George Perle and Elliott Antokoletz focus on alternative methods of signaling tonal centers, via axes of inversional symmetry. Others view Bartok's axes of symmetry in terms of atonal analytic protocols. Richard Cohn argues that inversional symmetry is often a byproduct of another atonal procedure, the formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads. Atonal pitch-class theory also furnishes the resources for exploring polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve tone aggregate, octatonic scale (and alpha chord), the diatonic and heptatonia seconda seven-note scales, and less often the whole tone scale and the primary pentatonic collection (Wilson 1992, 24–29).

He rarely used the simple aggregate actively to shape musical structure, though there are notable examples such as the second theme from the first movement of his Second Violin Concerto, commenting that he "wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all twelve tones and still remain tonal" (Gillies 1990, 185). More thoroughly, in the first eight measures of the last movement of his Second Quartet, all notes gradually gather with the twelfth (G♭) sounding for the first time on the last beat of measure 8, marking the end of the first section. The aggregate is partitioned in the opening of the Third String Quartet with C♯–D–D♯–E in the accompaniment (strings) while the remaining pitch classes are used in the melody (violin 1) and more often as 7–35 (diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 5–35 (pentatonic or "black-key" collection) such as in no. 6 of the Eight Improvisations. There, the primary theme is on the black keys in the left hand, while the right accompanies with triads from the white keys. In measures 50–51 in the third movement of the Fourth Quartet, the first violin and 'cello play black-key chords, while the second violin and viola play stepwise diatonic lines (Wilson 1992, 25). On the other hand, from as early as the Suite for piano, op. 14 (1914), he occasionally employed a form of serialism based on compound interval cycles, some of which are maximally distributed, multi-aggregate cycles (Martins 2004, Gollin 2007).

Béla Bartók memorial plaque in Baja, Hungary

Ernő Lendvaï (1971) analyses Bartók's works as being based on two opposing tonal systems, that of the acoustic scale and the axis system, as well as using the golden section as a structural principle.

Milton Babbitt, in his 1949 critique of Bartók's string quartets, criticized Bartók for using tonality and non tonal methods unique to each piece. Babbitt noted that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated" (Babbitt 1949, 385). Bartók's use of "two organizational principles"—tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific method for moment to moment thematic elements—was a problem for Babbitt, who worried that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling of closure (Babbitt 1949, 377–78).

Catalogues and opus numbers[link]

The cataloguing of Bartók's works is somewhat complex. Bartók assigned opus numbers to his works three times, the last of these series ending with the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, Op. 21 in 1921. He ended this practice because of the difficulty of distinguishing between original works and ethnographic arrangements, and between major and minor works. Since his death, three attempts—two full and one partial—have been made at cataloguing. The first, and still most widely used, is András Szőllősy's chronological Sz. numbers, from 1 to 121. Denijs Dille subsequently reorganised the juvenilia (Sz. 1–25) thematically, as DD numbers 1 to 77. The most recent catalogue is that of László Somfai; this is a chronological index with works identified by BB numbers 1 to 129, incorporating corrections based on the Béla Bartók Thematic Catalogue.^{[citation needed]}.

Discography[link]

• Bartók, Béla. 1994. Bartók at the Piano. Hungaroton 12326. 6-CD set.
• Bartók, Béla. 1995a. Bartok Plays Bartok – Bartok At The Piano 1929–41. Pearl 9166. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 1995b. Bartók Recordings From Private Collections. Hungaroton 12334. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2003. Bartók Plays Bartók. Pearl 179. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2007. Bartók: Contrasts, Mikrokosmos. Membran/Documents 223546. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2008. Bartok Plays Bartok. Urania 340. CD recording.

