Wetz Symphony No.2/Hiroshi Kodama

[Alan Howe]

Our fellow-member Maury has reminded us of the virtues of Wetz's music and here I'd like to mention a Japanese 2-CD recording featuring Wetz's very beautiful 2nd Symphony in A major, Op. 47, from 1919/published in 1921 (plus works by Bruch and Svendsen).
This is the set:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Svendsen-Wetz-Symphony-No-2/dp/B00CWGYBKA/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1T2B900NM08DV&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Z_BiAjEnL204h53RCn3GAY7qniLjdiaLPlgkC0lEmCEC8cru7EtHPK5ytUj3U8kQgf7V0xlgs_u0B3j3OrD779yYcsmMKuNhX07KJaL8ZHk.5Pp_1JOW7IpXCtgZGxY7shJFDvW3iVAk7INN3FHTiC4&dib_tag=se&keywords=hiroshi+kodama&nsdOptOutParam=true&qid=1733765365&sprefix=hiroshi+kodama%2Caps%2C104&sr=8-5 .
I must have bought it during Covid and promptly forgotten about it. The recording can be heard on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgzrghR4RhA  (in greatly reduced sound-quality).

The mood of the work is predominantly reflective and very backward-looking in style for its time, but nonetheless extremely effective. We have often talked here about 'Brucknerian' composers and Wetz's style is about as as indebted to Bruckner as one can imagine. Speaking personally, this matters not a jot to me, especially as Kodama's performance is so powerful and well-played. The Osaka Symphony Orchestra has a rich-sounding string section and commanding brass, and the recording quality is simply spectacular.

Here's Dave Hurwitz's take on the alternative cpo recording:
https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-3857/

And here's more detailed information:

<<As Johannes Brahms put it in a different context, "any donkey can hear" that Richard Wetz's symphonies were influenced by Anton Bruckner. It is a fact that also applies, in a quite different form, to a Nuremberg symphonist three decades his junior, Martin Scherber (1907-1974), who, like Wetz, composed three monumental symphonies that are likewise unthinkable without Bruckner's musical language. And yet, for all the obviousness of its undeniably Brucknerian moments and phrases (especially in the obsessive way it builds its climaxes), Wetz's formal psychology is completely different in kind, one of romantic discontent. And if he wrote large-scale sacred works in later life, such as the Requiem and Christmas Oratorio, it becomes clear how little he actually had in common with Bruckner in expression and aspiration. It is, of course, regrettable that Wetz never managed to write his projected fourth symphony; but given his line of evolution, we may safely assume that it would have been even more remote from Bruckner than its three predecessors.

Richard Wetz was the son of an Austrian merchant named Georg Wetz (1849-1903) and Klara Wetz née Mucha (1852-1906). Although he revealed a talent for music in early childhood, he was eight years old before he received his first piano lessons, and he began to write lieder and piano pieces. Upon hearing Mozart's great G-minor Symphony (K. 550) at the age of thirteen, he firmly resolved to become a composer. In 1897, after taking his school leaving certificate, he enrolled at Leipzig Conservatory, where he was taught by the venerable masters Carl Reinecke (1824-1910) and Salomon Jadassohn (1831-1902). Disappointed by the conservatory's hopelessly conservative spirit and its rejection of every innovation from the "New German School" of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, he left after a mere six weeks and took private lessons from Richard Hofmann (1844-1918), the former head of the Leipzig Singakademie, and from Alfred Apel, a student of Friedrich Kiel. He also took courses in philosophy, psychology, and literature at Leipzig University, developing a special predilection for the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and devoting himself to a study of the writings of Goethe, Kleist, Hölderlin, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe. In 1899 he moved to Munich, where he studied composition with Ludwig Thuille (1861-1907), thereby obtaining a solid command of his craft, especially in counterpoint. A year later he moved to Stralsund, where, thanks to the intercession of Felix Weingartner (1863-1942), he obtained a position as theater conductor. After a few months he abandoned it in order to try his hand at a similar position in Barmen. This, too, was of brief duration, and he returned to Leipzig, where he continued his training through self-instruction and deepened his knowledge of his great predecessors, of whom Bruckner and Liszt would become especially important.

