An Exhilarating Night of German Works Tainted by War

Among the Nazi war ravages was the destruction, likely permanent, of German and Austrian dominance over music. Eminent composers were forced to flee, were executed in concentration camps, lost their lives in the war or were forever tainted by their Nazi associations.

The best hope for Germany, it thus appeared in the early ‘50s, was in its composers too young to have been involved with World War II. And the greatest and most visible of them were intent on blazing a new path into the future that overthrew the past. Karlheinz Stockhausen became the great futurist of the second half of 20th century music; Hans Werner Henze presented us with a vision of a new society in his politicized left-wing music.

But in the dazzle of the new, it became easy to forget--especially for audiences outside of Germany--the composers who could not forget the war. Saturday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic remembered in an exceptional pairing of two German works from the early 1950s, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Trumpet Concerto and Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No. 6. The conductor was Ingo Metzmacher, who specializes in modern music, but who also is fully grounded in tradition. He is the music director of the Hamburg Opera, and he opened the program with a powerful reading of Beethoven’s Second Symphony.

The Beethoven was there to remind us, Dave Kopplin’s thoughtful program note suggested, of the great German trait of overcoming adversity in music--this is a work of a young composer who had spectacularly transcended (at least in his art) an abused childhood and a host of inner devils. Zimmermann and Hartmann, on the other hand, seemed to live their anguish through their music.

Zimmermann, who was born in 1918, fought in the war and then spent the rest of his life fighting that. Of philosophical mind, he wanted, through music, to bring the past and present together to make a newly synthesized future. In his Trumpet Concerto, written in 1954, that past was the jazz and the African American spiritual--forbidden music a decade earlier. The concerto has the subtitle “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” and it attempts to mesh a cool jazz sound with some of the more advanced 12-tone techniques of the day, as the spiritual tune works its way out of an atonal soup. It expects the clarinet, trumpet, trombone and drums to cook. It even includes a semi-cheesy part for a Hammond organ.

Unfortunately, Zimmermann proved too humorless, haunted and arrogant to carry off such a bit of appropriation (his final work before his suicide 16 years later is a requiem based upon texts by poets who committed suicide), but he had an unmistakable flair for dramatic instrumental writing. The trumpet part is brilliant, and the soloist, Hakan Hardenberger, a versatile player with a flabbergasting technique, held a listener spellbound.

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Hartmann, born in 1905, was the rare anti-Nazi German composer who withdrew from public life and grimily waited out the war years in internal exile (he had a wealthy wife). But his seclusion also meant the burning of an internal emotional fire in his music. His starting point was Mahler at his most angst-ridden. His favorite compositional technique was intensification. He was primarily known as a symphonist, and his symphonies are among the most explosive ever written.

The Sixth Symphony, completed in 1953, is in two mighty movements: big and bigger. The second is a series of three massive fugues turned into a riotous concerto for orchestra, with a particularly inventive and puissant role for the percussion (a great night for drumming).

Neither of these works is easy to bring off with an American band. The Philharmonic players surely could have taught Zimmermann a thing or two about jazz, and Hartmann provided them with a deafening work environment. Still, these were exhilarating performances.

And yet what a depressing feeling in the hall Saturday night. I have never seen so few people attend a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The programming turned out to be a brilliant stroke of timeliness--this is the week the pope is in Israel, and the week of the Academy Awards (which has bent over backward to honor Holocaust films in recent years). Austrian politics remain in the news. But the Philharmonic has once more (as it did with its conference on music and conscience earlier in the year) shown little appetite for promoting its most profound connections with our times.