Media[link]

See also[link]

Biography portal

• List of solo piano compositions by Béla Bartók

Bibliography[link]

• Anon. 2003. "Béla Bartók 1881–1945". Websophia.com. (Accessed March 25, 2009)
• Anon. 2006. "Gyorgy Sandor, Pianist and Bartok Authority, Dies at 93". The Juilliard Journal Online 21, no. 5 (February). (Accessed September 15, 2010)
• Antokoletz, Elliott. 1984. The Music of Béla Bartók. University of California Press.
• Babbitt, Milton. 1949. "The String Quartets of Bartók". Musical Quarterly 35 (July): 377–85. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, edited by Stephen Peles, with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph N. Straus, ^[citation needed]. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-08966-3
• Bartók, Béla. 1948. Levelek, fényképek, kéziratok, kották. ("Letters, photographs, manuscripts, scores"), ed. János Demény, 2 vols. A Muvészeti Tanács könyvei, 1.–2. sz. Budapest: Magyar Muvészeti Tanács. English edition, as Béla Bartók: Letters, translated by Péter Balabán and István Farkas; translation revised by Elisabeth West and Colin Mason (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971). ISBN 978-0-571-09638-1
• Bartók, Béla. 1976. "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music (1931)". In Béla Bartók Essays, edited by Benjamin Suchoff, 340–44. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-10120-8 OCLC 60900461
• Bartók, Béla. 1981. The Hungarian Folk Song, second English edition, edited by Benjamin Suchoff, translated by Michel D. Calvocoressi, with annotations by Zoltán Kodály. The New York Bartok Archive Studies in Musicology 13. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Bartók, Peter. 2002. "My Father". Homosassa, Florida, Bartók Records (ISBN 0-9641961-2-3).
• Bayley, Amanda. 2001. Cambridge Companion to Bartók. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Bónis, Ferenc. 2006. Élet-képek: Bartók Béla. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó: Vávi Kft., Alföldi Nyomda Zrt. ISBN 963-506-649-X.
• Botstein, Leon. [n.d.] "Modernism", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed April 29, 2008), (subscription access)
• Boys, Henry. 1945. "Béla Bartók 1881–1945". Musical Times 86, no. 1233 (November): 329–31.
• Chalmers, Kenneth. 1995. Béla Bartók. 20th-Century Composers. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-3164-6 (pbk.)
• Cohn, Richard, 1988. "Inversional Symmetry and Transpositional Combination in Bartok." Music Theory Spectrum 10.
• Cohn, Richard, 1992. "Bartok's Octatonic Strategies: A Motivic Approach." Journal of the American Musicological Society 44
• Czeizel, Endre. 1992. Családfa: honnan jövünk, mik vagyunk, hová megyünk? [Budapest]: Kossuth Könyvkiadó. ISBN 963-09-3569-4
• de Toth, June. 1999. "Béla Bartók: A Biography". Bela Bartok Biography Liner notes to Béla Bartók: Complete Piano Works 7-CD set, Eroica Classical Recordings^{[Full citation needed]}
• Dille, Denijs. 1990. Béla Bartók: Regard sur le Passé. (French, no English version available). Namur: Presses universitaires de Namur. ISBN 2-87037-168-3 ISBN 978-2870371688
• Einstein, Alfred. 1947. Music in the Romantic Era. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Gillies, Malcolm (ed.). 1990. Bartók Remembered. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-14243-5 (cased) ISBN 0-571-14244-3 (pbk)
• Gillies, Malcolm (ed.). 1993. The Bartók Companion. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-15330-5 (cloth), ISBN 0-571-15331-3 (pbk) New York: Hal Leonard. ISBN 0-931340-74-8
• Gillies, Malcolm. 2001. "Béla Bartók". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Press; New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music. Also in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed May 23, 2006), (subscription access)
• Gollin, Edward. 2007. "Multi-Aggregate Cycles and Multi-Aggregate Serial Techniques in the Music of Béla Bartók". Music Theory Spectrum 29, no. 2 (Fall): 143–76.
• Griffiths, Paul. 1978. A Concise History of Modern Music. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20164-1
• Hughes, Peter. 1999–2007. "Béla Bartók" in Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography. [n.p.]: Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.
• Leafstedt, Carl S. 1999. Inside Bluebeard's Castle. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510999-6
• Lendvaï, Ernő. 1971. Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music, introduced by Alan Bush. London: Kahn & Averill. ISBN 0-900707-04-6 OCLC 240301
• Loxdale, Hugh D., and Adalbert Balog. 2009. "Bela Bartok: Musician, Musicologist, Composer, and Entomologist!." Antenna – Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society of London 33, no. 4:175–82.
• Moreux, Serge. 1953. Béla Bartók, translated G. S. Fraser and Erik de Mauny. London: The Harvill Press.
• Móser, Zoltán. 2006a. "Szavak, feliratok, kivonatok". Tiszatáj 60, no. 3 (March): 41–45.
• Móser, Zoltán. 2006b. "Bartók-õsök Gömörben". Honismeret: A Honismereti Szövetség folyóirata 34, no. 2 (April): 9–11.
• Özgentürk, Nebil. 2008. Türkiye'nin Hatıra Defteri, episode 3. Istanbul: Bir Yudum İnsan Prodüksiyon LTD. ŞTİ. Turkish CNN television documentary series.
• Sipos, János (ed.). 2000. In the Wake of Bartók in Anatolia 1: Collection Near Adana. Budapest: Ethnofon Records.
• Somfai, Laszlo (1996). Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources. Ernest Bloch Lectures in Music 9. Berkeley : University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-08485-8
• Schneider, David E. 2006. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality. California Studies in 20th-Century Music 5. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24503-7
• Stevens, Halsey. 1964. The Life and Music of Béla Bartók, second edition. New York: Oxford University Press. ASIN: B000NZ54ZS (Third edition 1993, ISBN 978-0-19-816349-7)
• Szabolcsi, Bence. 1974. Bartók Béla: Cantata profana in "Miért szép századunk zenéje?" (Why is the music of the Twentieth century so beautiful), ed. György Kroó. Budapest.
• Wells, John C. 1990. "Bartók", in Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 63. Harlow, England: Longman. ISBN 0-582-05383-8
• Wilson, Paul. 1992. The Music of Béla Bartók. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05111-5.

