Miserae

Last updated

Miserae is a symphonic poem by the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann.

Composed in 1933–34, it was written in response to the plight of (and dedicated to) those who died in the first Nazi internment camps. As the title suggests (miserae is Latin for 'wretched' or 'miserable') the work reflects not only Hartmann's humanist credentials but his early awareness of what was starting to happen in Germany at the time.

The dedication on the autograph manuscript reads

My friends, who had to die a thousand times over, who sleep for all eternity – we shall not forget you. [1]

The work lasts around fourteen minutes. Cast in four brief sections, the two outer sections are quiet, lyrical passages. The two interior sections are quasi-march pastiches, almost parodying goose-stepping.

It was premiered at the 1935 festival of the International Society for New Music in Prague, where it was chosen as the opening work. [2] The conductor was Hartmann's mentor and champion Hermann Scherchen.

Until 1950, Hartmann used several titles for Miserae, including 'Symphonische Dichtung', Symphony No. 1 and Symphonie Miserae, until he withdrew it. Before then, it had rarely been performed owing to Hartmann's ambivalent attitude towards the relevance of his pre-war works. What had been an earlier Cantata for alto and orchestra ultimately became his First Symphony in 1955.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Haydn</span> Austrian composer (1732–1809)

Franz Joseph Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio. His contributions to musical form have led him to be called "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johannes Brahms</span> German composer and pianist (1833–1897)

Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Amadeus Hartmann</span> German composer

Karl Amadeus Hartmann was a German composer. Sometimes described as the greatest German symphonist of the 20th century, he is now largely overlooked, particularly in English-speaking countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gustav Mahler</span> Austro-Bohemian composer and conductor (1860–1911)

Gustav Mahler was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Vaughan Williams</span> English composer (1872–1958)

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Nielsen</span> Danish composer (1865–1931)

Carl August Nielsen was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.

<i>Pictures at an Exhibition</i> Suite for piano in ten movements by Modest Mussorgsky

Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano suite in ten movements, plus a recurring and varied Promenade theme, written in 1874 by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. It is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann put on at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, following his sudden death in the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphony No. 1 (Mahler)</span> 1887/1888 symphony by Gustav Mahler

The Symphony No. 1 in D major by Gustav Mahler was mainly composed between late 1887 and March 1888, though it incorporates music Mahler had composed for previous works. It was composed while Mahler was second conductor at the Leipzig Opera in Germany. Although in his letters Mahler almost always referred to the work as a symphony, the first two performances described it as a symphonic poem and as a tone poem in symphonic form, respectively. The work was premièred at the Vigadó Concert Hall in Budapest, Hungary, in 1889, but was not well-received. Mahler made some major revisions for the second performance, given at Hamburg, Germany, in October 1893; further alterations were made in the years prior to the first publication, in late 1898. Some modern performances and recordings give the work the title Titan, despite the fact that Mahler only used this label for the second and third performances, and never after the work had reached its definitive four-movement form in 1896.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphony No. 8 (Mahler)</span> Symphony by Gustav Mahler

The Symphony No. 8 in E-flat major by Gustav Mahler is one of the largest-scale choral works in the classical concert repertoire. As it requires huge instrumental and vocal forces it is frequently called the "Symphony of a Thousand", although the work is normally presented with far fewer than a thousand performers and the composer did not sanction that name – actually, he disapproved of it. The work was composed in a single inspired burst at his Maiernigg villa in southern Austria in the summer of 1906. The last of Mahler's works that was premiered in his lifetime, the symphony was a critical and popular success when he conducted the Munich Philharmonic in its first performance, in Munich, on 12 September 1910.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphony No. 2 (Mahler)</span> Symphony by Gustav Mahler

