Heinrich Gottlieb Noren (1861-1928)

[Rainolf]

In 2024 the Richard-Strauss-Tage in Garmisch-Partenkirchen will take place from 1 June to 11 June. The program includes two works by Heinrich Gottlieb Noren.

Heinrich G. Noren (1861-1928, born Heinrich Gottlieb) was an Austrian composer and violinist. His compositions for orchestra achieved international success in the early 20th century. In 1907 his work Kaleidoskop was premiered, a set of variations on an original theme, culminating in a double fugue. As an admirer of Strauss, Noren quoted (with Strauss's permission) two themes from Ein Heldenleben, but was accused of plagiarism by Strauss's publisher Leuckart. The lawsuit was put to an end by a court in Dresden in Noren's favour. The court declared that only melodies were protected by law, but the quoted themes were no melodies. This judgement was used by satiric writers, most prominently by Edgar Istel in a parody on the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, of which Strauss was president.

Here you can find a good introduction to Noren and his work:

https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/1827.html

Kaleidoskop will be played together with Ein Heldenleben by the Pilsen Philharmonic, conducted by Rémy Ballot on 8 June 2024.

https://www.richard-strauss-tage.de/event/sinfoniekonzert-5/

On 11 June the Phaeton Piano Trio will play Noren's Piano Trio in D minor, together with Strauss's piano trios.

https://www.richard-strauss-tage.de/event/kammerkonzert-iii/

[eschiss1]

Thank you- there's quite a few scores of his at IMSLP and there was a time when performances were at least an occasional thing (the New York Philharmonic played Kaleidoscope in March 1914 under Stransky , his symphony "Vita" was premiered in Leipzig in Jan. 1912, -- and that MPH preface- also the preface to his violin concerto, too- have more to say on this subject, now I look (and note that the US premiere of Kaleidoscope, under Stock, was given in late 1908 in Chicago)...

As one can see from the background in the (common material to both) preface(s), the coupling of Kaleidoskop and Ein Heldenleben is at least ironic , yes.  Stransky's performance of Kaleidoskop, btw, was also coupled with some Strauss works though not Heldenleben.
(Unfortunately IMSLP does -not- yet have Kaleidoskop - this would be a nice lack to fill...)

[Rainolf]

Surely, the contemporaries of Noren and Strauss would never have placed both, Kaleidoskop and Heldenleben, on the same concert programme (at least there is no such case known to me), but for a Strauss festival that wants to show the composer in dialogue with his contemporaries, Kaleidoskop is the ideal piece to be coupled with Strauss's tone poem.

Noren's music was played regularly during the years before the First World War, but the composer fell in obscurity during the 1920s. In his last years he seems to have spend all his energy for securing a performance of his opera Der Schleier der Beatrice, which never materialized.

After his death, Noren's wife Signe, who was a Norwegian singer, went back to Bergen, where she must have lived until at least 1955. In this year she renewed the copyright of one of her husband's songs:

https://www.google.de/books/edition/Catalog_of_Copyright_Entries/MTohAQAAIAAJ?hl=de&gbpv=1&dq=signe+noren&pg=RA1-PA30&printsec=frontcover

It seems very possible to me that Noren's estate, including his unpublished compositions, is located in Norway.


 

[Rainolf]

Having heard Noren's Kaleidoskop in a great performance in Garmisch (Rémy Ballot's performances of Strauss and Wagner were equally fine), I now can say more about the work and its style. Here you can find my review of the Strauss Festival concerts (in German):

http://www.the-new-listener.de/index.php/2024/06/28/richard-strauss-tage-2024-1-heinrich-gottlieb-norens-auferstehung/

The passages on Kaleidoskop in English:

"In the last variation, which he expressly dedicates "To a famous contemporary," Noren quotes (not quite literally, but clearly recognizable) the themes of the Hero and the Adversaries from Ein Heldenleben. The Adversaries's theme then becomes the starting point of the double fugue, in which the original theme of the variations returns as a contrast. Can you interpret all of this other than that Noren rushes to the aid of Strauss' hero to fight against the same opponents? As far as the attitude against the Adversaries is concerned, Noren is more optimistic than Strauss: In Ein Heldenleben there is an unbridgeable gap between the Hero and his Adversaries until the end, but Noren in his work allows his variation theme to triumph as a chorale, supported by the first fugue theme, which had changed its character totally: The Adversaries obviously turned into supporters here.

