Karl Ignaz Weigl was born in Vienna, the only child of Ludwig and Ella,
keen amateur musicians who encouraged their son’s early musical aspirations,
by sending him at the age of fifteen for private composition lessons with
family friend Alexander Zemlinsky. Weigl’s studies continued at the Vienna
Music Academy under Robert Fuchs and at the University of Vienna. In 1910,
he auditioned for Mahler at the Vienna Opera and was subsequently engaged as
a répétiteur and vocal coach. Early successes included the premiere of his
First Symphony in Zurich that year, and the Third String Quartet for which
he was awarded the Beethoven Prize. On the outbreak of the First World War,
he was called up for military service but after the war ended, he was
appointed teacher of theory and composition at the New Vienna Conservatory,
a position he held until 1928. The following year he became lecturer at the
University of Vienna succeeding Hans Gál. These prestigious appointments
were paralleled by a significant growth of interest in his music, with works
championed by such artists as Furtwängler, Szell and the Busch Quartet among
others. However, in the early 1930s, as a composer and prominent public
figure of Jewish descent, Weigl found himself a victim of Nazi cultural
policies, and performances of his works all but dried up. Aware of the
imminent danger of the developing situation, following Hitler’s annexation
of Austria in 1938, Weigl fled to America with his family. There he
continued his teaching, and still composed prolifically until his death
there.
By the early 1920s, Weigl was an established figure in the musical
landscape of Vienna and it was probably for this reason that he was
approached by the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, son of wealthy
industrialist Karl, and elder-brother to celebrated philosopher Ludwig. The
Wittgensteins were a musical family and Paul was just beginning to establish
himself as a concert pianist when he had to undergo amputation of his right
arm as a result of a wound sustained during the First World War. He was
nevertheless determined to resume his career using his left hand only, and
the family fortune enabled him to commission some of the most eminent
composers of the day to write works especially for him. Korngold’s Concerto
in C sharp, written in 1923, was the first of several commissions from,
among others,
Britten,
Hindemith,
Prokofiev,
Ravel,
Franz
Schmidt and
Richard Strauss. With hindsight, posterity can only
be indebted to Wittgenstein’s enterprise in precipitating a host of major
additions to the piano concerto repertoire. However, his own musical tastes
were actually on the conservative side and he often displayed a somewhat
ungracious attitude to the composers and their works. For example, he made
alterations to Ravel’s concerto, hoping that the composer wouldn’t notice –
unfortunately Ravel did, and was far from happy: Wittgenstein complained to
Britten that the orchestration of his Diversions for Left Hand was too
heavy, and he never even performed the Hindemith and Prokofiev concertos,
telling the latter that he ‘did not understand a note of it’. Unfortunately,
and for reasons unknown, Wittgenstein also failed to perform Weigl’s
concerto. In 1932, Ignaz Friedman expressed an interest in playing the work
but this, too, never materialised. Thus it was that the concerto received
its long-awaited premiere in 2002 in Vienna given by Florian Krumpöck, the
pianist on the present CD.
The
Piano Concerto is cast in traditional three-movement form –
Allegro – Adagio – Rondo: Allegro – essentially conservative almost in the
manner of Brahms, whose spirit inhabits much of the work, along with hints
of Schumann. Indeed, Weigl employs similar orchestral resources to Brahms –
double woodwind, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings – which all
seems to evoke the aura of his German colleague, although almost sixty years
his junior. However, Weigl does indulge himself by requiring a triangle in
the finale.
In fact, in Lloyd Moore’s excellent, and most informative sleeve-notes (in
English and German), he compares the approaches of the various composers who
wrote for Wittgenstein, in meeting the challenges inherent in composing for
the more unusual medium of piano (left hand) and orchestra. ‘Ravel and
Korngold in their concertos’, he postulates, ‘wrote bravura works which
heroically pit the soloist against the weight of a full orchestra. Other
composers, such as Hindemith and Prokofiev, took a different line, employing
modest forces to ensure that the soloist is evenly balanced and never
overwhelmed’. Weigl opted for the latter approach and, while not adopting
Brahms’s four-movement format, from the Piano Concerto No 2, still had him
as his role model. Moore comments here that Weigl’s Concerto is also
‘Brahmsian’ in terms of its ‘substantial duration of nearly forty minutes’.
It’s actually a few seconds under thirty-five minutes on the CD, unless cuts
have been made, whereas Brahms’ B flat Concerto actually takes forty-six
minutes, albeit having the added Scherzo. Grieg’s Concerto, by comparison,
is just around thirty minutes, so Moore still has some justification for his
comment on length.
