The Violin Music of East Germany Part V: Fidelio Finke

Fidelio Finke is the East German composer of the month.

Born Fidelio Friedrich “Fritz” Finke on October 22, 1891 in Josefsthal, Austria-Hungary (now Josefův Důl, Czech Republic - not far from the German border), died June 12, 1968 in Dresden, East Germany.

I spent months perusing the internet looking up Finke on the internet but apart from a Wikipedia article about him, very little can be found about the composer. I looked for recordings, videos, reference material and beyond. In a New Yorker article published in 1983, Andre Previn, after discovering, playing and enjoying the music of Finke is quoted to have said, “Fidelio Finke, where are you now?”

And it still feels pretty true…

About Fidelio

I feel like an academic sham to rely so heavily on Wikipedia but here it goes… Finke received organ, piano and violin lessons. From 1908 to 1911, he studied at the Prague Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. From 1911, he worked as a private music teacher and in 1915 he became a music theory teacher at the Prague Conservatory. In 1920, he moved to the German Academy of Music and Performing Arts (confusing, but also located in Prague), where he taught music theory and composition. He became a professor in 1926, and worked as the rector from 1927 to 1945.

During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia(1938–1945), and while serving as the Rector of the German Academy of Music, Finke opportunistically attempted to ingratiate himself with the Nazis by creating arrangements of Sudeten German folksongs and the choral works Deutsche Kantate: Der neue Tag and O Herzland Böhmens (1942) for mixed chorus, brass and organ. His application for membership within the Nazi party was denied in 1942 because of his political unreliability.

After imprisonment and expropriation as a result of the Bene decrees* as well as a suicide attempt in 1945, Finke was brought to Dresden by the Soviet occupation forces. There, he founded the State Academy of Music and Dresden Theatre, and was the rector until 1951. He was a professor of sound recordings at the Leipzig Academy of Music until 1958. His total works comprise about 170 compositions.

Finke was a member of the SED (The Socialist Unity Party of Germany) from 1946 until his death in 1968 in Dresden. He was buried in Heidenfriedhof Cemetery in Hamburg (which seems confusing to me, because it doesn’t really seem like he spent much time there) and his estate is preserved by the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

Repertoire:

·      String Quartet No. 1 (1914); dedicated to Arnold Schoenberg

·      String Trio (1923)

·      Piano Trio (1923)

·      8 Musiken for 2 violins and viola (1923)

·      Sonata for violin and piano (1924)

·      String Quartet No. 2 „Der zerstörte Tasso“ (with soprano solo) (1925)

·      Ciacona nach Vitali for violin and piano (1925) ACQUIRED

·      String Quartet No. 3 (1926, lost)

·      Transcriptions of Wagner Opera Overtures for violin and piano ACQUIRED

I can say, after spending some time with the overture arrangements, his style is fun - very romantic - and perhaps not as “envelope pushing” as some of the other composers working in East Germany, or already featured in my little series. Perhaps his memory did not persevere for many reasons, endearing yourself to the Nazis, in retrospect, was perhaps not the smoothest move to pull for one’s artistic legacy.

*a series of laws drafted by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II. The decrees dealt with various aspects of the restoration of Czechoslovakia and its legal system, denazification, and reconstruction of the country. In journalism and political history, the term "Beneš decrees" refer to the status of ethnic Germans, Hungarians and others in postwar Czechoslovakia. 

As a result, almost all ethnic Germans and Hungarians whose ancestors had lived in Czechoslovakia for centuries prior to World War II or those who had settled there during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia lost their Czechoslovakian citizenship and property and were expelled from their homes. Some of them died during the expulsion process, which took place during the late 1940s).

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidelio_F._Finke

https://slippedisc.com/2019/03/nazi-composer-gets-his-name-taken-off-school/

The Violin Music of East Germany Part III: Johannes Paul Thilman

The spotlight in this installment of my East German Violin Music blog series is dedicated to Johannes Paul Thilman. While information about Thilman is quite hard to find, some of his scores were more readily available. Unfortunately for me, several of my recent acquisitions are stuck in Germany due to COVID-19 related shipping restrictions between the EU and United States. The sellers assure me that they are holding them for me and will send them as soon as the holds are lifted. I cannot wait to explore these scores and the waiting only makes my excitement grow more ferocious. 

I’ll start with a few personal notes regarding my exploration of the music I already own.

