Draeseke Grosse Messe, Op.60 (1890-1)

[Alan Howe]

I know this is still available to download from this website, but friends may like to know that it's on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xbbzs1CVcA

Here's some extensive background material, both on Draeseke in general and on the Grosse Messe, Op.60:

<<Felix Draeseke was one of the most formidable German composers of his age, yet lasting success constantly eluded him. Some regarded him simply as a man dogged by ill-fortune (he began to lose his hearing at an early age), others as a figure tragically unrecognised. He suffered as many artists do whose creativity fails to conform to the fashions of their era. In his tempestuous youth he was a radical revolutionary of the 'New German School' propagated by Franz Liszt. Sensing that his wings were about to be clipped, he emigrated into provincial exile in francophone Switzerland. There, from 1862 to 1876, he underwent a 'purification'. From then on his former admirers viewed him as a 'tamed lion' while antiquarian conservatives declined to receive him with open arms as a reformed sinner. In 1876 he returned to Dresden, which he made his base of operations. By then he had become a peerless contrapuntalist and passed his knowledge on to young composers, of whom Eugen d'Albert (1864-1932) was the most famous and the great symphonist Paul Büttner (1870-1943) was ultimately the most significant. In the ideological squabbles between Wagner-Liszt-Bruckner on the one hand and Brahms-Reinecke-Bruch on the other, he was even more dismissive of the Brahmsians than of the 'musical futurists', whose shallowness and self-importance left him increasingly out of sympathy. For personal reasons he spurned the man closest to him in purely musical terms: Wagner. With the sharp deterioration of his hearing he became even more of an outsider. Then, from 1888 to 1892, lasting and widespread recognition seemed within his grasp with the overwhelming success of his Symphonia Tragica and his opera Herrat on the life of Theodoric. But his hypersensitivity toward setbacks, the associated bitterness and his stubborn uprightness were his own worst enemies. He admired the young Richard Strauss's Don Juan and expressed his 'opinion of a fellow expert' in a famous letter of 1896. Strauss, a fabulously gifted conductor who revered Draeseke in any case, might, like Bülow and Nikisch, have helped his music to achieve a large-scale breakthrough. But Strauss vacillated and Draeseke grew impatient. Then came Ein Heldenleben and Draeseke's open dismissal, which was evidently reported to Strauss. In the wake of Salome, their estrangement culminated in Draeseke's polemical broadside of 1906, Die Konfusion in der Musik. He was cheered by the reactionaries, mocked by Max Reger and Richard Strauss and consigned once and for all to the scrap heap. Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922), who had long abandoned composition himself, did not follow suit and helped Symphonia Tragica to belated triumphs. But this was an exception rather than the rule. In 1908-09 Draeseke, by now completely deaf, composed his great a cappella sacred works (a Mass and a Requiem), perhaps his most profound creations, and in 1912 a bizarre Symphonia Comica, in which he pulled all the stops of his mastery while treading in the bygone progressive footsteps of Hector Berlioz. In the same year he was able to witness the first complete performances of his magnum opus Christus, a tetralogy of oratorios, under the baton of Bruno Kittel (1870-1948). Shortly thereafter he died, an eminent master and teacher whose treatise on harmony 'in merry rhymes' was frequently quoted and admired, but whose music only sporadically received a public hearing.
   Born in Coburg on 7 October 1835, Felix August Bernhard Draeseke was the grandson of Bernhard Dräseke (1774-1849), the Protestant bishop of Magdeburg. His mother died eight days after his birth, and he grew up in the care of a maidservant and his three sisters before his father remarried in 1840. He began taking piano lessons at the age of five, but suffered from an imperfectly treated infection of the middle ear, probably a harbinger of his auditory sufferings to come. At the age of eight he composed a march for his father's birthday. Beginning in 1848 he attended the Casimirianum in Coburg while taking lessons from the flute virtuoso and composer Kummer. In 1849 he wrote an overture to Körner's Niklas Zriny for piano four-hands. His talent for composition soon became apparent; as he himself put it in 1850, 'Music is indeed my whole life, and I could not exist without it'. Later, in his Autobiographical Sketches, we find the entry 'Christmas 1851: Decided to pursue music'. But his father, though an estimable violinist in his own right, wanted Felix to become a theologian and consented to the boy's decision only under one condition: 'In four years I want you to be known by name as a musician'. By this time deafness was already a sword of Damocles suspended above Draeseke's career, and his father gave him a warning: 'Composers who are not at the same time virtuosos on their instrument have twice as much trouble making their music known...'.