Given that Weigl’s concerto on this CD emanates from 1924 – contemporary,
then, with Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony
and Respighi’s
Pines of Rome – Weigl forges his own musical path,
rather than paying lip-service to any of the emerging practices of the
1920s. Rather as in Reger’s Concerto, or even the first movement of Brahms’s
First Piano Concerto, there is little sign of the conflict typical of the
Romantic concerto, with mutual interplay between soloist and orchestra far
more par for the course. Towards the end of the first movement there is an
extensive cadenza, though here, too, Weigl resists the temptation to indulge
in virtuoso display for its own sake. Unlike Ravel’s concerto, for example,
Weigl never seeks to create the illusion of two hands playing, by complex
and overly-challenging writing.
The relatively short slow movement is essentially solemn in nature, with a
chromatic hint of
Tristan and Isolde, but which does build to an
expressive climax, before returning to the character of the opening. The
flute leads without a break into the finale, an energetic dance alternating
with more reflective episodes, bringing the work to a high-spirited
conclusion.
Weigl returned to the concerto medium four years later with his
Violin
Concerto, sending the completed score to Adolf Busch in the hope that
it might interest the great German violinist enough to perform it. After
perusing the score, Busch made various suggestions for ‘improvement’, many
of which Weigl dutifully incorporated, but Busch still declined to perform
the work. Instead, the premiere was given by the young violinist Josef
Wolfsthal in 1930 with the Vienna Workers’ Symphony Orchestra. Wolfsthal
died from pneumonia a year later, and his performance appears to have been
the only one given during Weigl’s lifetime. In the years following the
composer’s death, the work had a couple of outings, but the first modern-day
performance had to wait until 2009, when it was played by Philippe Graffin
in Taiwan.
It is scored like the
Piano Concerto, with the addition of harp
and percussion, and also follows the three-movement plan. The first movement
begins with a sizeable orchestral introduction which establishes a
characteristic rhythmic idea which then pervades the entire movement. Once
it enters, the violin is rarely silent for long, though again virtuosity for
its own sake is avoided, with soloist and orchestra treated as more-or-less
equal protagonists throughout. The slow movement is much more substantial
and spacious than its piano concerto counterpart, an almost continuous flow
of melody in which a gentle lyricism prevails. The finale returns to the
lively character of the first movement and this time is clearly conceived as
a show-piece guaranteed to win the soloist a warm ovation. Weigl was to
write two more concertos: a second for piano (two hands), and a cello
concerto, the latter neither published nor performed during his
lifetime.
Since the revival in the 1990s of so-called ‘Entartete Musik’ or
‘Degenerate music’ – a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazi government in
Germany to certain forms of music that it considered to be harmful or
decadent – interest in Weigl’s music has grown. He still remains a largely
unknown figure to most listeners. Moore concludes with: ‘It can be hoped
that recordings such as this present one will help to further draw attention
to his (Weigl’s) large and varied output which may yet contribute to the
repertoire it was designed to enrich’. This is the ‘$64,000’ question for
any composer’s music during that particularly dark side in world history.
Its musical style is certainly not unique; Weigl’s musical language has
evolved in much the same way, and to the same degree as many of his
contemporaries unfortunate to have been caught up in the troubles of the
time in Germany – and he was at least fortunate to have made it across to
the States, where essentially he was musically unfettered once more.
In terms of the
Concerto for piano (left hand) – this makes a
welcome, though by no means vital addition to the extant repertoire –
currently numbering some forty-four works (those for the right hand being
considerably rarer at four or so.) The
Violin Concerto, on the
other hand, contributes to one of the most popular combinations in the
entire genre. Taking both works together, their respective first movements
can feel overlong, especially in the piano concerto, seem somewhat academic
in concept, and have no big Romantic tunes to savour. Equally in their
finales, while there has been a real conscious attempt by the composer to
inject life and jollity by means of a dance-rhythm feel, they still appear
somewhat stilted and almost reticent really to let go, and just enjoy
themselves.
It is in the two slow movements – and especially the longer one from the
violin concerto – that the CD really might achieve Moore’s objectives for
it. There are some deeply moving passages here where Weigl appears to seem
uninhibited and psychologically at peace. Given the quality of the playing
and general clarity of the recording, this would argue strongly in favour of
getting better acquainted with some of Weigl’s music, with the knock-on
effect that more of his output does then become available.
Philip R Buttall
