Paul Von Klenau Symphony No. 9

Paul von Klenau Symphony no. 9 Cornelia Ptassek, Susanne Resmark, Michael Weinius, Steffen Bruun Danish national Symphony orchestra & Choir Michael Schønwandt, conductor CD 1 Paul von Klenau (1883-1946) Symphony no. 9 Symphony No. 9 (1945) Cornelia Ptassek, soprano I. Allegro. 9:26 Susanne Resmark, alto II. Requiem. Andante. 12:40 Michael Weinius, tenor Soprano, alto, chorus Steffen Bruun, bass III. Allegro molto vivace �� 9:25 IV. Andante. “Estne haec vitae discrepantia sempiterna” . 16:47 Danish national Concert Choir Soprano, alto, tenor, bass, chorus Danish national Symphony orchestra Michael Schønwandt, conductor CD 2 V. Allegro (Tempo di marcia, vivace). 10:23 VI. Adagio ��10:04 VII. Misericordia. Sehr leidenschaftlich bewegt �� 1:27 Chorus VIII. Ruhige Viertel. “Stella lucet per coelum”. 18:37 Soprano, alto, tenor, bass, chorus Total: 88:49 World premiere recording Dacapo is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation PAUL VON KLENAU AND HIS NINTH SYMPHONY by Niels Krabbe influential circles of musicians, poets and philosophers, and had his operas and symphonies performed in many places in Germany. Apart from a few years in Denmark in connection with the establishment of the Danish Philharmonic Society in the 1920s it was in Germany and Austria Introduction that Klenau left his musical mark, and it was not until 1939 that he left Germany for private and In all essentials, Paul von Klenau’s Ninth Symphony was composed in 1945 in Copenhagen as political reasons to return with his Austrian wife to Copenhagen, where he stayed until his death his last major work, and concluded six months before his death in the summer of 1946. Klenau’s in 1946. With him on his journey to Denmark he brought a somewhat chequered reputation as autograph manuscript then lay unknown outside his close family circle for more than fifty someone who had tried to navigate the currents of Nazi cultural policy a little too long, and who years until it appeared in 2001 in connection with the discovery of a large collection of Klenau had literally turned his back on his native country. manuscripts at the home of his grandchild in Vienna.1 Subsequently the collection was bought Both in Klenau’s final years in Denmark and afterwards, people had difficulty reconciling by the Royal Library in Copenhagen and after music-philological editing and publication of themselves with his relationship with Nazism in the thirties and during the war. His connec- the symphony by the Danish Centre for Music Editing at the Royal Library, it was given its first tion with Nazi cultural life up to the war and his continued contacts with German and Austrian per formance at a DR Thursday Concert in March 2014 under the baton of Michael Schønwandt. friends during and after the war contributed greatly to the tainted reputation that Klenau With its eight movements for symphony orchestra, choir and four soloists and a duration of 90 acquired – and still has to a not insignificant extent. Around the first performance of the Ninth minutes it is presumably the biggest symphony written by a Danish composer. It takes the form Symphony on 20 March 2014 in Copenhagen discussions flared up anew about his political of an unusual fusion of a requiem in four movements to a Latin text (taken, with a few exceptions stance. After the emergence in connection with the above-mentioned discovery in Vienna in from the liturgy of the Catholic Requiem Mass) and a traditional four-movement symphony. 2001 of the extensive new source material covering Klenau’s life and work, it can probably be Throughout its tonal language, with its German roots and its mixture of tonal and atonal (some- claimed with considerable certainty that Klenau was at no time a Nazi, although like many other times twelve-tone) passages, the work is very far from the style that predominated in Danish cultural personalities in Denmark he entertained a certain admiration for the clarity and order music in the 1940s which was marked, on the one hand, by the music of Carl Nielsen and on the that prevailed behind the Nazi ideology. He had a passion for the great bourgeois German other hand by features from folk music and Neoclassicism. cultural tradition and thus came to adopt a number of ideals and visions that were later taken In 1944-45, when Klenau was composing his major work, it is unlikely that he anticipated over by Nazi cultural policy. This is particularly evident from a 100-page manuscript that he having it performed in the immediate future. For one thing the poli tical circumstances in the left after his death under the title A Musician’s Experience of European