Ferdinand Hiller: Symphony in E minor, Op. 67, Es muss doch Frühling werden, and Symphony in F minor. Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt; Howard Griffiths, conductor. CPO (555625-2). Total time: 61:00.
DIGITAL REVIEW — What happens to the mainstream composers of a given era, the ones who didn’t create a fuss through manifestos but wrote in a confident manner along lines that had been established by the best practitioners of the generation or two before? Composers such as Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Cécile Chaminade in France; Donizetti, Ponchielli, Mascagni, and the Brazilian-born Antônio Carlos Gomes in Italy; Stanford and Parry in England; MacDowell, John Knowles Paine, and Amy Beach in the United States.
Some may have one or a few works remaining in the active repertoire, while the rest of their output slid off the “mattering map.” Nineteenth-century Germany and Austria were full of highly capable composers whose works achieved public recognition but then largely disappeared from musical life: Ludwig Spohr, Joachim Raff, Max Bruch, and, in the opera world, Albert Lortzing and Otto Nicolai.
One of the best and most accomplished of these was Ferdinand Hiller (1811-1885). The second of his three piano concertos remained in the repertoire for decades after his death. But even his once-famous 1840 oratorio Die Zerstörung Jerusalems (The Destruction of Jerusalem [by the Assyrians]) eventually vanished from the concert scene, despite the fact that Schumann had praised it heartily for introducing much drama into a genre he felt was at risk of becoming stodgy.
In part, Hiller’s music came to be considered passé. Much of the time, it was highly traditional, in the manner of Mendelssohn and Schumann, staying clear of the high chromaticism of Wagner and mid-to-late-period Liszt. Scurrilous and antisemitic attacks on Hiller from members of the Liszt circle in Weimar further contributed to discouraging artists from performing the works, and critics and historians from discussing them.
Hiller was born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt. Though he converted to Lutheranism at age 13, a new, racialist strain of antisemitism — which would eventually culminate in Nazi ideology and practices — insisted on a person’s family origins rather than on his or her current affiliation.
Aside from the hostility aimed at him, Hiller lived a long and gratifying life, becoming chief conductor of the Gürzenich Concerts in Cologne and heading, for 34 years, that city’s conservatory, where his students included Bruch and Engelbert Humperdinck. It has taken the effort of recent performers to bring Hiller’s numerous works back to public awareness. We can now hear, on disc or through streaming, most of his songs and piano pieces, the Jerusalem oratorio (a truly splendid work), all three piano concertos, much chamber music, and — newly released — two of his four surviving symphonies.
Classic Produktion Osnabrück is a record label founded in 1986 to fill niches in the recorded classical repertoire. Its recording of Hiller’s mature E minor and early F minor symphonies comes from Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, a medium-sized German city near the border with Poland. The Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt is renowned for playing new pieces (for instance, by American composer Samuel Adler) and for digging up somewhat older ones (by Siegfried Matthus and Paul Büttner). The conductor is Howard Griffiths, widely praised for his recordings of forgotten works from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the eight symphonies of Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries, with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra.
The only Hiller symphony to have been published during his lifetime — and thus the only one to carry an opus number — was the Symphony in E minor, Op. 67, the first of three symphonies he wrote in his middle and later years. Op. 67 was widely performed at the time; Liszt conducted it in Weimar. It was composed in 1848, when Hiller was around 37, revised in 1854-55, and finally published in 1865. It bears the title Es muss doch Frühling werden (“Springtime is surely coming”), a recurring line in the famous poem “Hoffnung” (“Hope”) by Emanuel Geibel.
Hiller’s Springtime Symphony, a work clearly in the tradition of those by his friends Mendelssohn and Schumann, opens the album. Its first movement is laid out in a three-theme sonata-allegro form. Alert uses of syncopation keep the music heading constantly onward. By contrast to Schumann, Hiller is much more willing to break with the norms of four-bar phrases, sometimes extending them by an extra bar in a surprising yet convincing manner. I couldn’t help but think of Brahms during one passage in which the second theme is accompanied by pizzicatos in the low and middle strings. Brahms, throughout his career — and perhaps aware of Hiller’s precedent — was fond of creating unusual and sometimes unpredictable phrase lengths: Five-bar phrases prevail in his Haydn Variations.