I really like Thilman’s musical style and harmonies. He is considered a conservative composer and his music is reminiscent of the Romantic Era tonalities, and maybe I just like that stuff, but it fits nicely on the violin. Some works, like the 8 Duets for violin and piano, are quite simplistic and use folk-like melodies. The virtuosic technique is very manageable and makes this music well suited for younger music students. This is similar to some of Schwaen’s music – one could conceivably put together a student recital consisting solely of music from East Germany...that would be a cool history lesson/experience! The Kleine Suite for Solo violin is difficult and virtuosic in a similar way to the solo music of Bach, Prokofiev, and Ysaye. I had to sit at the piano and play through many of the harmonies to get a better sense of the sonorities. I think it is particularly challenging because I have no recordings to refer to for style, articulation, tempo, etc.

The Research:

Johannes Paul Thilman - German composer and pedagogue; b. Dresden, Jan. 11, 1906; d. there, Jan. 29, 1973.

Thilman, who actually wanted to become a teacher, encountered music at the age of 18 and was initially self-taught. He was a pupil of Hindemith, Grabner, and Scherchen and attended the Leipzig Conservatory in 1929. He also studied at the Dresden Technical Univ. During the Nazi era (1933-5) he was declared an unacceptable composer, and it was only after the fall of the 3rd Reich that he was permitted to pursue his career in earnest. In 1940, he became the instructor of composition at the "Carl Maria von Weber" School of Music (also called the Dresden Conservatory) in his hometown, Dresden. He was a professor there from the year 1956 until he became an Emeritus professor in 1968. Among his students were composers Friedrich Goldmann and Udo Zimmermann. Besides his academic activities, he was also involved in the musical life of Dresden. He was the founder-director of the “New Music in Dresden” concert series (1947-51) and later taught at the University of Dresden. Thilman went on to become the Professor of composition at the Dresden Hochschule für Musik beginning in 1965.* In 1960, he was the recipient of the coveted National Prize of East Germany. 

*these schools listed above may be related in some way. I’m not 100% certain about the University/Conservatory setup in Germany and how it may have changed.

His academic publications include, Probleme der neuen Polyphonie (1949), Neue Musik: Polemische Beiträge (1950), and Musikalische Formenlehre (1952). 

Among his compositions are 7 symphonies and other orchestral works, chamber music, choral works, piano pieces, and numerous works for school and “domestic use” (I assume this means to be sang or played at home by amateur musicians?).

During his life, his 4th Symphony was very popular. It really is beautiful - as are the images in the video.

Musical Style:

Thilman was a conservative Composer. His music is tonal and refers to the form and harmony of Romantic music. His melody is always catchy and uncomplicated. Thilman was particularly inspired by folk music. This influence can be heard clearly in many of his works. Most of his works are short. Generally, his tone is fresh and uncomplicated rather than dramatic. Undoubtedly, Thilman oriented his works towards the aesthetics of the Socialist realism. 

 ~Just in case you need a refresher on Socialist Realism, here is what Wikipedia says: 

Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is characterized by the glorified depiction of communist values, such as the emancipation of the proletariat.

In his later works, he often chose unusual settings and freer forms for his works. Thilman was very respected in East Germany. Today, however, he is mostly forgotten. This last point seems to be sad but true for many composers in East Germany, even those that were popular, famous, or highly regarded. The quest to find his music and information about him has been surprisingly limited, and as I said at the beginning, his scores are some of the easier ones to find. I’ll be sharing clips of his work on social media soon so make sure to follow me on Instagram (@activeviolinist ) to watch some of those stories.

Repertoire I am looking for:

Solos:

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op. 59, 1952 FOUND – stuck in Germany

Lichtenberger Konzert for violin and string orchestra, 1958

Concerto for Violin and Chamber Orchestra, 1972

Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano Op. 50 FOUND – stuck in Germany

Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano Op. 80

Kleine Suite for Solo Violin, 1955 ACQUIRED

Sonatine for Violin and Piano Op. 82 FOUND – Stuck in Germany

8 Duos for Violin and Piano ACQUIRED

Duo Drama for Violin and Piano

Chamber Music:

Sontatine for String Quartet Op. 49

String Quartet No. 1

String Quartet No.2, 1954

Piano Quartet No. 2 Op. 70  

Piano Quintet, 1955

String Quartet No. 3 in D major Op. 81

String Quartet No. 4 “in einem satz” Op. 84, 1958

Piano Trio, 1963

Dramatische Szenen for String Quartet, 1969

Kammerspiel for String Quartet, 1970

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Paul_Thilman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/thilman-johannes-paul

https://www.hofmeister-musikverlag.com/authors/s-t/t/thilman-johannes-paul.html

https://www.abebooks.com

Finally Sharing My Quarantine Playlist

I keep seeing people sharing their playlists and I wanted to share mine too so I started thinking about what music I’ve been listening to lately. So I started thinking about what I’ve been listening to over the last few weeks and realized I’ve been listening to books and the Bach Chaconne…and that’s pretty much it. So I thought I would share a little bit about the piece like I did with the Tzigane several years ago when I was borderline obsessed with that piece. Plus, my mom told me she enjoyed listening to all the different versions and surely she can’t be the only one, right?