Apart from the value of Noren's variation cycle as a historical document [from the time of the Draeseke-Strauss-debate on "Confusion in Music"], it is a highly remarkable work, especially since Noren in no way seeks to imitate Strauss's style. The theme of the variations begins in a very un-Straussian way as a simple cor anglais melody in a modal E minor, somewhat like a mixture of a Slavic folk song and a Protestant chorale. The subsequent variations do not follow the classical practice of essentially retaining the dimensions and form of the theme, as Brahms did, but only take up its motifs and develop completely new structures from them in free variations. "Kaleidoscop" is exactly the right name for this type of variation composition. The individual variations are bursting with ideas! Slavic temperament comes to the fore again and again, and not just in the variation explicitly referred to as "Slavic dance". Using refined post-Wagnerian harmony, Noren creates an arc of contrasting pictures from the material of his theme. The size of some of the variations makes them appear as small tone poems, especially since they have characteristic titles ("In the Cathedral", "From Bygone Days"). In contrast to Strauss's Don Quixote, they are not intended as parts of an overarching plot, and therefore the whole work cannot be addressed as essential program music. The tendency towards symphonic expansion that characterizes the work - particularly noticeable in the final fugue, especially in the "cathedral" variation and in the powerful central funeral march - is also evident in the fact that Noren precedes the theme with a slow introduction in which its motifs are prepared, and in fact that the crowning chorale ends in a quiet coda that corresponds to the introduction. Noren's instrumentation is not inferior to Strauss's in terms of color and brilliance. What is striking is his preference for percussion instruments, which in some sections of the work almost form an independent orchestral layer."

[Alan Howe]

Here's the full text of Christoph Schlüren's introduction to Kaleidoskop (translated):