Further reading[link]

• Antokoletz, Elliott. 1984. The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04604-8.
• Jyrkiäinen, Reijo. 2012. "Form, Monothematicism, Variation and Symmetry in Béla Bartók’s String Quartets". Ph.D. diss. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. ISBN 978-952-10-8040-1 (Abstract).
• Kárpáti, János. 1975. Bartók's String Quartets, translated by Fred MacNicol. Budapest: Corvina Press.
• Somfai, László. 1981. Tizennyolc Bartók-tanulmány [Eighteen Bartók Studies]. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó. ISBN 963-330-370-2.
• Somfai, Lászlo. 1996. Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources. Ernest Bloch Lectures. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08485-3.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Béla Bartók

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Béla Bartók

• Béla Bartók biography and works on the UE website (publisher)
• The Lied and Art Song Texts Page Original texts of the songs of Bartok with translations in various languages.
• Bartók Béla Memorial House, Budapest
• Bartók and his relationship with Unitarianism
• Gallery of Bartók portraits
• Béla Bartók at the Notable Names Database
• Don Gabor and Laszlo Halasz recorded Béla Bartók at his home in New York
• Béla Bartók at Find a Grave
• Plaque #94 on Open Plaques. in Sydney Place, London

Recordings

• Kunst der Fuge: Béla Bartók—MIDI files
• Excerpts from sound archives of Bartok's works.
• In the BBC Discovering Music: Listening Library

Sheet music

• Free scores by Béla Bartók at the International Music Score Library Project

Tiana Lemnitz (26 October 1897 - 5 February 1994) was a German operatic soprano with a beautiful lyric voice. Her major operatic career took place between the two world wars (1919-1939).

Tiana Lemnitz as Eurydice in Orpheus and Eurydice by Christoph Willibald von Gluck

Life and career[link]

The youngest of 10 children, she was born in Metz to a musical family. Her father was a Militärkappellmeister. She began to sing at the age of seven and at 15 she entered the Metz Music School. Later she studied voice with Antoni Kohmann at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Starting with small opera companies, she made her debut in Heilbronn in Albert Lortzing's opera Undine in 1921. She then sang in Aachen (1922-28), Hannover (1928-34) while making several guest appearances in Dresden (1931-34). In 1930 she sang in Sopot as Agathe in Der Freischütz.

She became a member of the Berlin Staatsoper in 1934, and remained with the company until 1957. She also sang regularly at the Munich State Opera, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.

In 1936 she made guest appearances at the Royal Opera House in London and at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1938. She sang Marguerite in Faust in Warsaw in 1937 next to the Mephisto of Feodor Chaliapin.

