Wilhelm Berger String Quintet

[Alan Howe]

Edition Silvertrust have published Berger's String Quintet in E minor, Op.75 - and have some enticing samples on their website...

http://www.editionsilvertrust.com/berger-string-quintet.htm

[chill319]

For me this is timeless music.

Edition Silver Trust (thanks for that link, Alan) has Wilhelm Altmann's positive assessment of the work. Berger's biographer Gustav Ernest mentions that the work is dedicated to the Joachim Quartet, itself evidence of high regard, I think. Ernest, best known for his insightful writing on Beethoven and Brahms, begins his discussion of opus 75 as follows:

"In every bar of this work the pure joy of creation speaks. The music of the opening movement, despite its minor key and con passione marking, does not blaze from abysses of passion, nor does darkness brood anywhere about it. Everything is clear, transparent, moving effortlessly from one idea to another, until, before the connoisseur's eye, a masterly structure can be seen, one in which every refinement of compositional art is used."

In Berger a late nineteenth-century aesthetic commingles with a Bachian "work ethic." The result doesn't necessarily fit neatly into music history courses, but it's a potent mix nonetheless.

[Alan Howe]

Berger, I am convinced, is one of the greatest unsungs. We urgently need recordings of his major works.

[eschiss1]

So far we do have his piano quintet and a set of orchestral variations on CD, unless that's no longer available.  IMSLP has his string trio, quintet, piano trio, and piano quintet in scores and/or parts, for such as are interested (and the orchestral variations too, I think.) Still, there's also two symphonies and a number of other works, and most of the works at IMSLP aren't recorded yet either, agreed.

Eric

[black]

Like Alan, I used to think Wilhelm Berger was a thoroughly unjustified neglected composer. But the more I have heard of his compositions the less I think his neglection was entirely unjustified.
He was a very solid and skillful composer firmly rooted in Romanticism and his works are mainly large scale and rather lengthy, but not very imaginative in my opinion. So in the end it is often a bit of a disappointment.  One expects more, especially more moving melodic lines and more daring harmonies and modulations.
Of his String Quintet – which, incidentally, can also be downloaded from here - I happen to have a recording, made from a radio broadcast last year. Just like the Piano Quintet I find it  nice, but rather long and unimpressive.
Still I am looking forward to recordings of his Symphonies.

[Alan Howe]

...which just shows how opinions vary. For me the Piano Quintet is an absolutely inspired masterpice, as his 2nd Symphony, which I have in a radio recording, apparently from the 1980s. It is quite unlike any other symphony I know, while equally clearly belonging in the great Austro-German tradition of symphonic writing. It is utterly memorable, original and strongly-projected music - far superior to any symphony by his unsung contemporaries, e.g. Weingartner, Thuille, d'Albert, Bischoff, Walter, etc.

[chill319]

Berger certainly knew how to write music that charms, that intrigues, that gestures grandly. Yet I would never claim that his instrumental melodies are the first one would choose for the soundtrack to Lean's Brief Encounter. Nor are his harmonies and modulations as consistently daring as those in contemporaneous works by Carl Nielsen (another Brief Encounter reject).

So why do I find Berger's music so stimulating? Because at its best, which it often is, it achieves that mysterious combination of originality and inevitability, of short-term interest and long-term payoff which makes classical music seem grander than anything else I know. Highly personal, of course.

What Berger lacks is a proper performing tradition.  For music like his -- essentially a profession of faith -- one needs advocates who perform with the same depth, reverence and insight they bring to Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Schubert's Quintet for strings, Bruckner's Fifth, Wagner's Parsifal, and so on.  If just one conductor of the calibre of a Konwitschny or Bernstein were to champion Berger's symphonies, Serenade, or orchestral Variations, I believe that Berger's time would arrive quite rapidly.

[Mark Thomas]

As another Berger fan, I won't argue with your last paragraph, but would add that it's true of so many of the composers whom we champion here...

[Marcus]

Wilhelm Berger is known to me only through the String Quintet.  Hearing this impressive work, leaves me wanting to hear more, and I hope the  Symphonies in B flat major op71 & in B minor op80, will make the recording catalogue sometime soon. I agree with you Alan, and wonder why so many such composers are Unsung. I guess it came down to lack of opportunities & money, and whatever music was in vogue at the time.
Another Berger who also comes to mind is Ludwig Berger (1777-1839), who is only represented in the CD catalogue by one work, (that I am aware of),the Grande Sonate in C minor op7, a lush classical/romantic work which betrays the influence of Beethoven , but not of course,of the same quality.
Marcus

[edurban]

"As another Berger fan, I won't argue with your last paragraph, but would add that it's true of so many of the composers whom we champion here..."

And, to be frank, many of our unsungs actually need the extra touches that a performance of the highest quality brings.  Beethoven 5 is still a work of blinding genius even in a so-so performance...Goldmark 2 (just as an example) not quite so bullet-proof.  Sadly, these are just the performances our unsungs rarely get.  But how they blaze out when a Bernard Herrmann conducts Raff 5 or an Earl Wild plays Scharwenka pc 1!

David

[Peter1953]

... and what a lovely trio for clarinet, cello and piano (op. 94) this Berger wrote...

Marcus, in another thread I mentioned the other Berger. I still think his gorgeous piano sonata op. 7 is one of the most fascinating unsung piano sonatas of the early 19th century. I'm pretty sure that the Great Ludwig himself would highly praise this sumptuous sonata by his namesake.

[ewk]

11 years after you were discussing about Berger's quintet in this thread, I only discovered the piece yesterday on Youtube when going through Wikipedia's list of Cello quintets, searching pieces for my quintet to play after Schubert and Glazunov.

Admittedly, I did not yet listen to all of them, but until now, the Berger is standing out by a mile (e.g. compared to the works of Borodin, even Taneyev and Draeseke I dare to say, composers I usually admire – their quintets are good, but no comparison. And a lot better than Dessoff, the only other 2-cello quintet I knew beforehand, which turned out to be comparably boring)! What a piece. At first, I found the first movement and the 2d movement comparably uninteresting, but upon second listening, I grew to like all movements very much.

In addition, has anyone played the piece and can report on the amateur-group playability, compared to Schubert and Glazunov?

Best wishes, ewk

[Rainolf]

Yes, Berger's Quintet is a great piece which grows in value the more you hear it (as it is the case with Draeseke's and Taneyev's works which I love no less), and your idea to play it can only be supported heartily! Being not a string player I cannot say something from personal experiece, but maybe Wilhelm Altmann's Handbook for String Quartet Players can help you. Altmann, himself a violinist, wrote:

"[The two celli] are used skillfully, as the whole work, considering that the composer as a player was only familiar to the piano, shows an unusual good and beautiful use of the string instruments, which have to solve magnificent, but not easy tasks." Altmann conludes: "This work cannot enough recommended."

German original:
"diese beiden Instrumente [Celli] sind auch klanglich recht geschickt ausgenutzt, wie denn überhaupt das ganze Werk für einen sonst hauptsächlich mit dem Klavier vertrauten Tonsetzer eine ungewöhnlich gute und schöne Verwendung der Streichinstrumente bekundet, denen prächtige, wenn auch nicht leichte Aufgaben zugeteilt sind. [...] Dieses Werk kann gar nicht genug der Beachtung empfohlen werden."

Because Altmann, when he thinks that a piece is to hard for amateurs, writes this explicitly in his articles, and does not do this in the case of the Berger Quintet, it seems to me, that he thinks of this piece as a work not only playable by amateurs, but recommendable to them, too.