   In April 1846 Draeseke enrolled at Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied piano with Louis Plaidy (1810-1874) and Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) and theory with Julius Rietz (1812-1877). He heard Franz Liszt conduct a performance of Lohengrin in Weimar and felt an 'extraordinary attraction to the artistic current opened up by Wagner's music'. His own plans for an opera began to take shape. In 1853 he learned that his right eardrum was already destroyed and his left auditory nerve inflamed. Under the spell of Wagner's music, he completed the overture to his opera Sigurd. In 1854 he set out to compose larger pieces for orchestra: a Symphony in C major and the great tone-poems Julius Caesar and Frithjof. In 1855 he left Leipzig Conservatory, where he 'was viewed as a Wagnerian for the whole period of my studies. This proved to be an impediment with Rietz and especially with director Schleinitz. Although I was numbered among the outstandingly talented composers of my class, I was occasionally omitted from the public examination recitals. This made it easier for me to put into action the resolution I had in any case already made: to join the Weimar School'. Accordingly, his final grade sheet was mediocre; as Rietz summed up, 'His powerful talent is undeniable, but no less so his want of beauty and euphony'. Nonetheless Draeseke continued to take private lessons from Rietz. He completed his Symphony in C major and began to write articles for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in Berlin. On 11 November 1856 the C-major Symphony received its première in Leipzig (presumably Draeseke destroyed it later). The following year, together with his friend Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), he met Liszt in Weimar for the first time and finished his opera Sigurd. He moved to Dresden, where he was accepted into the circle of 'musical futurists' who met regularly at the home of Alexander Ritter (1833-1896). At this time he also published his analyses of Liszt's symphonic poems. In 1858 Liszt invited him to Weimar for a critical look at Sigurd. However, the disastrous Weimar première of Peter Cornelius's Barbier von Bagdad on 15 December 1858, under Liszt's baton, put paid to any thought of mounting Draeseke's opera. A year later Draeseke composed his ballad Helges Treue (op. 1), and in July Liszt sent him to Richard Wagner in Switzerland, where he spent an entire month and witnessed the completion of Tristan. Later he claimed that Wagner was 'by far the most original genius I ever met' and revealed to him the true nature of melody. In consequence, he set Kleist's Germania an ihre Kinder and completed the symphonic poem Julius Caesar (he continued to tinker with it until 1865) as well as Kleist's Die Hermannsschlacht and three song cycles. In August 1861 he conducted the Weimar première of his recently completed Germania March: 'With this piece I was cast as a terror of humanity throughout the whole of Germany. Every newspaper rushed to pronounce a severe verdict of condemnation on the school en bloc and to depict me as the especially dangerous beast'. The discomfiture of the 'musical futurists' was utter and complete; Liszt left Weimar and settled in Rome. At first Draeseke sought contact with Wagner and familiarised himself with the music of Berlioz, whose works he found 'at that time superior to Liszt's'. He wrote a few disoriented pièces d'occasion, continued to dabble with his multi-movement symphonic poem Frithjof, and moved to Switzerland in October 1862.
   There now followed 14 'wilderness years' in provincial Switzerland, interrupted by urgently needed creative side trips to Germany. Later Draeseke is said to have told his wife, 'If I were still forced today to give piano lessons in Switzerland, I would have died years ago'. There being nothing more to gain from the outside world (his enthusiastic aspirations toward a musical revolution had collapsed), he had no other choice but to turn his attention inward. In 1862, while living in Yverdon, he composed his only piano sonata, Sonata quasi fantasia (op. 6), an incomparably bold venture that has remained his most successful piece to the present day. In 1864 he produced the libretto for his oratorio Christus (the music had to wait until 1898-1900, by which time he was living in Dresden), relocated to Lausanne and completed Frithjof. In May and June of 1865 he