One of the best violinists of his generation, Heinrich Gottlieb Noren was at first belittled as a composer. Then the première of his orchestral variations Kaleidoscope, given at the Dresden Tonkünstler Convention on 1 July 1907 by the Saxon Hofkapelle (the forerunner of the Dresden Staatskapelle) under their principal conductor Ernst von Schuch (1846-1914), thrust him instantaneously into the forefront of modern composers at the age of forty-six. Besides the incontestable musical quality of this brilliantly and inventively orchestrated work, as delightful in its seriousness and sublimity as in its whimsy and gossamer workmanship, it was especially the unusual freewheeling final variation before the double fugue ("Fantasy," No. 11) that attracted widespread attention, both for the uninhibited boldness of its design and for the audacity with which it dared to brook comparison with "a famous contemporary." This was, of course, Richard Strauss, whose Ein Heldenleben Noren unabashedly quoted not once but twice.
   Hardly did news of the stunning success begin to make the rounds than Noren found himself embroiled in legal repercussions which would develop into a priceless and gleefully commentated original precedent: Richard Strauss's Leipzig publisher Leuckart submitted a lawsuit to the Royal District Court in Dresden for infringement of copyright. This proved to be grist for the mill of the stylistic controversy then raging between the progressives (primarily the bold innovator Strauss, never at a loss for a turn of phrase or tirade) and the conservatives (such as Reinecke in Leipzig or the Berlin Academics). Two years earlier, after the première of Salome, that stern master of counterpoint Felix Draeseke (1835-1913), estranged by the latest developments, had already poured oil on the flames of an acrimonious dispute between the adherents and opponents of progressive music by publishing his polemical pamphlet Die Konfusion in der Musik. Besides such deadly serious broadsides, there were also acidly humorous articles, especially once Noren, who cleverly and brazenly posed as the thief of two main themes from Ein Heldenleben, had been cleared of all charges in 1908, the reasoning of the court being that the themes in question were not melodies at all (GRUR 1909, p. 332, Oberlandesgericht Dresden). This was followed by a gloss from the pen of Strauss's biographer Max Steinitzer (1864-1936), a generous patron of Strauss's fictitious rival Otto Jägermeier who eventually emigrated to Madagascar. This gloss, published in the carnival issue of Die Musik in 1909, added the following lines of doggerel to Strauss's heroic theme: "Strauss is a great genius, but completely lacking in melody. O, listen to Franz Lehár! Now there's a man to reckon with!" The same issue ran a "Reformist Harlequinade" from the opposing party, a report of the "144th Cacophonists Convention in Bierheim" that mercilessly pilloried the work of the General German Music Association (ADMV), of which Strauss was chairman. The article brought about years of litigation for its author, the Munich educationalist and composer Edgar Istel (1880-1948). At the end of the convention the Devil himself appears and has his regimental band play "a new cacophonic concoction from our Richard: Ein Höllenleben" ("A Life in Hell"). But the Devil puts an end to the proceedings: "That's too much even for me! I can't impose that on my poor souls: they're damned only to infernal torments. Do all of you compose like this?" To which Richard responds, in broad Bavarian dialect, "With all due respect, Mr. Devil, I think the other chaps compose even more hideously." At which point they are all expelled from Hell: "The earth opens up and spews out the cacophonists ...."
   Quite apart from the legal and satirical collateral damage Kaleidoscope may have occasioned on Earth and in Hell, the piece itself was a virtuosic and multifaceted orchestral work at the zenith of its era, and the scandal fueled its success to great effect. Issued in print by the Leipzig publishers Lauterbach & Kuhn in 1908, the year of the court's verdict, it was performed from one end of Germany to the other and entered the repertoires of the great orchestras throughout Europe. On 12 December 1908 the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered the work in the U.S., two days later the Berlin Philharmonic played it for the first time under their principal conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922), and the English première was given in Queen's Hall during a concert of the London Proms on 19 August 1909. The successes proceeded apace: on 11 January 1912 Nikisch conducted the première of Noren's B-minor symphony Vita (op. 36) with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and on 28 Mai 1912 the extremely ingratiating Violin Concerto of 1911 (op. 38) was premièred, under Noren's baton, at the Danzig Tonkünstler Festival by Alexander Petschnikoff (1873-1949). In short order Hugo Kortschak (1884-1957) played the Berlin première with the Berlin Philharmonic on 9 October 1912 (again with Noren conducting), the Viennese première with the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra on 24 November 1912, the Munich première, and the first American performance, given in Chicago by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on 5 December 1913 under its principal conductor, Frederick Stock (1872-1942). Only the First World War was able to put an abrupt end to the triumphal progress of Noren's music. After the war his name, in the absence of exciting new works, quickly vanished from the collective consciousness, as did so many others. Yet two works of his had appeared on the programs of the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1916-17 season: Kaleidoscope, conducted by Hermann Henze (1886-?) on 12 October, and the new Symphonic Serenade, op. 48, premièred under Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) on 12 February 1917.
   After beginning as a Brahmsian, Noren shifted at the height of his success to the camp of his revered Richard Strauss, and he stands side by side with Strauss and Reznicek in the natural virtuosity of his style and his musicianly whimsicality. Today, a full century after the gradual sinking of his star, he is well and truly ripe for rediscovery, and no work is better suited to this purpose than that cult composition at the threshold to modernism: Kaleidoscope.
Christoph Schlüren, May 2016
https://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Heinrich-Gottlieb-Noren-Kaleidoskop/27010

[Alan Howe]

Thanks, Rainolf. How would Noren's music compare to, say, Nicodé (a comparably important but unknown contemporary figure)?