The Symphony No. 2 in C minor by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection Symphony, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. This symphony was one of Mahler's most popular and successful works during his lifetime. It was his first major work that established his lifelong view of the beauty of afterlife and resurrection. In this large work, the composer further developed the creativity of "sound of the distance" and creating a "world of its own", aspects already seen in his First Symphony. The work has a duration of 80 to 90 minutes, and is conventionally labelled as being in the key of C minor; the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians labels the work's tonality as C minor–E major. It was voted the fifth-greatest symphony of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the BBC Music Magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphony No. 7 (Shostakovich)</span> 1941 symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60, nicknamed the Leningrad, was begun in Leningrad, completed in the city of Samara in December 1941, and premiered in that city on March 5, 1942. At first dedicated to Lenin, it was eventually submitted in honor of the besieged city of Leningrad, where it was first played under dire circumstances on August 9, 1942, nearly a year into the siege by German forces. The performance was broadcast by loudspeaker throughout the city and to the German forces in a show of resilience and defiance. The Leningrad soon became popular in both the Soviet Union and the West as a symbol of resistance to fascism and totalitarianism, thanks in part to the composer's microfilming of the score in Samara and its clandestine delivery, via Tehran and Cairo, to New York, where Arturo Toscanini conducted a broadcast performance on July 19, 1942 and Time magazine placed Shostakovich on its cover. That popularity faded somewhat after 1945, but the work is still regarded as a major musical testament to the 27 million Soviet people who lost their lives in World War II, and it is often played at Leningrad Cemetery, where half a million victims of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad are buried.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niels Gade</span> Danish composer, conductor, and music teacher (1817–1890)

Niels Wilhelm Gade was a Danish composer, conductor, violinist, organist and teacher. Together with Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann, he was the leading Danish musician of his day, in the period known as the Danish Golden Age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphony No. 6 (Tchaikovsky)</span> Tchaikovskys final completed symphony

The Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, also known as the Pathétique Symphony, is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's final completed symphony, written between February and the end of August 1893. The composer entitled the work "The Passionate Symphony", employing a Russian word, Патетическая (Pateticheskaya), meaning "passionate" or "emotional", which was then translated into French as pathétique, meaning "solemn" or "emotive".

The Symphony No. 14 in G minor, Op. 135, by Dmitri Shostakovich was completed in the spring of 1969, and was premiered later that year. It is a work for soprano, bass and a small string orchestra with percussion, consisting of eleven linked settings of poems by four authors. Most of the poems deal with the theme of death, particularly that of unjust or early death. They were set in Russian, although two other versions of the work exist with the texts all back-translated from Russian either into their original languages or into German. The symphony is dedicated to Benjamin Britten.

The Symphony No. 98 in B major, Hoboken I/98, is the sixth of the twelve London symphonies composed by Joseph Haydn. It was completed in 1792 as part of the set of symphonies composed on his first trip to London. It was first performed at the Hanover Square Rooms in London on 2 March 1792. Some musicologists and historians interpret this symphony as Haydn’s tribute to his friend Mozart who had died on 5 December 1791.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Rosbaud</span> Austrian conductor

Hans Rosbaud was an Austrian conductor, particularly associated with the music of the twentieth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphony No. 60 (Haydn)</span>

The Symphony No. 60 in C major, Hoboken I/60, was written by Joseph Haydn. It is sometimes given the nickname Il Distratto or, in German, Der Zerstreute.

The Symphony No. 1 in C minor, B. 9, subtitled The Bells of Zlonice, was composed by Antonín Dvořák during February and March 1865. It is written in the early Romantic style, inspired by the works of Ludwig van Beethoven and Felix Mendelssohn. Dvořák never heard or revised the symphony, because the completed work was lost during his lifetime. It premiered in 1936.

The First Symphony of the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann was completed in 1955.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Requiem (Delius)</span>

The Requiem by Frederick Delius was written between 1913 and 1916, and first performed in 1922. It is set for soprano, baritone, double chorus and orchestra, and is dedicated "To the memory of all young artists fallen in the war". The Requiem is Delius's least-known major work, not being recorded until 1968 and having received only seven performances worldwide by 1980.

References

  1. Quoted by Andreas Jaschinski (trans. C. Williams), liner notes to EMI CD 5 56468 2 (1997)
  2. http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428130.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]