Culture 1900-1939, in country did not favour a performance that required such extensive resources; for another – and which he describes his more than thirty years in Germany and speaks of his many relations with perhaps primarily – Klenau was at this time an outsider because of his tonal language and his German cultural figures in the first three decades of the twentieth century. These memoirs, many years in Germany. As a very young man he had left Denmark for Germany as a kind of supplemented by the many, partly newly-discovered letters, lectures and articles by Klenau, protest against the Danish musical establishment, which he considered provincial and anaemic. give us a far more nuanced picture of his personality and views than has been the norm in the In Germany he got his musical training and established himself in time as a well known name Danish tradition so far.2 in German musical life both as a composer and as a conductor. He was a familiar figure in the 1 Besides the Ninth Symphony the collection comprised many other hitherto unknown works, including two symphonies (no. 4 and no. 8), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, songs and many other works. 2 The memoirs, which were written in Danish, are being published in an annotated edition by Eva Hvidt. 5 Klenau’s symphonies Klenau wrote a total of nine symphonies (to which we can add an unfinished ‘first’ symphony in D minor written three years before the ‘first’ symphony acknowledged by Klenau himself from 1907), and he is thus one of the most productive Danish symphonists of the first half of the twentieth century, exceeded only by Rued Lang gaard. It should be stressed, however, that the second, third and fourth symphonies are not available in complete versions, and in particular the transmission of the Fourth Symphony, which is perhaps identical to the so-called Dante Symphony, is unclear. The last five symphonies were all written in the period 1940-1946 after his return to Denmark, and only the Fifth (Triptych) and the Seventh Symphony (Storm Symphony) were printed in Klenau’s lifetime. The Fifth, Sixth (Nordic Symphony) and Seventh Symphony were performed in Denmark during the war in DR Thursday Concerts to somewhat mixed receptions in the press, while the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies were unknown until the Klenau collection appeared in 2001; these two works in particular demonstrate the range of Klenau’s production: the Eighth Symphony, with its score of just 39 pages for traditional symphony orchestra with the by-name Im alten Stil, and the Ninth Symphony in eight movements, with more than 225 score pages for orchestra, choir and four soloists. It is interesting to note that while for the first three of the five symphonies from the last period in Denmark we have a number of statements from Klenau’s pen on the content and technique of the works, no such information is preserved on the genesis of the Eighth and Ninth symphonies – not in letters, in lectures or in other notes. The works – in Klenau’s autograph ink fair copy – were apparently hidden away “for better times”, and after Klenau’s death in 1946 were taken to Vienna by his wife, Margarethe Klimt, where as mentioned they remained in private ownership until 2001. Ninth Symphony Disregarding a large number of handwritten sketch sheets, Klenau’s autograph score in the Royal Library is the only source for the Ninth Symphony (see illustration). The composer must have originally been uncertain about which number he should give the work, inasmuch as both some of the sketches and the third movement bear the inscription Symphonie VIII, irrespective of the fact that at this time there already was an Eighth Symphony – that is, the previously men- Fair copy of Klenau’s autograph of the score of the Ninth symphony tioned symphony, Im alten Stil. A handwritten note in the manuscript by Klenau’s widow suggests (Klenau Collection, The Royal Library, Copenhagen). that Klenau, “in veneration of Beethoven”, was loth to use the figure “9” of his new work! The 6 7 dating of the individual movements, and the notes in the sketches, show that the composer long longing for peace on the other of course first and foremost brings to mind the political situation remained in doubt about the order of the eight movements, and that the work at one point had then prevailing in Denmark and Germany, but at the same time evokes associations with the Old the working title Tragische Ouverture. The datings show among other things that the two purely Testament text from Ecclesiastes, saying that “to everything there is a season and

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