Her repertory included Euridice in Orfeo ed Euridice, Countess Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Elsa in Lohengrin, Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Sieglinde in Die Walküre, Octavian and Marshallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the title role in Arabella, Micaela in Carmen, Elvira in Ernani, the title role in Aida, Desdemona in Otello. She also took an interest in Slavic operas and became a noted interpreter of operas such as Dalibor, Jenůfa, Wozzeck.

She was also admired as a recitalist notably in Lieder. In 1937 she was awarded the prestigious title of Kammersängerin. She died in Berlin.

She began recording in 1934 for Polydor with arias from Der Freischütz and Lohengrin. She recorded for Electrola in Germany (1937-48) and for HMV (1938-9)^[1].

Assessment[link]

According to Musical America, "What more adjectives can do justice to the Elisabeth of Tiana Lemnitz! This beautiful voice, this superlative vocalism, this absolute supremacy of the technical and the interpretative in which the economy of gesture lent the whole a spiritual grandeur. It was wonderful . . . Lemnitz remained unique in the perfection of her performance."

An English reviewer wrote: "The greatest moment of the evening came in the quintet [of Meistersinger]. Lemnitz, beginning the movement, sang so beautifully that—without being rude—one was conscious of nothing else." Wagner's biographer Ernest Newman thought her Eva the best he had ever seen.

Infinitely expressive, she gave all of herself to her art. About herself she said: "I am very earnest in my art and consider it as a holy legacy which shall procure some of the higher sense of life to the people."

Sources[link]

• Operissimo.com (German)

1. ^ Encyclopedia of recorded sound By Frank W. Hoffmann, Howard Ferstler Edition: 2, illustrated Published by CRC Press, 2005 ISBN 0-415-93835-X, 9780415938358

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2011)

Wolfgang Holzmair (born 1952 in Vöcklabruck) is an Austrian baritone.

Holzmair studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He won 2nd prize in the baritone class of the 's-Hertogenbosch International Vocal Competition in 1981, and a year later 1st prize in the Musikverein International Lieder Competition, Vienna.

Opera[link]

Holzmair spent about six years with opera companies in Bern (Bern Theatre) and Gelsenkirchen (Musiktheater im Revier) before successes in Udo Zimmermann's The White Rose and Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande brought him to general attention^[1] His repertoire includes rarely performed works such as Henze's Boulevard Solitude, Nigel Osborne’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union,^[2] Hindemith's Neues vom Tage^[3] and Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias.^[4]

More standard works^[5] include Richard Strauss's Capriccio (the Count), Ariadne auf Naxos (Harlequin and the Music Master), Der Rosenkavalier (Faninal); Mozart's The Magic Flute (Papageno and the Speaker) and Così fan tutte (Guglielmo and Don Alfonso); Wagner's Tannhäuser (Wolfram), and Meistersinger (Beckmesser). In the 2009/2010 season he sang Demetrius in the Canadian Opera Company's production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream,^[6] the Father in Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel on a tour in Japan, and the Sorceress in a concert performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas^[7]in Vienna

Song recital and orchestral concerts[link]

Holzmair's high, rather light. timbre is particularly suitable for song^[8] and in 1989 a highly successful debut at the Wigmore Hall launched his international recital career^[9]. His clear and expressive language embedded in a pure legato line^[10], and his dramatic commitment, have been especially commended. The English music critic Alan Blyth^[11] was immediately struck by the baritone’s first recording of Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin^[12] and remained a firm advocate^[13][14]; more recently Richard Fairman referred to an exceptional ability to communicate the rhythms and meanings of poetry^[15].

He has worked with many pianists of note, a long-standing collaboration with Imogen Cooper being widely admired for its exceptionally close rapport^[16][17]; other partners include Andreas Haefliger^[18]and Philippe Cassard^[19] as well as dedicated accompanyists Gerard Wyss, Russell Ryan and Roger Vignoles. He also maintains a strong presence in the world of chamber music, where the Trio Wanderer^[20], the Nash Ensemble and the Rachmaninov Trio^[21] are among his collaborators. Holzmair regularly appears in major centres in Europe and North America, and also travels to outlying venues where communities have fewer opportunities to hear live recitals^[22]. Recent European Music Festivals include Risør, Kuhmo, Lockenhaus, Kyburgiade, the Oxford Lieder Festival and Styriarte, and he has also participated in La Folle Journée's program for bringing classical music to new audiences. In 2010 Holzmair and the Departure Centre for Creative Design in Vienna collaborated in a bid to attract new listeners to lieder, by presenting concerts in which the baritone and 6 compatriots performed Wolf against visual backdrops. The experiment was deemed a success, and was repeated for Mahler’s lieder, with a slightly different cast of singers, in 2011^[23]. The Wolf series is now available on 5 DVDs (which use studio recordings, so that the viewer sees the visuals but not the singers)^[24].

