Guido Peters

[Glazier]

Any opinions of the above composer, active 1900-1920.?
MGG gives him an entry, and there are two of his works on IMSLP.

[Wheesht]

Nearly 14 years on, and this composer has never been mentioned again here on UC.

In a review of the 1905 "Tonkünstlerfest" in the Austrian city of Graz, in which the first and last movements of Peters' Symphony in E minor (1900-1903) were played, the critic Julius Schuch was so impressed that he would have liked to hear the entire work. Interestingly, the long and detailed preface to the Third Symphony in F sharp minor mentions three symphonies altogether but not the one in E minor. Performance material for Peters is available from Universal Music Vienna but the composer appears to have been utterly forgotten – despite the fact that during his lifetime a Guido Peters Community apparently existed briefly in Vienna.   

[Alan Howe]

Thanks so much for reminding us about Peters. I thought it might be worth copying the material to which Wheesht has posted a link (above):

Guido Peters
(b. Graz, 29. November 1866 – d. Vienna, 11. January 1937)
Third Symphony in F-sharp minor
Preface
Although a bas-relief memorial tablet by the Styrian sculptor Wilhelm Gösser, commissioned for his 60th birthday, adorns his former Graz residence in Hartiggasse on the Karmeliterplatz, nobody these days has heard of Guido Peters (29.11.1866 - 11.1.1937), even in his home city. Once again we stand amazed before the extraordinary, highly original music of a composer who is unjustly quite forgotten, in this instance a significant Austrian symphonic composer at the turn of the century, before the treasures to be excavated here, and we wonder how such a sustained amnesia could have come about and, most of all, what our cultural establishment proposes to do about it.

Guido Peters was born in Graz in 1866, the son of the geologist Carl Ferdinand Peters who came from Liebhausen (today Libčeves) and his second wife Leopoldine von Blumfeld. A great-great-aunt of Guido's and her husband were friends of Beethoven (the latter sharing the guardianship of Beethoven's nephew Karl) and she was likewise acquainted with Schubert. They retired to Peggau, to the north of Graz. A great-grandmother had been a member of Goethe's social circle.
From 1875 - 1882 Guido attended the Society of Friends of Music Conservatory in Vienna, where he would later teach himself, from 1905 - 1908; from that point on he identifies himself in autobiographical sketches as an autodidact. There followed studies in philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, along with visits to the Bayreuth Festival in 1889 for Tristan, Parsifal and Meistersinger. Return visits to Graz and Vienna, then Berlin and finally Munich were the departure-points for his double career as pianist and composer. Peters performed as a soloist with conductors such as Siegmund von Hausegger, Franz Schalk, Oswald Kabasta, Erich Wolf Degner and - certainly the climax of his career - played Mozart's D-minor Concerto KV 466 with the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter; in the same concert Peters' own Ländliche Symphonie (the First) was on the programme and was later (1895) also performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.
As a pianist he was much admired for his interpretations of the classics, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, which were tasteful and unpretentious whilst, according to a variety of newspaper reviews, seeming to be "independent inspirations" (improvisations) 1. Wilhelm Kienzl judged his interpretation of the Hammerklaviersonate to be superior to [Eugen] d'Albert's. Reports emphasise "richness of colour" and "warmth", but he "never brings colour arbitrarily to bear for the sake of effect." Constantly recurring phrases: "full-bodied colouring...chaste contouring...direct, childlike freshness of perception", "simple, warm, intimate" 2
A departure from all purely external lustre, it is ethos, internalisation - in fact, in the light of the search for solitude in the countryside of his beloved home, almost escapism - that characterise both the artistic personality and the human being Peters, who was to be found every year in the mountains. Nature, as an almost religious dimension and source of inspiration, represents alongside music the other fundamental constant of his life. He himself in turn, in one of his autobiographical sketches: "His sensibility is deeply religious (in the broadest and most profound sense of the word) and it is expressed, among other things, in the Ländliche Symphonie..." In the Grazer Tagesblatt 3: "He kept faith with the Styrian mountains, most of his works had their origin here." However: "These days, innermost feelings are a little-valued currency in the stock market of musical art..." 4
As well as piano and chamber music, Lieder, choral works both accompanied and unaccompanied, and an opera (Beata), Guido Peters created three symphonies: the above-mentioned "Ländliche Symphonie" in E major (1889/90), the Second (Die Heroische) (1895/1900) which was conducted by Bruno Walter among others, and the one before us, the Third in F sharp minor (1914/18) for which he himself in an autobiographical sketch provided the epigrammatic phrase "(mit dem Adagio 'Weltfriede')"; this, like the Symphonische Vorspiel zu einer Tragikomödie, was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic under Felix Weingartner.
Further orchestral works are listed in Ursula Hubmann's catalogue: a C minor overture, a Kleine Scherzmusik (Vorspiel) zu einem Hans Sachs'schen Stück, a Burleske, a Romantische Tondichtung (in Form einer Ouvertüre) for the 10th anniversary of Schubert's death, overtures and incidental music for Grillparzer's drama Die Ahnfrau, a piano concerto, a romance for violin and orchestra, a waltz Lenzeszauber and a threnody Im Gedenken an das traurige Ende Ludwig II., König von Bayern, des Förderers Deutscher Kunst; apart from these, sketches for three further symphonies; the fourth would have been in A flat major.
Peters was buried with municipal honours in the Viennese Central Cemetery; the memorial tablet is also by Wilhelm Gösser.