I referenced this piece in my Silver Linings Post a few weeks because I’ve finally mustered the courage to work on it but now it has turned into more of an obsession. I know that not everyone who reads my blog is a violinist so here is some history, theory, and a whole bunch of performances so you can see for yourself what is so great, and also so you can see how it can sound so different depending on who is playing it, but still so fantastic.

 First of all, what is a Chaconne?

According to everyone’s favorite research tool, Wikipedia:

A chaconne is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offers a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. In this it closely resembles the passacaglia.

The ground bass, if there is one, may typically descend stepwise from the tonic to the dominant pitch of the scale; the harmonies given to the upper parts may emphasize the circle of fifths or a derivative pattern thereof.

What about THIS Chaconne?

The encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say about Bach’s famous work:

The Chaconne forms the longest movement of the piece by far, making up roughly half of the entire partita. It draws upon the Baroque dance form known as a chaconne, in which a basic theme stated at the opening is then restated in several variations. In Bach’s Chaconne, the basic theme is four measures long, short and simple enough to allow for 64 variations. From a stern and commanding mood at the beginning, Bach gradually increases the complexity of his theme, mixing in various compositional effects. Some twists upon the theme are spacious and grand; others flow nimbly. Fast runs and large interval skips are frequent, requiring much dexterity from the performer. Bach also calls forth changes in emotional intensity, as some variations are dominated by long notes and others by many, more urgent short notes. Bach builds up his work over 256 measures, finally restating the theme at the end with new, even stronger harmonies.

A Little History:

Bach composed the chaconne sometime between 1718 and 1720. Historians speculate that Bach composed it after returning from a trip to find his wife (and the mother of seven of his children) Maria Barbara dead and buried. 

According to the obituary co-authored by Carl Philipp Emanuel and Bach student Johann Friedrich Agricola, Maria Barbara's death in 1720 was sudden and unexpected. Bach was at the Carlsbad spa accompanying his employer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, when she died. When Bach left Köthen, Maria Barbara was in perfectly good health; but when he returned two months later, he was shocked to learn that she had died and been buried on 7 July. The cause of her death is undocumented. Professor Helga Thoene proposed that Bach's famous Violin Partita No. 2 (especially the final "Chaconne" movement) was written as a tombeau for Maria Barbara, however these claims are controversial.

Professor Thoene’s line of thinking resonates with the modern listener. A few summers ago while I was studying with violin teacher extraordinaire Felicia Moye at summer camp, I was introduced to Professor Thoene’s theory. It shines such a poignant and moving light on the piece, that it was composed in response to the death of his wife. There is so much emotion contained in the music that it demands a story. Otherwise, it leaves us all wondering “why” and “how.”

 In the excellent article titled, “The New Mythologies: Deep Bach, Saint Mahler, and the Death Chaconne,” author Michael Markham gives some context to our modern notions, and the evolution of those ideas. Here are a few excerpts that wonderfully sum up the concept:

 Artists of the early 1700s did not wear their lives on their sleeves, and we do not invest the era with particular psychocultural significance. Their goal was not to expose the hidden and the personal but to replicate the empirical and the universal; their domain was not the unconscious but the observable world. Whatever “truth” might be recoverable about the original motivation behind the Chaconne will be rooted in that culture, not ours. To be a canonical work, however, means to outlive your birth era, and so the Chaconne has undergone a number of emotional transformations since Bach’s lifetime.

There is no evidence that Bach himself considered the Chaconne to encode an entire vista of the universe or to sound out his own emotional depths. Such Romantic notions would never have occurred to a court composer who had trained in the late 1600s as a Lutheran town organist. Creating art then and there was not an act of personal expression but one of civic or religious service. Of course emotions could be depicted and messages delivered. But musicians of Bach’s generation did not need to feel an emotion in order to depict it. It was the next generation, beginning with Bach’s own son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who began to demand that a musician express emotions in a way we would call “authentic”:

The aspirations, motivations, and meanings that have since accrued to Bach’s works, and in particular to the Chaconne, have been filtered through others — Brahms, Busoni, and Stokowski — and are not Bach’s but theirs and ours. But to say this is not to dismiss such meanings. I experience them, enjoy them, rely on them in my own listening. There is no crime in that, nor any mistake or shallowness. It is inevitable, normal, and necessary. That is consumption history. We select it because it pleases us. We change it so that it can continue to please us.