was in Munich to witness the première of the century: 'Spent four weeks waiting for Tristan. Heard three performances'. In 1865 he became a teacher at Lausanne Conservatory and, under the influence of Mozart, wrote Lacrymosa (op. 10), which he later incorporated into his own Requiem (op. 22). It was a clear indication of a stylistic volte-face toward classicism. In 1866, at Bülow's request, he tried unsuccessfully to intervene with Wagner in the 'Cosima Affair'. He wrote many pieces for piano and expanded his Sonata quasi fantasia into a three-movement cycle (1867). Its completion also marked the end of his musical Sturm und Drang period. The year 1868 was spent mainly in Munich, where he started work on his First Symphony in G major (op. 12), completing it in 1872. By then his Second Symphony in F major (op. 25) was already underway, and he finished it in 1876 immediately after his return to Germany. It was here, after two fallow years, that his symphonic style reached full flowering. In August 1876 he relocated permanently to Dresden, which became his new home. He soon fell into a depression so deep 'that I almost harboured thoughts of suicide'. The first version of his opera Herrat arose from 1877 to 1879, and Ernst von Schuch (1846-1914) conducted the Saxon Court Orchestra in the première of his Second Symphony on 15 February 1878. It was followed by a period of constant upswings and disappointments, nourished on the hope of creating the great breakthrough and being named in one breath with the best composers of his era. He became close friends with his fellow-composer Jean Louis Nicodé (1853-1919), completed his B-minor Requiem (op. 22) in 1880, and wrote his only Violin Concerto in E minor (1881), the score of which vanished with the destruction of Dresden in 1945. In 1883 he finished work on his opera Gudrun, whose tuneful if angular overture would become one of his most successful works. The complete opera was premièred in Hanover on 5 November 1884 by his friend and colleague Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf (1830-1913). Two months previously he had been appointed professor of composition at Dresden Conservatory. In 1886 he came up with two of his most substantial orchestral creations, the Piano Concerto in E-flat major (op. 36) and the Symphonia Tragica (op. 40). Thanks to the energetic advocacy of Bülow and Nikisch, the latter piece would earn him a reputation in professional circles as a leading symphonist of his day, alongside Bruckner and Brahms. In 1888 he completed his symphonic preludes to Calderón's Life is a Dream and Kleist's Penthesilea, and the Tragica began to make headway. Draeseke was at the zenith of his career. But every setback seemed to him a screaming injustice, and he brought about his own misfortune. In 1890-91 he wrote his Grand Mass in F-sharp minor (op. 60), and in 1892 his Herrat, after a 13-year delay, received its triumphant première in Dresden under Schuch's baton. He immediately set about composing a Minnesinger opera, Bertran de Born, which he completed in 1893. Apart from the overture, it has remained unperformed to the present day. On 16 May 1894 he married Frida Neuhaus (1859-1942), which at last brought him inner tranquillity and marked the onset of his serene late works. He immediately plunged into a one-act comic opera Fischer und Chalif on a tale from the Arabian Nights, completing it in early 1895, and embarked on his magnum opus, the mighty four-part 'Mysterium' Christus, which finally reached completion in 1899. The years 1903-05 were largely devoted to his sixth and final opera, Merlin, posthumously premièred in Gotha on 18 April 1913. By now he was completely estranged from all current trends in composition, a state that found expression in his polemical brochure Die Konfusion in der Musik (1906). Draeseke, the former revolutionary, was suddenly considered reactionary, and he felt utterly misunderstood. Now completely deaf, he wrote what many connoisseurs consider his most substantial compositions, the Messe a cappella in A minor (op. 85, 1908) and the Requiem a cappella in E minor (1909). But he had not renounced programme music: the symphonic poems Thuner See (1903) and Der Traum ein Leben after Grillparzer (1904) were followed by his final work for orchestra, the Symphonia Comica (1912), an unruly and unpopular counterfoil to the Symphonia Tragica, and definitely not the work of a reactionary. Draeseke died of a stroke in Dresden on 26 February 1913; his widow Frida survived him by almost three decades and became an indispensable eye-witness source for Draeseke's biographer Erich Roeder (1902-1945), whose two-volume biography, despite its unavoidable ideological tint (it was written during the Third Reich), has bequeathed to posterity an astonishing wealth of solid information.

