Eduard Lassen

[Gareth Vaughan]

Hmph! Pity.

[Alan Howe]

Harumph indeed.

[eschiss1]

Weimar Theatre Orchestra Library doesn't seem to have the most searchable of catalogs, that I can tell. Would be nice to know where his manuscripts ended up besides there, though...

[Alan Howe]

Quite, Eric.

[pcc]

On the basis of Mr. Howe's (and others') enthusiasm for the Lassen violin concerto, I just heard the YouTube perfomance. It definitely deserves championing, at least from my first hearing. Right from the start I could hear the composer of the Festival Overture; it is richly but clearly orchestrated, melodically very compelling, kind of a bridge between the early 19th century virtuoso concertos and more symphonically integrated concertos where the violin is (in my opinion) sometimes overwhelmed by the orchestral thematic material and texture. The woodwind writing is superb, differentiating them as a distinct choir, and the brass is light but always welcome and necessary, giving weight and point when appropriate.  The entire texture never feels heavy, but has power and grace throughout. The second movement serenade is charming in the best sense of the word and  much more accomplished than some other movements that take a similar approach (it has more harmonic and orchestrational surprises).  I thought the last movement very witty and wry; tremendous style and melodic appeal, plenty of showmanship but always integrated into the movement's dance-like aesthetic, and the same clean but colourful texture that the whole work possesses. I also must say I rather liked the recording's outdoor acoustic; my ears deal with dry early electric recordings all the time, and I often prefer that kind of clarity rather to electronically over-manipulated reverb. It really sounded "alive".

[Alan Howe]

Thank you for that full and appreciative assessment. I believe it is a major discovery.

Adding a modicum of reverb does improve the recording, though.

[Amphissa]

Alan's post with the VC details indicates Lassen's death as 1894, but Wikipedia (not always reliable) says he died in 1904. Can anyone resolve this discrepancy?

[Alan Howe]

It was a typo - now corrected. Apologies. My original post had it right.

[pcc]

I would say, not as a criticism but as an observation, that the work's obscurity (which I hope will be reversed) might be somewhat due to the qualities we've all enjoyed and appreciated: it's very clear-textured, elegantly structured, and melodically appealing for a work that premiered in 1888, which may have made it date fairly quickly in some circles. (Think of  Strauss's Don Juan and the Mahler First Symphony, both written the same year). It really isn't "Brahmsian" or "Wagnerian", if you want to apply labels (I don't), it's much more spaciously scored than Dvořák's or Mackenzie's concertos (the only near-contemporary "Germanic" violin concertos I know well that spring instantly to my mind), and it really is very much its own work and expressive of Lassen as a personality. The fierce musical progressivism'traditionalism debate raging not only in Germany but all over Europe in the 1880s and 90s, and the battle of "national schools", sometimes got in the way of composers who wrote really good music with personality that didn't have agendas past being really good music.

[pcc]

This may label me coarse, but I should add that before I heard it I noticed the 1888 premiere date and half-expected it, with some trepidation, to sound much "thicker" than it does. How glad I was to be wrong!

[Mark Thomas]

Alan Howe wrote:

Toskey mentions VC No.2, Op.149, published by Breitkopf und Härtel

I have been digging a bit further into the intriguing question of this 2nd Violin Concerto of Lassen, spurred on by the prospect of unearthing something to equal his very fine D major Op.87.

Alas! I suspect that it never existed.  Alan drew a surprising blank when he wrote to the supposed publishers, but Toskey is very specific that they published the work. However, going back to Toskey one sees that he gives three literary references for the piece but doesn't seem to have himself seen it. Looking up the three references just yields single line listings identical to that repeated by Toskey, but this time with no sources mentioned. One of them though (I can't recall which), goes further and says that the 2nd Concerto is in D major. But that's the key of Op.87, and surely Lassen wouldn't have written another concerto in the same key?

Library online searches draw blanks, as we know. I also went through the Berlin library card index, which lists hundreds of copies of Lassen's works, including all the known orchestral pieces, but there's no 2nd Violin Concerto. No other reference work dating back to 1900 that I have looked at mentions Op.149. Hofmeister XIX doesn't record its publication, but it does stop at 1900. However, Altmann's usually very reliable catalogue of 1919 doesn't record it either, so the odds are that if it ever existed it wasn't published.

The opus number itself is odd. Op.149? The latest published opus number of Lassen's which I can find is Op.93, a set of six lieder published in 1895. All the works between it and the Op.87 Violin Concerto (published 1888) are songs, and Lassen was a very successful song composer, so I imagine that his songs at least were published as soon as they were composed. Would Lassen really have written another 46 works between 1893 and his death in 1904? I know that Röntgen managed it, but it seems unlikely in the extreme, given his relatively slow rate of composition up until then and, even if he did, where is the evidence for them?

All in all, I think we have another "phantom concerto" on our hands, like Bronsart's 2nd Piano Concerto or Goldmark's 2nd Violin Concerto. One of Toskey's three original sources (or an ur-source from which they all drew) misplaced another composer's Violin Concerto No.2 in D major Op.149 in a Lassen work list and the others and Toskey perpetuated the error. The question then is: whose concerto?

[Alan Howe]

That's great research, Mark, and I think your conclusion is 100% correct. So, as you say, whose is this VC Op.149?

[cypressdome]

I've been through the Hofmeister publications from 1900 to 1940 and could find no Lassen second concerto listed.  What few Lassen works that do appear seem to be re-issues of songs or new arrangements of previously-published works.  Too bad.

[Mark Thomas]

That's helpful, thanks. Did you come across anything later than Op.93?

[Alan Howe]

That's the crucial question. If Lassen's final opus was approx. 93, where does the number 149 come from?