Holzmair's wide-ranging repertoire includes melodies as well as lieder^[25] and extends from the 18th to the 21st century. He has long been committed to bringing to attention the "Entartete" composers who suffered under the Nazi regime and has recorded lieder by Hanns Eisler, Franz Mittler^[26], Erich Zeisl^[27], Ernst Krenek^[28], Franz Schreker^[29]and composers from Theresienstadt^[30]; in 2010 he joined the Nash Ensemble in a week-end show-casing music by the Theresienstadt composers, at the Wigmore Hall^[31][32].

He has performed orchestrated lieder with many leading orchestras, as in the 2010 Styriarte Festival^[33]; other recent orchestral appearances have been in Britten's War Requiem, Brahms' Deutsches Requiem, Darius Milhaud's Les Choephores^[34] and Schumann's^[35] Scenes from Faust.

Song premieres and commissions[link]

Premieres since 2000 include Kurt Schwertsik's Die Welt eine Laute and Fioretti per San Francesco,^[36] a chamber version of Hans Werner Henze's Five Neapolitan Songs^[37] with the Nash Ensemble (as part of a 75th birthday tribute to the composer), Dmitry Smirnov's Eternal Refuge^[38] with the Altenburg Trio Wien (recorded by Austrian Radio), Daniel Schnyder's one-act opera Mozart and Casanova^[39] (at the Menuhin Festival, Gstaad), Helmut Schmidinger's solo cantata Mozart Briefe^[40] (with the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz, as part of Mozart's 250th), and David Matthews' arrangements of Brahms' lieder^[41] and of part of Franz Schubert's Schwanengesang^[42] (commissioned by the Nash Ensemble); recent additions are Schmidinger's Wo der Bartl den Most holt^[43]and the Austrian premiere of Lori Laitman's Seed of Dreams^[44]. HIs Erich Zeisl disc marking the composer's 100th anniversary included unpublished songs, and he contributed to a recording of new settings of Eduard Mörike's poetry^[45]commissioned by the Hugo Wolf Instititute of Stuttgart, to celebrate the poet's 200th birthday. Holzmair has commissioned David Leisner to compose a new piece for baritone and string quartet^[46]and the resulting work, A Timeless Procession, will be premiered in a future season.

Teaching[link]

Since 1998 Holzmair has taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum and given master classes in Europe and North America; 2011 finds him participating in the annual Schubert Institute Master Course in BadenBaden^[47] for the 7th time. In 2008 the Royal College of Music made him a Fellow in recognition of services to the college and to music, and in 2009 he was a juror for the Wigmore Hall Song competition.^[48] He is an advisor to the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, and contributed to the foundation's first CD.

Selected recordings[link]

• Schubert Die schöne Müllerin with Jörg Demus, 1983 Preiser
• Ein deutsches Requiem with Herbert Blomstedt, 1996 Decca Grammy Award
• Brahms Die Schone Magelone with Gerard Wyss and Will Quadfleg, 1986 Tudor
• Braunfels Die Vögel with Lothar Zagrosek, 1992 Decca
• Schubert lieder to texts by Mayrhofer with Gerard Wyss, 1993 Tudor
• Schumann Heine Lieder with Imogen Cooper, 1996 Philips
• Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart Lieder with Imogen Cooper, 2000 Philips
• Krenek and Schubert Lieder with Russell Ryan, 2003 Orf
• Beethoven, Pleyel, Haydn, Songs from the British Isles with the Trio Wanderer, 2008 Cypres
• Wolf Songs with Imogen Cooper, 2009 Wigmore Live
• Songs from Theresienstadt with Russell Ryan, 2009 Bridge
• Ravel Melodies and Trio with Ensemble Musique Oblique, 2009 Alphee

References[link]