From 1906 Wetz was based in Erfurt, where he headed the Musical Society and remained for the remaining three decades of his life. By then he had already completed his first opera, Judith (op. 13) in 1903 and his second, Das ewige Feuer (The Eternal Fire, op. 19), the following year. The latter, performed in Hamburg and Düsseldorf in 1907, was widely regarded as a failure. A third opera Savitri, begun in 1907, remained unfinished. But his first orchestral work, the Kleist Overture of 1903 (op. 16), became a resounding success when performed in Berlin in 1908 by Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922), and it opened the doors to nationwide recognition (it would remain his most frequently performed orchestral work).

For three decades Wetz was the leading musical light in the town of Erfurt in Thuringia. From 1911 to 1921 he taught composition and music history at the Thuringian State Conservatory; he also served as a teacher (1916) and professor (1920) of music history, counterpoint, orchestration, and composition at the Ducal School of Music in Weimar, the forerunner of today's Franz Liszt University of Music. There his students included Walter Rein (1893-1955) and Werner Trenkner (1902-1981), of whom the latter, in a clear gesture of allegiance to his teacher, completed two symphonies in 1930 and 1932.

In the 1920s Wetz published three substantial and widely noticed books: one on Bruckner's life and music (1922), another on Franz Liszt (1925), and a third on the spiritual foundations of Beethoven's music (1927). Having instituted several music festivals in Erfurt primarily devoted to his own music, he was admitted to the Prussian Academy of the Arts as a corresponding member in 1928. Shortly thereafter he turned down an offer to teach composition at the Berlin Musikhochschule. Remaining loyal to Thuringia, he was increasingly burdened by administrative duties, which slowed the flow of his creativity. His success outside Thuringia was modest; as he noted in 1932, "My music suffers a strange fate: wherever it's heard it moves listeners to the quick, but it's seldom given the chance to do so." In October 1934 he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (Wetz was a heavy smoker), and he died a short while later. The obstinacy of the trustee of his estate prevented his pupil Trenkner from completing the sketches of his Goethe oratorio as Wetz had instructed in his will.

Wetz's relocation to Erfurt was followed by several significant works for chorus and orchestra: Gesang des Lebens (Hymn of Life) for boys' chorus on orchestra, op. 29 (1908); Hyperion for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, op. 32 (1912); and Psalm III for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, op. 37 (1914). Only then did he finish his Symphony No. 1 in C minor in 1916 (op. 40). It was followed by his Second Symphony (1919), his Third Symphony in B-flat minor/major, op. 48 (1922), the B-minor Requiem for soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra, op. 50 (1925), the Christmas Oratorio on Old German Poems for soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra, op. 53 (1929), and the Violin Concerto in B minor, op. 57 (1933). His oratorio Liebe, Leben, Ewigkeit (Love, Life, Eternity) after Goethe was left unfinished and has disappeared. He also wrote significant music for a cappella chorus and chamber music, including Sonata in G major for Solo Violin, op. 33 (1911), String Quartet No. 1 in F minor, op. 43 (1916), and String Quartet No. 2 in E minor, op. 49 (1923), as well as music for organ (Passacaglia and Fugue in D minor, op. 55, 1930) and piano (Romantic Variations on an Original Theme, op. 42, 1916; Five Piano Pieces, op. 54, 1929).

No conductor was a greater champion of Wetz's music than Peter Raabe (1872-1945), the eminent scholar and biographer of Liszt (and later president of the Reich Chamber of Music), first in Weimar and later as general music director of the Aachen City Orchestra. Raabe must be considered the true discoverer and key advocate of Wetz's symphonies. It was he who conducted in Weimar the world premières of the First Symphony on 23 January 1917 and the Second Symphony in A major (op. 47) on 9 January 1920. Installed in Aachen, he was responsible for the premières of the Third Symphony on 10 January 1923 and the Requiem on 3 March 1926. Owing to an inexplicable falling out, Raabe did not conduct the première of the Christmas Oratorio – a fact for which the "Wetzians" gave him full blame. But he remained true to his convictions even after Wetz's death; and in the 1930s, when he also took up the cause of Felix Woyrsch (1860-1944), he conducted the première of the Violin Concerto by Wetz's pupil Werner Trenkner on 10 October 1935.