The expression mark above the beginning of the first movement is "sombre, with trepidation". That is more than a suggestion of what to expect in this chilly, uncompromising work which rejects any and every superficial effect. The musical landscape is austere, craggy, at the same time often ephemeral, as though the existence of any material that could make sense were in doubt - a void, in which a coherence of meaning wrested from eternity means a victory. If ethical categories may be objectivisable from absolute music at all, then - we may believe - such deeply religious, yet at the same time unworldly and pessimistic music has never before been heard. It makes Anton Bruckner seem full of worldly joie de vivre; comparison with Allan Pettersson springs to mind. The bond with nature attested to in Peters' biography promises peace; here, the closeness to Gustav Mahler is again striking.
Among the means by which Peters achieves this effect is an astonishingly delicate harmonisation considering the orchestral resources he demands (three-way division of the violas at Fig 13 in the 2nd movement!). Again and again it is vaguely two-part, there is tonal uncertainty - the third note stabilising the harmony is added afterwards - or a strange, non-choric instrumentation in which sometimes a single instrument plays the third. The forms, too - sonata movement, scherzo with trio, ternary form, then sonata movement again - are very free, sketch-like, predominantly an association of forms dictated by the exigencies of the moment.
However, the work does not really have a tragic ending - in this light it is also neither pessimistic nor optimistic. It is more the case that, in a universe whose purpose is not to be a living-environment for human beings, for which the possibility of other inhabited planets is a matter of indifference, such purely human categories lose all meaning.
The first movement begins in Brucknerian fashion with the genesis of the theme from the wellspring, agonising, searching, in pain-racked suspended harmonies. Organ pedal point F sharp, at first in a hesitant, irregular pulse, as in Strauss' Tod und Verklärung, permeates the whole 1st thematic complex, changing to D sharp shortly before the end. Suspensions rich in dissonance are stacked up, building towers of thirds as in Bruckner's Ninth, until 13 - 17 (Dominant-Thirteenth-Seventeenth-Chord; here we have had to invent a word!). The second theme becomes warmer with pastoral horn-fifths and thirds (horns 5 bars after Fig 3, trumpets Fig 6, oboe, clarinette, Fig 7), a foreshadowing of the functionally harmonious bliss in the adagio 'Weltfriede'.
A recitative-like reminder of the first theme introduces the development, the two themes confronting each other in strictly contrapuntal fashion (5 after Fig 5). At the climax there explodes over us - there's no other way of expressing it - the recapitulation, the Parsifal-esque chromaticism of pain further honed to extreme dissonances of seconds as in 1 before Fig 9 (11 vs. 17) A declamation of the theme on violoncello/contrabass - "O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne!" marks the beginning of the coda which takes up the hesitant drumbeat-pulse of the beginning and brings the movement to a rapid close.
The wild, grotesque scherzo, through which roams the pain-racked thematic suspension of the 1st movement, remains, with its short, cryptic trio, relatively monochrome. 5 Passages to be shaped "freely" (7 after Fig 18) are a friendly homage to Mahler! A hinted-at second trio-return leads into the central adagio "Weltfriede".
This movement will - like its title? - polarise. Something that sounds like kitschily romantic yearning to the ear weaned off astonishment is transformed by Peters' art of seamless differentiation in gradations of harmonic definition into awestruck astonishment, into emotion at the beauty that it seems to render vulnerable, but at the same time also comprehensible in truthfulness, in the absence of irony of the unbroken tonality. There emerges the impression of unbelievably delicate, gentle harmonisation. Again and again single crotchets are two-part, the ever-recurring cadencing in G flat major consistently lacking the seventh (regardless of the seventh-transition of the melodic lead); the anchoring in the certainty of functionally harmonic clarity is certainly gentle and always only just as firm as necessary. Must we endure beauty, endure happiness too?
In a "gracefully moving" middle section, introduced by wind triplets ("Dem Vogel, der heut' sang"), the peacefulness of the pastoral fifths returns (oboes 5 before Fig 23, clarinos 1 before Fig 23). And then - "very quietly, mysteriously" - actually naturalistic sounds of nature, birdsong in the solo violins, the nightingale from Beethoven's Pastorale on the flute.
The fourth movement opens with motifs of seemingly improvised dashed-off scales and to a certain extent with the second tempo before the first (see the original form of the theme, Fig 33 onwards). Following a Brucknerian second theme in ¾ time (3 after Fig 35) comes the short, very loosely associative development in which both themes are once more heard simultaneously (Fig 37: 2nd theme in 4th horn, then in 3rd trumpet, finally in the augmentatio bass trombone 2 before Fig 38). Here, with the scales of the 1st theme in the style of an organ prelude, comes the transition to the reprise whose precise entry remains veiled.
"Insistently" - after another "mysterious" point at which Peters' painterly acoustic effect ("hinter dem Podium") is taken under consideration - the main theme of the first movement impinges on the memory, and then resounds in a long passage based on the diminished seventh chord which is likewise combined with the first theme of the fourth movement (from 7 before Fig 46). Incidentally what is remarkable here, as in several parts of the symphony, is the sophisticated double kettledrum-beat, reminiscent of the Scène aux Champs from Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique. A few final convulsions - but with the return of the head-motif of the first movement, ever circling round itself, the work darkens pessimistically (at the top of the last page of the score in F sharp minor only the last trombone chord four bars before the end brings the redeeming G flat major) - in fact nihilistically? - together with the irregular kettledrum-beat in the same infinity from which it came.
English translation by Brigid Purcell