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ David M. Cummings in International Who's Who in Music and Musicians Directory [2]
3. ^ [3]
4. ^ [4]
5. ^ Listed under Owen White management [5]
6. ^ Opera News review of A Midsummer Night's Dream [6]
7. ^ Dido and Aeneas review[7]
8. ^ Nick KImberley The Anatomy of Melancholy 1993 [8]
9. ^ Michael White Sing a Song of Silence 1993 [9]
10. ^ Barrrymore Laurence Scherer Letter from America 1993 [10]
11. ^ Alan Blyth music critic[11]
12. ^ Review of Die Schone Mullerin[12]
13. ^ Review of Schubert's Mayrhofer lieder [13]
14. ^ Review of Schubert's Goethe lieder[14]
15. ^ Richard Fairman on Wigmore Hall recital, 2010 [15]
16. ^ Colin Clarke on the Holzmair/Cooper partnership in Wolf, in Musicweb International 2011 [16]
17. ^ Review of re-issue of Holzmair/Cooper Schubert song cycles, 2005[17]
18. ^ Rob Pennock on Holzmair/Haefliger's Winterreise, in Classical Source 2009 [18]
19. ^ Philippe Cassard Web site"
20. ^ Performance with Trio Wanderer 2009 [19]
21. ^ New initiative between Russian and Western musicians [20]
22. ^ Recital in SW England[21]
23. ^ Mahler lieder with visuals [22]
24. ^ DVDs of Wolf lieder [23]
25. ^ Diamant d'Opera Magazine, May 2010 [24]
26. ^ Mittler review 2004[25]
27. ^ Zeisl review 2005[26]
28. ^ Krenek recital 2000[27]
29. ^ Schreker review 2008[28]
30. ^ Theresienstadt recording 2010[29]
31. ^ Tim Ashley on Theresienstadt week-end in The Guardian 2010 [30]
32. ^ Week-end in Therezin 2010 [31]
33. ^ Orchestrated Krenek lieder [32]
34. ^ Review of Les Choephores [33]
35. ^ Review of Scenes from Faust[34]
36. ^ Kurt Schwertsick premiere [35]
37. ^ Henze's 5 Neapolitan Songs [36]
38. ^ Online from Sibelius music
39. ^ Daniel Schnyder's Web site [37]
40. ^ Schmidinger's Mozart Briefe [38]
41. ^ David Matthews' Brahms arrangement[39]
42. ^ David Matthews' Schubert arrangement [40]
43. ^ Schmidinger's Wo Bartl den Most holt. [41]
44. ^ Seed of Dreams Austrian premier [42]
45. ^ Mörike settings [43]
46. ^ David Leisner biography[44]
47. ^ Schubert Master Course 2011[45]
48. ^ Wigmore Hall Song Competition[46]

External links[link]

• Homepage

Olaf Bär (born December 19, 1957 in Dresden) is a German operatic baritone.

Life[link]

Bär received his musical training in his home city of Dresden, studying at the city's Hochschule für Musik. His career has concentrated on lieder and on the lyric baritone roles of the operatic repertoire. Many of his early lieder performances were accompanied by the late Geoffrey Parsons.

His operatic debut was in 1981 in Dresden, and he was a member of that city's opera company (Semperoper) from 1985 to 1991. His voice has been compared favorably with that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.^[1]

Selected Recorded Repertoire[link]

• Bach: Cantatas with Peter Schreier and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (EMI, 1991)
• Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem (EMI, 1992)
• Duruflé: Requiem (EMI, 1988)
• Fauré: Requiem (EMI, 1988)
• Mahler (arr. Schönberg): Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Linos Ensemble (Capriccio, 1999)
• Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (Papageno) with Neville Marriner (Philips, 1989)
• Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (Sprecher) with Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players (EMI, 1990)
• Schubert: Winterreise (EMI, 1988)
• Schumann: Lieder (EMI, 1985, 1989, 1996, 1997)
• Wagner: Tristan und Isolde (Kurwenal) with the Royal Opera House Chorus, Covent Garden; the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden; Antonio Pappano (EMI, 2004/05)

References[link]

1. ^ http://www.gramophone.co.uk/gramofilereview.asp?reviewID=9713097&mediaID=165502&issue=Reviewed%3A+Awards+1997

External links[link]

• Biography
• Discography

This article about a German opera singer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e