Born in 1927 Schafer
was just old enough during the Second
World War to be conscripted into the
German army and spend time as a prisoner
of war. His formative years were in,
if not a cultural vacuum, then a culture
that the Nazis filtered ferociously.
Anything ‘tainted’ by modernism was
condemned as ‘Entartete Musik’ (degenerate
music) and banned or placed in an exhibition
designed to attract ridicule. So it’s
no surprise to find Schafer’s idiom
is strictly traditional and this is
evident in the sonatas on this disc.
Unsurprisingly the
weakest is the ’prentice piece of 1946,
the Piano Trio. However, Schafer was
undoubtedly of the 20th
century and, as the notes suggest, he
offered ‘old Romanticism draped in new
dissonances’. This is particularly evident
in the Cello Sonata; the most interesting
piece here in its 1978 revision, where
the first movement sounds a bit like
Bartók. However, even here, the
music doesn’t manage to maintain the
momentum throughout despite the excellent
opening Allegro appassionato.
The Violin Sonata, like the Piano Trio,
suffers from blandness, particularly
in the outer movements, though the melancholy
Andante offers a Vaughan Williams-like
‘soaring’ violin line that is extremely
prepossessing.
The notes make interesting
reading as they situate Schafer carefully
in his social context. When an extreme
ideology dominates a society it is easier
to pick out how politics have influenced
art. However, music can never be completely
understood if divorced from the social
context of the composer, the performers
and the listeners. With fascism there
was no middle ground, you were either
for it or against it (those who didn’t
oppose the Nazis, but were not party
members, were giving support by default).
Schafer felt himself a victim of the
post-war musical orthodoxy and it was
ironic that the Cello Sonata should
be premiered at Kranichstein Palace,
in Darmstadt, in 1952. A few years later
Stockhausen, Boulez and others, were
about to unleash onto the world, from
Darmstadt, an uncompromising avant-garde
music. Schafer, like many composers
who looked to tradition in the post-War
years, was ‘frozen out’ by the establishment.
Antes Edition are to
be congratulated for releasing this
disc of music by a little known, outside
Germany at least, composer. The trio
play very well and the recorded sound
is clear. The music’s characteristic
enough but ultimately sits in an anachronistic
limbo.
Nick Lacey
Annette Fehrmann (violin), Ingo Zander (cello),
Oliver Triendl (piano) 