Source: Ursula Hubmann - ,,Guido Peters, steirischer Klaviervirtuose und Komponist, im Spiegel seiner Zeit", Graz, 1999

1 Grazer Tagespost (Abendblatt) 29. 11. 1926
2 Dr. Friedrich von Hausegger, after: ,,Guido Peters / Pianist und Tondichter / München", the first of Peter' two autobiographical sketches, about 1904.
3 21. February 1926 on occasion of the appeal for donations for Wilhelm Gössers' memorial plaque (1881 – 1966).
4 Grazer Tagblatt, 29. 11. 1926
5 A contribution to an errata: 3 before figure 9 Bass-Klar. bhould be ,,in A", not ,,in B".
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/1918.html

[eschiss1]

Peters' "symphony in E minor" is his 2nd symphony of 1900-3 which IS mentioned in the preface, but with the wrong dates. Info from ÖBL and ÖNB.

[Wheesht]

Thank you very much for clearing that up.

[Alan Howe]

Definitely a composer who needs investigating. Wow! At least we have the score of the 3rd Symphony.

[eschiss1]

There are several other published works (IMSLP has some chamber music of his, for example). ÖNB catalog subdivides their "Peters, Guido" entries into 20 published (Musikdruck) and 89 manuscript entries, not all of which are complete (though some of the incomplete mss are sketches of works that exist in complete form, unsurprisingly, and that "89" includes one entry for the C minor quartet's score and another for its parts, e.g.- it's not 89 wholly separate pieces of music, I'm saying. But the sketches for the aforementioned symphony no.4 in A-flat of 1908? right here (not yet digitized if ever, but there's a description and card catalog entry.) Description of the 1890 symphony in C here, another here, and its parts here. The symphony in E minor, which does have the date 1900 here (perhaps it was revised, maybe I've just been wrong) here and its parts here. The autograph score of no.3 is also listed in the catalog. Guessing I am probably wrong about the date of no.2, though, again, it might still be the same work (or an early version of it) as the work performed in the concert - further information to confirm or disconfirm  OBL's worklist - itself partially based on the NZM obituary and other sources, apparently- might help.

Of 2 cello sonatas one in F minor was published, without opus number; one in C major -was- given Op.7 but remains in ms (I think).

(ONB also has the mss of a piano concerto and the opera "Beata", etc.)

[eschiss1]

Detail: the original score and parts of sym. 3 are also at Fleisher.

[Alan Howe]

Eric: would you mind providing us with an updated listing of Peters' symphonies, please? Thanks!

[Wheesht]

A search for Peters in the digitised historical newspaper portal of the Austrian National Library has brought up this long article from 1894 (in German), from the Österreichische Musik- und Theaterzeitung. There is even a portrait of the composer.

[Alan Howe]

Thanks - a good find. I wonder whether there are any articles covering his later life and compositions?