CPO has just released a CD of two of his wonderful string quartets that you can sample at Amazon (he wrote the first one when he was 16). My hope is that this becomes a kind of "gateway disc," and more recordings of Mittler's music will become available.
I came across a clever little poem of his that brightened my day yesterday. Maybe it will brighten your day today.
I'd like to leave the state, why should I bother?This letter from Mittler holds the key to the deeper meaning of this poem.
Let the remaining contrasts fight each other.
The binding one, the one that tries to sever,
Must I stay sandwiched in between forever?
Tags: Franz Mittler, Austrian Composers
7 comments:
The link to the letter didn't work, but the quartet samples are interesting. I notice the movements of the 2nd are named for areas of Eastern or Central Europe--"Wolhynien" (Volyn, or Volhynia, in Ukraine, where my mom was born), Serbien (Serbia), Steiermark (the area of Austria usually called Styria in English) and Hungarian Rhapsody. I'd like to know more about this composer and his work (the quartet samples sound pretty conservative in style--maybe Dvorak-y?)
I'd like to know more about him too!
Those samples are lovely, and I will get the CD. The music raises a question that interests me: how to evaluate a composer (or any other artist) writing in an anchronistic style. Rachmaninov and Medtner, for example, and Mittler. Of all three, I would say, the music is gorgeous, and composed with superb skill levels. How do you evaluate their place in musical history, their importance, if you will, when their compositional styles seem 50 years out of date?
That's an interesting question, Lisa. One of the things I did when I read The Rest is Noise was to go through the index to see who got omitted. I know, it's not a encyclopedia, but in any case if there's another neglected category besides women composers, I'd say it's the consciously "conservative" or "anachronisic"--Rodrigo, Respighi, Hahn. Are they so atypical that they don't belong in a study of 20th century music (or the music of the 20th century) at all? Or was the backward-looking impulse also a product of its time?
Actually, Mittler was not writing in an anachronistic style: he was simply writing creatively in the musical language he knew and used so well. Lesser-known people like Mittler and Kauder, and well-known composers like Respighi and Strauss really throw a wrench into the generalized concepts connected with what we like to think of as progressive modernism. The more I learn about non-atonal music in the early 20th century, the more I know that I know very little. And it is such a pleasure to find out just how little I know.
But R. Strauss was considered a modern composer, and his style au courant, until at least the 1920s. Mittler was 25 years his junior and composing in a similar style. I agree that music doesn't move forward in straight lines, if it moves forward at all - but carrying the Strauss style in the 1950s or 60s, if Mittler was still composing then, would be, to my mind, anachronistic.
Let's hope that we will get a chance to hear what Mittler was writing in the 50s and 60s!
I always find it interesting that R. Strauss began to write more and more "conservative" music as he entered his later years.
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