Particularly cherishable is Hiller’s slow movement (marked Adagio). One contrasting section, for solo clarinet, could have been penned by some French master of melody, such as Gounod or Bizet. The orchestration is beautifully managed, with certain touches making me wonder if later composers beyond the German-speaking world were familiar with this symphony. I thought of Tchaikovsky during some of the lovely woodwind solos that comment on the main musical material carried by the strings. The third movement (Allegro vivace) is a scherzo of a Mendelssohnian sort. The symphony’s finale is energetic and determined.
The booklet essay, by Bert Hagels, emphasizes the ways in which Hiller’s Op. 67 departs from certain by-then-standard academic norms of sonata form. Hagels also proposes, plausibly, that the reference to “springtime” in the poetic title of the piece, as well as the positive-minded spirit of the finale, reflect Hiller’s confident feeling that political liberalism, as represented by the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany, would eventually triumph in Europe over the old system of aristocratic privilege and its attendant narrowness and abuses. Among these abuses — though Hagels does not even hint at it — was prejudice against Jews, an issue that Hiller, in later life, exposed in writings for prominent magazines.
The album concludes with Hiller’s earlier Symphony in F minor (1832-33), a work that often sounds much like Beethoven, who died in 1827. The 16-year-old Hiller had, with his teacher Johann Nepomuk Hummel, visited the dying Beethoven, and Hiller had clipped a lock of Beethoven’s hair as a keepsake. The F minor symphony was written when Hiller was around 21 and living in Paris, where he became close friends with Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and the great operatic tenor Adolphe Nourrit.
Reviewing Hiller’s symphony, Berlioz complained that the last movement submitted its Scottish-sounding tune to inappropriate complications, which Berlioz lumped under one of his favorite curse words: “fugue.” I’d say that the treatment is perfectly appropriate: In a rather Beethoven-like manner, the folk-like tune is carved up into smaller bits for purposes of symphonic development, and these then get reassembled for a whirlwind finish. As for the specific accusation of inappropriate “fugal” intrusions, there is only one brief passage of imitative counterpoint (canon), toward the end of the movement, and it works just fine.
I particularly enjoyed the second movement, a duple-meter scherzo marked “Capriccioso, molto vivace,” which, like the one in Op. 67, is full of feather-light scurrying in the strings, but now with soft trumpet calls on the dominant, which sound to me as if beckoning us mysteriously from a psychic distance. Notably striking, again Beethovenian in effect, is a passage when the counter-subject takes over so fully that the music briefly gets restructured into emphatic three-beat units, like a stomping, three-legged giant.
I was truly moved by the third movement (Adagio non troppo), in which a series of lovely melodies buoyed by pulsing and sometimes syncopated accompaniments reminded me of Berlioz’s music from around the same time. Symphonie fantastique had been given its first performance two years earlier, and, soon thereafter, Berlioz, as he would later openly admit in his Memoirs, reworked its third movement — “Scene in the Fields” — according to good advice from his friend Hiller. The mutual influence of these two composers during their early years is a topic deserving of further study.
The performances of both the E minor symphony and the early F minor are precise, emphatic, and lyrical. The recorded balance is clear and detailed, with wonderful interweaving from the brass and winds, and peppery appearances from the timpani. Hiller’s delight in throwing the listener off rhythmically would have been more obvious had conductor Griffiths kept the pace steady. I lost a sense of pulse in the lead-in to the recapitulation of the first movement of the E minor symphony and in the first measures of the F minor.
The booklet notes are generally well translated. But in one translation goof, we are startled to see that Griffiths has conducted “more than 40 symphonies by Beethoven’s contemporaries and the early Romanesque.” That last word is a mistranslation of “Romantiker.” The phrase should of course be “the early Romantics.” The term “early Romanesque” sounds like a reference to medieval architecture.
This CD is one of the most welcome, ear-opening recordings I’ve heard in recent years, easily capable of restoring Ferdinand Hiller to the position he once held as the composer of highly accomplished, enjoyable, and intriguing works.
