HERZ: Piano Concerto.* 4 Short Pieces for Large Orchestra. Cello Concerto.# Orchestral Suite / *Oliver Triendl, pno; #Konstanze von Gutzeit, vc; Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin; Christiane Silber, cond / Capriccio C5510
Once again, we come up with another great woman composer from the past whose name is barely known today, Maria Bing Herz, and in her case, especially, the oversight is criminal.
Many years ago, I read an article (I now forget where) criticizing woman composers in general. The author complained that most of their music has been lightweight and of little value. If they were so great, he asked, where are their symphonies? their operas? their concertos? Yet as great latter-day composers emerged who did write symphonies, concerti and operas, their work was still marginalized or demeaned. Starting in the 1980s, such composers as Ethel Smyth, who did indeed write operas, concerti and a wonderful Mass in D, as well as Emilie Luise Mayer, who wrote symphonies, and others who wrote powerful works in large forms also emerged, at least on records, but for the most part their works were ignored as well.
And now, here we have Maria Herz, who just might have been the most startlingly original of them all. Not a single note of the music on this remarkable CD is lightweight or trivial; it has the same tensile strength and originality of any male composer of her time; yet not only is every piece on this CD a first recording, I sincerely doubt that any of these works will be played publicly unless Christiane Silber, the enterprising conductor on this disc who single-handedly revived these amazing works, is the one to perform them. They will probably languish here on this record and only on this record, and they do not deserve to do so.
But who was Maria Herz and how did this remarkable music come about? It’s a bittersweet story with a splendid beginning but a tense middle period and a sad ending. She was born as Maria Bing to a wealthy textile manufacturer and his wife from Cologne in 1878. But wait a minute…wasn’t there another person in the music business named Bing who was born to a wealthy textile manufacturer? Why, yes, there was…Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival from 1934 to 1950, then of the Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972. Comparing their photos, Maria and Rudolf Bing didn’t look very much alike, but Bing is not really all that common a name. My guess is that Rudolf’s father was one of Maria’s older brothers (she was the youngest child and the only girl), so she might well have been his aunt. I could not confirm this one way or the other, however; it’s just my guess.
Showing musical talent from a young age, Maria had some of the best teachers in Europe, among them piano pedagogue Max Pauer, a second-generation student of Mozart’s son Franz Xavier. She was also trained as a cellist and a composer, and she became an eloquent speaker on artistic matters in both German and English. In 1901 she married a chemist from Cologne, Dr. Albert Herz, who was six years older than she. Although they had four children, Albert took care of them as often as he could so that Maria could continue to study composition as well as write music.
But then, calamity struck. Despite being married with children, the German army was so desperate that Albert was drafted to serve in World War I. Although he survived physically, he returned a broken man suffering from PTSD. Two year later, in 1920, he died in the bird flu pandemic , leaving Maria a widow. She eventually moved in with her brother, whose wife had also died from the bird flu, and thus added two more children to her care, but her brother helped as much as he could. Istvan Ipolyi, the original violist of the Budapest String Quartet, encouraged her as much as he could because he found her music original and stimulating.
During this period Maria wrote most of her music, which she wisely published using her late husband’s first name: Albert Maria Herz. She was very proud of the fact that her music sounded strong, not like most “women’s music,” yet it was considered too strange for most audiences and thus was seldom performed. Then the Nazis took over Germany in 1933; a year later, Maria and her children, now grown adults, fled to England where she lived until 1950…but she never wrote another note of music.
Listening to her works, I found it very difficult to discern her influences because her music doesn’t really sound like anyone else’s. I think it was very fitting that the cover art for this release used an Art Deco-styled painting, because her pieces sound like a musical extension of the Art Deco movement of the 1920s and early ‘30s. Yes, there are lyrical themes in them, and her development sections follow established musical rules, but the overall effect is of edgy music—and by that I mean music with a sharp edge to it. Many passages in her works moved in a vertical, serrated fashion, like the teeth of a saw. Just reading this, you might get the impression that the music is “gimmicky,” that it doesn’t work, but that’s not it at all. It’s just so different that it’s hard to pin down. The only contemporary composer whose music hers resembles in some respects was George Antheil—but Antheil generally worked within a modal harmony, whereas Herz’ harmony shifts vertically as does the top line.
This is immediately evident in the first movement of her piano concerto. Herz, being a virtuoso pianist herself, wrote some fantastic lines for the instrument, yet even the piano part falls into those serrated passages. As for her handling of the orchestra, that, I think, shows the influence of Stravinsky with his biting wind and string sections. She tended to use what I would call a “glassy” sound rather than a warm one. Conductor Silber and pianist Triendl capture this feeling perfectly in their recorded performance, although I did feel that Capriccio’s engineers over-emphasized this a bit. The orchestra and piano sound so bright that their timbres are almost unnatural. I boosted the mid-range and bass by 2 db, which helped restore some of the mid-range and bass that their engineering tended to eliminate, and I think it sounds better this way.