Wetz's commentators referred to the Second Symphony as his "Pastorale." Though comprehensible when compared to the First, it overlooks the extreme contrasts that also mark the work's large-scale form. Unlike the four-movement First and Third Symphonies, the Second has only three movements, as Wetz never carried out the scherzo he had originally planned. He first wrote the two outside movements, only to discover that the slow middle movement fully sufficed as a gestural counterweight: "The second movement is a funeral dirge, a compassionate glance at the 'barren and impoverished life that can never fulfill a single wish of ours'" (thus the composer's own commentary). The work arose within the space of ten months and was finished in October 1919. The finale is called the fourth movement in the manuscript. Wetz defended it against criticism: "Critics have called the opening theme of the finale 'unimportant' – unjustifiably, for it first appears so to speak in embryo and only unleashes all the forces coiled within it as the movement progresses. The first and third movements form a self-contained unit; the themes of the opening movement return on a higher level in the finale."

Whatever we might think of Wetz's stylistic posture and originality, there can be no doubt that he was a genuine symphonist capable of placing extreme contrasts in a convincing relation and allowing the form as a whole to evolve organically. What Wetz wrote in his Liszt monograph of 1925 can be applied without contradiction to his own music:

"Like the forms of Nature, those of art are the 'living cloak of divinity,' that is, they are in the final analysis the result of the forces prevailing in the artist. The work, content, and form emerge at the same time in the soul of the creator, inscrutably and mysteriously. It is not as if he first wants – or rather has – to search for a form! Schopenhauer, as a young man, beautifully described this coalescence of content and form when he bore within himself that symphony of human thought, The World as Will and Representation. Where vital contents exist, the form is also alive. It is foolish to explain the 'newness' of a work of art from the novelty of the devices employed, or to seek to attain new art in the broadest sense by altering those devices."

Wetz's Second Symphony was published by Friedrich Kistner of Leipzig in 1921, the year of its first performance in Weimar. The present volume faithfully reproduces that edition.>>
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/1831.html

[eschiss1]

One minor correction: Kistner was after 1918 just an imprint of CFW Siegel (owned by the Linnemanns) - indeed in just a couple of years (1923) they merged their companies and Kistner & Siegel was born. (Actually, there's something here I'm not sure about, but I've asked a question in a relevant place.)

Would tend to disagree about just how backward-looking the Wetz symphonies are - they would have been, like so much "backward-looking" music written after 1915 or so, quite shocking to a 19th-century audience. (That something sounds different from other music of the same time does not have the automatic consequence that it would settle nicely and unprepossessingly into another!)

(As to my own opinion of Wetz's symphonies for what that is worth, I've enjoyed the first two very much for decades, and still need to get to know the 3rd better. And his other music too!)

[Ilja]

To be honest, the differences between the Kodama and the Albert recording on cpo are pretty minimal, bordering on carbon copies. If you have one recording, there's little reason to get the other. The Rheinland-Pfalz is just a bit smoother, particularly in the brass, but again, we're talking very marginal stuff.

[terry martyn]

And, Eric, not just shocking to a nineteenth-century audience,I'm afraid.   I listened to about 30 minutes of this symphony, but that was enough. It is,like mature Richard Strauss, all too advanced for me. Can't say I'm a fan of the mature Bruckner either, with the exception of his Ninth.

After switching off the Wetz, I gave my nineteenth-century ears a cleanse with the Du Puy Bassoon Concerto. I was soon over the Wetz "shock and awe".

[Alan Howe]

Each to his own, Terry. I've no problem with that.

[Maury]

Thanks very much for the posted long review of Wetz which is insightful and I believe very fair. Indeed a century later it matters not whether a fine piece of music was written tardily in 1915 or on time in 1895. And actually Bruckner's music itself really only became generally popular some years after his demise.

Thanks also to this site which for me opened two seemingly closed doors: Bruckner and post Tchaikovskian Sibelius. Wetz and Scherber showed that there was more life to the Bruckner style in convincing fashion.

PS The Japanese CD of Wetz did not come up directly for me outside the UK and did not appear using a search term Richard Wetz. I had to search by Svendsen Wetz to access the CD. With this search term it also came up on US Amazon.