Speaking of Brahms… in a letter to Clara Schumann, he described the Chaconne like this:

 “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind. If one doesn’t have the greatest violinist around, then it is well the most beautiful pleasure to simply listen to its sound in one’s mind.”

 Back to Markham….

The Chaconne had become both broader (“a whole world”) and deeper (its “emotional tension” putting your very psyche at stake). Brahms wrote this while reworking Bach’s violin piece as a left-hand-only piano étude, a process that for him bordered on the mystical. In the century since Bach’s death, Kant, then Beethoven, had given us the Romantic sublime, and musical composers had become philosophers-in-notes. For the Romantics, a great piece of art was a psychological sucker punch, knocking loose some terrifying unconfronted truth. The technical grandeur of Bach’s Chaconne (and his newfound role as Großvater of German music) had given it Himalayan stature — immovable, ancient, a platform from which to survey the universe. Brahms was not the last to approach it this way. 

 In his article, Bach and Clinical Care: a proposition, Dr. John Edmund Spicer, a medical doctor, advocates for listening to the Bach, and specifically the Chaconne to be a better doctor.

“When we as clinicians listen to something as profound as the Chaconne, we are hearing the transmuted emotions of a great composer to which we respond emotionally and interpretively: we have two ways of responding. And that is just the same sort of task we face when listening to the stories of our patients, particularly the complex patients. I suggest the two areas of activity help each other.”

Some performance perspective: 

In his book Violin Dreams, legendary violinist Arnold Steinhardt talks at length about the Chaconne, and his lifelong relationship with the piece. Below is an excerpt which I think beautifully sums up the violinists personal relationship with a piece that has taken on mythic proportions.  

As far as I could see, my first task was to figure out how best to combine these ever-changing variations cohesively. I had not forgotten Isaac Stern's advice in violin camp years ago: think of the Chaconne's variations as occurring in groups, so that the evolution of thought and feeling unfolds convincingly. At the outset my course seemed relatively clear, since the early variations all came as matched pairs in which the second of each could be treated as a simple response to the first. But every now and again a lone variation would appear, begging me to direct it somewhere. These orphans vexed me. Did each belong with the next or the previous pair, or did they stand alone to freshen the palate between courses? The basso ostinato also perplexed me. This recurring bass line was supposed to do just that — to repeat endlessly without significant alteration and to serve as the work's distinctive theme. Yet Bach refused to stick consistently to the bass template he fashioned for the beginning and chose rather to draw from several quite distinctive and different ones. 

Another characteristic trait of a chaconne is a regularly repeating harmonic structure. Here again I could easily recognize not one but three or four different patterns. It was as if Bach had begun a card game with hard-and-fast rules that he then changed at whim again and again during play. Even the most easily identifiable element of a chaconne, a dance-related emphasis on the second of the bar's three beats, appeared only sporadically. If I were to dance the Chaconne, where and how would I place my feet when the stress was not on the second beat?

I decided to put past considerations aside for the moment and try to look at the bigger picture. The Chaconne was divided into three large sections. The dark and brooding outer sections flanked a hymnlike inner one that evoked peace, gratitude, and optimism. Was it far-fetched to think that Bach, a devout Christian, might have offered the Chaconne as an expression of the Holy Trinity, its bedrock spiritual principle? The first section, in D minor, would represent the Father; the next, in D major, the Son; and the final section, in D minor, the Holy Spirit. This line of thought intrigued me, even though I was on shaky footing as a secular Jew with only the flimsiest knowledge of Christianity. The more I looked, however, the more "threes" I found. The Chaconne's basic building block was a three-beat bar, the initial theme appeared three times — at the beginning, the middle, and the end — and then there were those evocative three-note groups that appeared over and over again. Was the Chaconne some kind of message in a bottle destined for (dare I think it?) God?

Excerpted from Violin Dreams, by Arnold Steinhardt (Houghton Mifflin, October 11, 2006).

So, do you want to hear it now? This first video was created by 14 violinists during lockdown and it was kind of the impetus for writing this post. The rest of these are performances I think are incredible and/or are historically of note. I do have a favorite, but I’m not going to tell you which one it is. Can you guess?

(Interesting to note that Midori’s video was filmed where Bach wrote the Chaconne - how cool is that?

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partita_for_Violin_No._2_(Bach)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Barbara_Bach

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chaconne-by-Bach

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-new-mythologies-deep-bach-saint-mahler-and-the-death-chaconne/

https://onbeing.org/blog/the-story-behind-bachs-monumental-chaconne/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4212738/

Violin Dreams

By Steinhardt, Arnold