Translation: J. Bradford Robinson

Today Draeseke's presence in concert life is confined mainly to his sacred music, and on disc mainly to his symphonies. His operas are known only by title, even among the cognoscenti. A shroud of silence has rested upon them for over a century, and we wait with bated breath for an opera house brave enough to venture the first step. Nor have his lieder entered public awareness, whereas his piano music has been taken up again and again as a rewarding challenge, thanks most of all to the bold, virtuosic and wildly impetuous Sonata quasi fantasia (op. 6). In recent decades his chamber music, like his orchestral works, has occasionally drawn attention, but in view of the superior quality there is no justice and the modest dissemination of these works is scandalous.
   In December 1888, Draeseke had the great experience that Hans von Bülow led his 'Symphonia Tragica' to a triumphant success in Berlin. Now he turned his creative powers more than ever inwards and composed his first motets for mixed choir a cappella (opp. 55 and 56) and the 23rd Psalm for three-part women's choir, the first harbingers of his transfigur blissful late œuvre. He completed his cantata 'Columbus' Op. 52 for male choir, soprano solo and baritone solo, and orchestra, based on his own libretto, by the end of 1889, and in the first half of 1890, he wrote the Sonata in D for cello and piano Op. 51, and an Academic Festival Overture Op. 63 (ten years after Brahms's work of the same name) that never appeared in print. On 19 June 1890, Richard Strauss conducted the world première of Draeseke's armor-clad Symphonic prelude to Kleist's 'Penthesilea' Op. 50 from 1888 in Eisenach, a work that split the critics. The first performance of his Academic Festival Overture (certainly the less significant composition) under Hugo Herrmann in Dresden on 19 December 1890 was much more successful. But now Draeseke became familiar with Hermann Kretzschmar (1848-1924), at the time music director of Leipsic University and later professor in music history there. Consequently, Kretzschmar led the première of the cantata 'Columbus' in Leipsic's new Gewandhaus on 16 February 1891 and followed the formation process of Draeseke's Great Mass in F-sharp minor, the most enormous piece of sacred music Draeseke wrote since his meanwhile widely appreciated Requiem in B minor Op. 22 from 1877-79.
   Draeseke started composing his Great Mass in F-sharp minor in autumn 1890. He wrote the full score without preliminary sketches. The Gloria was finished on 3 November, the Agnus Dei on 3 December. In spring 1891, he finished the Credo on 20 March, the Sanctus on 17 April, and the Kyrie on 21 April. Originally, Draeseke had scored the Great Mass in a manner such as Cherubini's Requiem in C minor for mixed choir and orchestra with only one soloistic part in the Benedictus. But Kretzschmar, the work's dedicatee, made many suggestions in the score indicating 50-50 divisions oft he choir and sections for quartet of solo singers instead oft he full choir. Draeseke accepted a good deal of these suggestions.
   Hermann Kretzschmar conducted the first performance of Draeseke's Great Mass in F-sharp minor in the 214th concert of the Riedel Society, accompanied by the Gewandhaus Orchestra, in Leipsic on 1 November 1892 (the Saxonian Day of Penance). The solo singers were Anna Münch, Pauline Metzler-Löwy (1853-1921), Karl Dierich (1852-1928), and Paul Knüpfer (1865-1920). Kretzschmar, wo conducted the première by heart, wrote about the mass in his popular ,Führer durch den Konzertsaal' (Guide through the Concert Hall): "Whoever studies the description oft he passion, the Benedictus, and particularly the Agnus Dei, will have no doubt that this ist he work of a master." Draeseke himself considered the Credo the most successful piece of the mass, and Erich Roeder, the main biographer, later put the Great Mass on an equal footing with Beethoven's 'Missa solemnis'.
   The world première was followed by the Dresden première on 8 April 1893, with significantly smaller forces under Theodor Müller-Reuter (1858-1919) and the solo singers Anna Münch, Agnes Witting, Eduard Mann, and Edmund Glomme in the hall of Braun's Hotel. The 'Dresdner Nachrichten' reported: "In Leipsic 250 singers, yesterday 50-60 singers. Draeseke's mass reaches directly the masses of Beethoven and Bach in ist dimension and presentation [...] everything is written with genius and captivates the listener into the spell of this extraordinary creation." And that was about it. Draeseke's Great Mass remained unprinted and after these two performances it was never played again not only during the composer's life but for almost a complete century: On 6 May 1989, state church-music director Udo Rainer Follert (b. 1943) conducted the work's third performance during his International Schütz Festival in Speyer's memorial church. The Evangelical Youth Choir from Palatinate was accompanied by the Cologne Philharmonic Orchestra, the solo singers were Adelheid Vogel (b. 1956), Elvira Dreszen (b. 1957), Frieder Lang (b. 1950), and Phillip Langshaw (b. 1938). For this historic occasion Follert, also director of the Internationale Draeseke-Gesellschaft, commissioned a new transcript of the score that is faithfully reprinted in the present first print of the full score of Draeseke's Great Mass in F-sharp minor Op. 60. We hope that with the help of this publication the work that counts among the most magnificent settings of the catholic mass in the 19th century will finally finds its way into the repertoire.

Christoph Schlüren, February 2019>>
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/4137.html

[kolaboy]

A wonderful piece. It always reminded me a bit of Reger's unfinished requiem.