Within her serrated musical world, however, Herz followed the proper rules of theme-and-development, yet there are so many little surprises as one goes along that you begin to realize what an inspired composer she was. Little of this music is predictable in any way; she may indeed jump around both rhythmically and harmonically—the altered chords, as noted above, move up and down with the top line—but it all holds together and makes perfect musical sense. It’s just…different.
Towards the end of the first movement the music slows down considerably in pace and eases in intensity until the coda, where Herz ramped up the music to a feverish pace, including fast-running viola passages beneath the biting violins. The second movement opens with the extraordinary sound of extremely low winds and basses holding a single notes over which the piano and a forlorn-sounding oboe are heard. This is in C minor and stays there for some time, despite occasional harmonic shifts, presenting a very dolorous mood which, to my ears, has an underlying Hassidic sound. Eventually the pianist moves into a melodic line played in slow triplets, then back to a straight four as the curiously Hebraic harmonies resume—but not for long, as Herz then starts moving things around for the development. Again, she was in her own musical world; she sounded like no one else, and no one else sounded like her.
The third movement opens with the trombones playing a quirky five-note modal theme, into which the strings come galumphing, followed in turn by the piano. This is not just a dialogue but a whole musical conversation going on between soloist and the different sections of the orchestra, creating a strange modal world in the minor. Once again we hear an oboe solo, over which the pianist plays odd sixteenth-note figures until things settle down a bit and the music continues to move on. In the soft passage, it almost sounds as if the piano is asking a question, only to be answered by heavy-sounding trombones and other orchestral members. And once again, nothing in this music is predictable or expected; it almost overwhelms the listener with both its novelty and its surprisingly linear construction. About two-thirds of the way through this movement, things quiet down in terms of volume but not in rhythm; a jolly, burping bassoon is head in the background. Then the tempo changes completely to a rapid 6/8, eventually returning to 4 when it feels like it. A very strange piece, but at the same time stimulating and exciting.
The first of the 4 Short Orchestral Pieces is a bit less serrated-sounding but still quite unusual in its rhythmic and harmonic construction. Being a medium-slow piece, Herz uses a more lyrical and less serrated top line, but even so the music has its own unique construction and direction and it does become quite fast and agitated in the second section. And, wonder of wonders, it feeds directly into the second piece, taken at the same pace and the same key, an extension of what has just occurred rather than a discrete piece in a contrasting tempo, style or mood, though it does slow down as a solo violin plays a theme above swirling clarinets and flutes. Then back to the fast, quirky music, which then speeds up even more (albeit with short pauses) towards the end. The third piece has a different vibe, slow and eerie, though again emphasizing those biting wind and string sounds over a sort of ground bass. This almost sounds like some of the post-war modern music that evolved long after Herz had stopped writing. Everything here floats, but in an atonal way. The fourth, though also in a minor key, is all bustle with fast string passages in a 6/8 moto perpetuo, alternating with wind, French horn and trombone figures. But then—a surprisingly slow section right in the middle before the bustle re-starts; the volume increases as it proceeds to a loud finale.
And then there’s the cello concerto, which opens with very low trombones over muted tympani. Again the music is slow and, though somewhat bitonal, lyrical in quality. with a gong sounding in the midst of the opening theme statement. There are also brief solo spots by other instruments, including a very forlorn-sounding English horn and a trombone. Then things begin to ramp up in intensity, volume and strangeness of both the melodic line and the harmony as the rest of the orchestra pitches in. A little before the halfway mark, we suddenly switch to a strange sort of galumphing 4/4 as an entirely new theme enters for the cello and others to play. But shifts in meter, tempo and key continue as the pace increases, though staying basically in the minor. How I wish that such well-known cellists as Zuill Bailey and Stephen Isserlis would play this concerto! Konstanze von Gutzeit, our soloist here, is an excellent technician and has the right style, but their outstanding interpretive abilities could, I think, make this something of a repertoire piece. I was particularly impressed, as the piece went on, how Herz eventually made the solo cello just another voice in the orchestra, albeit the most prominent one.
We end this disc with the seven-piece orchestral suite. Although the music is still recognizable as Herz’s, the serrated quality of her earlier works is somewhat minimized, yet once again she seemed to be operating in a sound world unique to herself. The fourth piece is particularly inventive, but even the more subtle ones grab and hold your attention due to Herz’ unique style and continual inventiveness.
The sad thing is that Maria Herz isn’t even a “forgotten” composer. She’s a completely neglected one, and although she lost the will to compose once the Nazis took over, you really can’t call her a victim of “entrarte music” because even before the Nazis were elected few if any were playing her music. I must give high praise to Christiane Silber, not just for her wonderful conducting but for insisting that this material be recorded and issued. Here she is, folks, that “major woman” composer you’ve all been saying never existed.
Deal with it.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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