The Viennese composer Oskar C. Posa is rediscovered | EUROtoday

Almost half a century in the past – extra exactly: in 1977 – it was nonetheless doable to subtitle a lecture on Alexander Zemlinsky “an unknown master of the Vienna School”. Rudolf Stephan, then full professor of musicology on the Free University of Berlin, was on the very starting of one of many few lucky circumstances by which a composer may progressively be gained again into the widespread repertoire. A superb decade later, this lecture in brochure type fell into the arms of the creator of those strains, who was so electrified by the prospect of rediscovering new territory within the circle of Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg that he determined to go to Berlin and examine with Stephan.

The decisive dialog passed off within the mid-Nineteen Nineties: the keen scholar now needed to get a bit of the large Zemlinsky analysis pie in his grasp’s thesis. But the good professor grumbled one thing indignantly into his graying beard: Everyone is now writing about Zemlinsky, there is no must analysis it, you’d higher depart it alone! And then the phrases got here: “Better write about Oskar C. Posa!”

In Schiller’s “Don Carlos” there may be the attractive sentence from Philip II: “Posa? – Posa? I can hardly remember this person!” A extra banal variant flashed by means of the coed’s head: “Posa? – Posa? Never heard of it!” But the detective’s curiosity was sparked. Especially for the reason that motive for Rudolf Stephan’s curiosity in Oskar C. Posa quickly turned obvious: in 1904, a number of composers had based the secessionist “Association of Creative Music Artists in Vienna”.

Arnold Schönberg and Alexander Zemlinsky have been at all times thought of to be the heads of this affiliation, and the undisputed predominant occasion of the affiliation, which solely existed for one yr, was an orchestra live performance in January 1905, at which each Zemlinsky’s “Sea Maiden” and Schönberg’s “Pelleas and Melisande” have been premiered, two landmarks of younger musical modernity. And between these two works there have been 5 orchestral songs by a sure Oskar C. Posa. But who was that?

A biographical and music-historical scavenger hunt started, which passed off in a extremely analogue approach at a time when the Internet was nonetheless extra of a promise than a analysis help. Of course, it led firstly to Vienna, the place the virtually full musical legacy was discovered. The seek for biographical proof was far more troublesome, till instantly a path pointed to The Hague: A bundle of 65 letters from Posa to the pianist and composer Julius Röntgen – one other unknown in music historical past – had been slumbering there for many years, unnoticed!

An image slowly emerged that depicted an exemplary artist’s destiny within the first half of the twentieth century and likewise contained some actual surprises. What is exemplary lies in the midst of occasions, which begins out excessive, then expands institutionally, and finally crumbles massively (and violently).

Born in 1873, Oskar C. Posa, who initially set his profession on the safe path of regulation, seems to be a extremely gifted musician who instantly finds himself within the superior circles of modernity. He tried to place his stamp on it himself, whereas on the similar time beginning a typical Kapellmeister profession, which at its peak within the 1910s made him a very powerful conductor of the Julius Grevenberg period on the Graz Opera (and in spite of everything: the younger Luigi Dallapiccola determined to change into a composer after conducting Posas with Wagner).

What follows is a gradual decline that finally noticed him working as an accompaniment on the Vienna State Academy, from which he was eliminated in 1938 – three weeks after Austria’s “annexation” to Hitler’s Germany – as a result of his Jewish origins might be confirmed with inquisitorial acumen. Afterwards, Posa’s path disappears into nothingness; in 1951 he dies impoverished in his hometown of Vienna.

The first large shock, nonetheless, was {that a} memorandum that the “Association of Creative Music Artists” had distributed at its founding and which has since been handled as a sort of founding doc of Viennese musical modernism was not, as lengthy assumed, written by Arnold Schönberg (who by no means accused himself of this), however by Oskar C. Posa.

This alone makes him an essential a part of the historical past of the Vienna School. The second shock, nonetheless, was the extraordinary high quality of his music, which was written primarily within the first decade of the twentieth century: in quite a few songs, a violin sonata and a big cycle of piano variations, we’re confronted with a completely self-confident composer who sought an idiosyncratic, harmonically wealthy and extremely variable rhythmically, usually intricately convoluted path by means of the legacy of Wagner and Brahms. However, this music remained unplayed within the archives even after the grasp’s thesis was submitted.

Until 2020, when a younger French music producer and label founder turned focused on Oskar C. Posa. And what the coed researcher as soon as not thought doable now really occurred: Olivier Lalane introduced Posa’s forgotten music again to life. Now, 5 years later, he has launched “Voilà!” on his label. introduced a double CD, which, outfitted with an especially voluminous and elegantly designed accompanying ebook, instantly introduced Posa worldwide consideration – even Alex Ross, music critic for the “New Yorker”, included the CD on his checklist of a very powerful recordings of the yr.

What could be found right here is the Violin Sonata op. 7, which apparently failed at its premiere on the Heidelberg Tonkunstler Festival in 1901 as a result of the ambition of the work and a really mediocre efficiency weren’t appropriate. The violinist Eva Zavaro, who has a splendidly positive, at all times ahead tone at her command, and the pianist Juliette Journaux, who effortlessly combines a wonderful consciousness of strains with a gripping gesture, present the way it’s carried out: how they let the melodic energies shoot out from the little motive materials (within the virtuoso last motion it principally solely consists of a rhythmic nucleus), which Posa exploits as a lot as doable, is easy rousing.

Among the 24 songs recorded, which Edwin Fardini, once more with Journaux on the piano, interprets in an intensively word-related, generally nearly operatic approach, there may be additionally the piano model of these orchestral songs that have been premiered in 1905 between Schönberg and Zemlinsky’s symphonic poems. They are troopers’ songs primarily based on texts by Detlev von Liliencron, by which Posa appears to anticipate the devastation of the First World War: of their expressive, darkish and finally sarcastic expression of the horrors of battle, they’re a veritable outgrowth of early musical modernism. This music can now lastly discover its place alongside that of Schönberg and Zemlinsky: Oskar C. Posa – an unknown grasp of the Vienna School.

The creator is chief dramaturg on the Komische Oper Berlin.