Noren's Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.38 (1911) would also be of interest. It sounds as though it might rival (in length) the roughly contemporary VCs of Elgar and Reger. Details at IMSLP here:
https://imslp.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto%2C_Op.38_(Noren%2C_Heinrich_Gottlieb)

On 28 Mai 1912 Noren's utterly ingratiating Violin Concerto of 1911 (op. 38) was premièred at the Danzig Tonkünstler Festival by Alexander Petschnikoff (1873-1949). In short order Hugo Kortschak (1884-1957) played the Berlin première with the Berlin Philharmonic (9 October 1912) and the Vienna première with the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra (24 November 1912), both times with Noren at the conductor's desk. During this tour, Kortschak and Noren presented the new concerto with leading local orchestras in many other European cities, including Munich. Later, on 5 December 1913, Kortschak gave the American première in Chicago with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Frederick Stock (1872-1942).
  Thereafter Noren's op. 38 fell completely into oblivion and has been neither rediscovered nor revived to the present day. This can only be called, with full justification, a sorry state of affairs. But it is also a stroke of luck, in that it allows us to awaken music of such quality from century-long somnolence. For this is one of the most valuable forgotten concertos for this instrument from an era dominated, in the German-speaking countries, by Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Max Reger, to name only a few who likewise wrote one violin concerto apiece. All sought to surpass, in a wide variety of ways, the tradition founded on the great violin concertos by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvořák, Joachim, and Bruch. One way in which Noren surpassed his forebears (as did Reger, though to a lesser extent) was in the work's duration, which, in the only accessible score today, is given by hand as seventy minutes. This, of course, also sheds light on the work's appropriate tempos, which will no doubt pose insoluble questions to many of today's musicians (we need only recall that Wagner needed thirty minutes for his Siegfried Idyll). Tracking down the resultant character must be done very carefully, and it is of course obvious that this requires immense refinement and intensity of delivery. Simply playing the piece very slowly without probing its depth of expression would lead us nowhere. Playing it faster would doubtless do an injustice to the original vision of its performance. These are genuine challenges! In any event, despite its winning musicality, this is anything but a conventional virtuoso concerto, and its peculiarities of melodic and harmonic invention are plain to hear. The first-movement cadenza, for instance, is completely unconventional, being accompanied by strings, horns, woodwind, and harp in the manner of a recitative. Although Noren's orchestration is very sophisticated, inventive, and surprising, this is a concerto that places the soloist center stage as few other large-scale concertos are willing to do. The writing in the central Intermezzo is a miracle of chamber-music clarity, exuding a deep calm, yet fraught with sharp contrasts of form. The finale displays that side of Noren's art that some of his contemporaries called a "Slavonic idiom." It is safe to assume that this accomplished virtuoso was not only familiar with the Tchaikovsky and Dvořák concertos but drew wide-ranging inspiration from other sources as well (Moritz Moszkowski springs immediately to mind). It is a supremely ingratiating concerto for the violinist, while at the same time treating the orchestra superbly in all its separate parts and as a whole. It only remains to be hoped that the potential lurking in this work can be brought to light by a satisfactory performance.
  The sole surviving score of Noren's concerto, originally published by Eos in Berlin-Schöneberg in 1912, passed into the archives of Eos's successor, Simrock. Now that Simrock's holdings have been taken over by Boosey & Hawkes/Bote & Bock, there is, logistically speaking, nothing to prevent the work's worldwide dissemination. We wish to thank the publishers for kindly allowing us to use this sole copy as a master for the present publication.
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/1911.html

[eschiss1]

A concert with Noren's Kaleidoscop and Strauss' "Aus Italien" seems the obvious and most appropriate coupling.

[Alan Howe]

Any recording of Noren's music would be welcome!