KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN – CENTER

The International Karl Amadeus Hartmann Society mourns the death of its founding member Pierre Boulez. With Pierre Boulez, the music world has lost not only a conductor and composer with a voice all of his own, but also one of its most important and in many ways formative personalities.

How close he felt to Karl Amadeus Hartmann became clear during his last appearance at musica viva on September 30, 2011 at Munich’s Prinzregententheater, which featured a magnificent performance of Boulez “Pli selon pli”. He never tired of referring in interviews and personal conversations to his beginnings as a composer and conductor and his first musica viva concerts, emphasizing Hartmann’s formative role. Thinking of Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Munich always warmed his heart. The impulses Boulez received from Hartmann and the idea of a platform for the freedom of thought, the freedom of art and for the social responsibility of art, which took shape in musica viva, were manifold.

In his usual modest but sustainable way of “acting” in the background and quietly pulling strings, Hartmann implemented an idea in 1960 and recommended Pierre Boulez for Bayreuth. Interestingly enough, this was combined with a very concrete recommendation for the work, which was finally followed in exactly the same way in 1966. In a letter to Wieland Wagner dated June 10, 1960 Karl Amadeus Hartmann wrote:

“I would like to draw your attention very briefly to a real artist who will certainly be considered for the Bayreuth Festival one day. It is Pierre Boulez, who is an outstanding composer, music writer and conductor, probably unique in his universality. I could imagine that he would be particularly suitable for ‘Parsifal’. This is just a little advice from my side.”

Parsifal was to become his first work in Bayreuth, the Jahrhundertring 1976 (directed by Patrice Chéreau) his masterpiece, with which he set a milestone in the history of interpretation.

Thus on September 30, 2011 in the musica viva a first circle closed, which is now completed on January 5, 2016.

(AHB)

Further links:

Pierre Boulez – Nachruf von Alexander Kluge (Spiegel online)

Zum Tode von Pierre Boulez – von Reinhard Brembeck (SZ)

Vom Sprengmeister zur Galionsfigur: Zum Tod des Komponisten Pierre Boulez – von Gerhard R. Koch (FAZ)

Reaktionen auf den Tod von Pierre Boulez (Die Welt online)

Sprengmeister der Moderne – von Frederick Hanssen (Tagesspiegel)

Zum Tod von Pierre Boulez – Lucerne Festival Academy, Videos (NMZ)

On January 7, a seminar of the Musicological Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität took place in the rooms of the Karl-Amadeus-Hartmann-Gesellschaft at 2 PM –

it was dedicated to the topic “Institutions and Festivals of New Music”. The second part of the seminar dealt with Karl Amadeus Hartmann and musica viva. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Rathert as well as Andreas Hérm Baumgartner, the director of the Karl Amadeus Hartmann Society, described to the twelve students of musicology the early days and the basic ideas of the musica viva concert series founded by Hartmann, which still exists today and is dedicated to contemporary music. They ranged from the 1920s, more precisely from the concert series “Die Juryfreien” founded by Hartmann (per se his first field of experimentation, in which he also included literature and the fine arts), through Hartmann’s compositional work and his attitude during the years of National Socialism, to his early death in 1963.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann – with his attitude of refusing to be appropriated by the Nazis and his all the more active role abroad – sought in each of his works international solidarity with allies in spirit and put a concrete message ot it. Be it through the use of forbidden texts and melodies or with the help of Jewish songs. Especially the use of the Jewish song “Elijahu hanavi” in all compositions written between 1933 and 1945 became Hartmann’s lament for the extermination of the Jewish people and the persecution of all opponents of the regime. Andreas Hérm Baumgartner used historical events – such as the Seizure of control, the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the November Pogroms and the beginning of the war – for illustration and showed Hartmann’s compositional reaction in musical examples.

The International Karl Amadeus Hartmann Society mourns the death of its founding member Maestro Kurt Masur.

As the New York Philharmonic announced, the long-standing principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic passed away in Greenwich (USA) on Saturday morning, December 19, 2015, at the age of 88. The outstanding conductor did not only see himself as a performing musician, but also as a “homo politicus”, as Federal President Joachim Gauck emphasized in a statement. “Viele Menschen werden niemals vergessen, wie er sich im Herbst 1989 für grundlegende Veränderungen in der DDR, für die Freiheit der Menschen und die Demokratie eingesetzt hat.” [“Many people will never forget how he stood up for fundamental changes in the GDR, for people’s freedom and democracy in autumn 1989.”] Kurt Masur lived music as a humanistic message.

Enclosed you will find links to some press articles:

BR Klassik, Nachruf Kurt Masur

Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nachruf Kurt Masur

Süddeutsche Zeitung, Zum Tod von Kurt Masur

Die Zeit, Nachruf Kurt Masur

In cooperation with the Ukrainian State Orchestra Kyiv Kamerata, the Goehte Institute Ukraine, the Kiev Summer Music Festival, the Composers’ Association Ukraine and the Karl Amadeus Hartmann-Gesellschaft e.V., a concert with works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Wolfgang Rihm will take place on June 4, 2015 in the concert hall of the Academy of Sciences in Kiev (Ukraine).

Together with the chief conductor and artistic director of Kyiv Kamerata Valeriy Matyukhin, the conductor and director of the Karl Amadeus Hartmann-Gesellschaft e.V. Andreas Hérm Baumgartner – on whose initiative the project came into being – will conduct this concert, which is special in every respect: an act of solidarity, a sign of solidarity in an existentially threatening political situation in which Hartmann’s music with its message of humanism cannot be missing. In an accompanying introductory event with the theme “Klänge des Friedens” [“Sounds of peace”] the question of what music can do, what should music and art be able to achieve, will be explored.

Current development, conflict and peace research also deals with this topic. Especially with composers like Hartmann, who have a sensibility for socio-political grievances, who use seismographic antennas to perceive developments that are not yet obvious, track down their potentially fatal dynamics and deal with them in their art. Research speaks of the ability of “early warning”. Years before 1933, Hartmann had already warned in every possible way of the danger of National Socialism for society, humanity and humanism.

In each work he dealt with this in a different way, invoking resistance in alliances between cultures, religions and peoples; he pointed out alternatives, drew a different world view. It is also astonishing that in his last work – the “vocal scene” for baritone and orchestra – he once again demonstrated the ability of “early warning”: assimilating texts by Jean Giraudoux, he conveys an apocalyptic vision of the end of a civilization drawn into by a spiral of death. The initial dynamic of progress does not only turn into regression, but into decline, into the “evil of the great empires, the deadly evil”. Downfall of the banking world, social structures, nuclear catastrophe and the deadliest evil: that even the “Seelenschatz” [“Treasure of soul”] is lost. An unfortunately all too topical subject.

PROGRAM
Wolfgang Rihm: nature morte – still alive

Karl Amadeus Hartmann:
Concerto funebre
4th Symphony

Katya Suglobina, Violin
Kyiv Kamerata
Direction: Valeriy Matyukhin, Andreas Hérm Baumgartner

Andreas H. Baumgartner with the outgoing Management Board members Bernhard Pfau, Kurt Scharl and Dr. Raphael Woebs (from left to right) on December 12, 2014.