Franz Lachner: Symphony No. 4

[FBerwald]

I rate Lachner quite high!

[Alan Howe]

Well, I'm with Dave Hurwitz (for once). Know which review I mean?

[semloh]

Well, I'm with Dave Hurwitz (for once). Know which review I mean?

No

[Alan Howe]

https://www.classicstoday.com/review/lachners-third-symphony-its-about-timing/?search=1

[Alan Howe]

I decided this afternoon that I needed to give Lachner 4 a proper listen and so downloaded it from Presto's website. What is immediately obvious is the polish of the orchestral playing which is a testament to the care expended on this recording by conductor Gernot Schmalfuss. Tempi are also lively throughout, textures nicely clear and well-balanced, and overall discipline pretty well exemplary. So, all in all this is as perfect a presentation of the music as we have any right to expect, beautifully recorded. The problem, though, isn't the performance, because Hurwitz is right: Lachner had no sense of timing whatsoever. It's the music which, judged by the highest standards of its day, simply goes on too long.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of enjoyment to be had from this Symphony. Memorable passages abound and there is attractive orchestration and an overall 'busyness' which does its best to keep the musical argument tripping along. And I think one knows what sort of symphony Lachner is aiming at writing here: not for him the lithe athleticism of Mendelssohn or the occasional neuroticism of Schumann - no, he's seeking to extend the grander vision of, say, Schubert 9 into a new era beyond that great master's death in 1828 (Lachner's 4th dates from 1834). Does he succeed? I'll leave that up to members to decide; I personally think that Rufinatscha is a better candidate for that honour, but he wasn't as prolific as Lachner. And, as I said, there's much to enjoy here.

By my reckoning we now have commercial recordings of Symphonies 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8. Who'd've thought it?

[terry martyn]

I will need to listen to the CD before making up my mind about the tempi, but Alan makes a perfectly reasonable point about Lachner's intent. In my opinion, he succeeded -in his Eighth (just listen to the flutes in the finale - heavenly music) ,and I suspect he also thought that he did,because thenceforward he  eschewed the art of the symphony and concentrated on his famous Suites for the rest of his life.

[Alan Howe]

Friends may find this assessment of Lachner's style helpful - I certainly did!

To understand the unfamiliar music of a forgotten composer, we would be well-advised not to take the most obvious step and play him off against such well-known luminaries as Beethoven and Schumann. Any such approach is doomed to failure, just as it is meaningless and unfruitful to grasp Bruckner's symphonies with the aid of Hanslick and Brahms. Like any musical culture, the music of the Biedermeier period – indeed the early and high romantic music in the entire region of southern Germany and Austria – must be viewed in its historical context. There we discover a more or less vague North-South rift, aggravated by increasing tensions within the German Federation, which, as we all know, culminated in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Many critics were at pains to turn this rift into a cliché and to propound an adherence to the Schubert style, and to naturalness in music, as being typically "southern German" qualities.

Lachner was unquestionably the most prominent and successful representative of this "southern German style." His symphonies are characterized by compressed thematic-motivic workmanship combined with an increased emphasis on counterpoint. The cultivation of counterpoint to a degree "verging on an end in itself" remained intact in Austrian art music throughout the whole of the nineteenth century. This "elegant type of counterpoint [was] rooted in sound" and frequently stood in "only seeming opposition" to the often deliberate simplicity of the chosen devices. In a certain sense it can be said that a synthesis of Baroque and Classical thought emerged on a new ground of Romantic lyricism. The frequently heard accusation of monotony in Lachner's thematic-motivic development is not to be found in a supposedly prima facie nonexistent opposition of musical themes so much as in the fact that his themes, though often enough motivically related, are presented as musical material of maximum contrast and combined and brought closer together with the aid of thematic-motivic variation, combination, and contrapuntal superposition, during which head motifs often assume a commanding position. A sense of monotony can soon arise, especially when this combinatorial game is maintained at great length, making it difficult or impossible to trace a line of evolution in the development. Yet it is precisely the abandonment of classical linear development in favor of a trend toward the "pendular prolongation of a single motif" that leads to an "unbridled flow of thematic material" – an important element in the Schubert style that Lachner adopted for his own large-scale compositions. That said, the listener's interest in this reiteration and prolongation of motifs does not reside in a zealous search for their mere recurrence, but rather in retracing the manner in which they are manipulated, the way the components of the material are combined, in conjunction with the contrasting emotions conveyed by these devices. It was precisely here that a change of paradigms took place during the first half of the century, a change that led above all to the distinction between a "southern German style" that adhered to this taste, and a "northern German style" that added new impulses of its own. This fact is crucial for the study and assessment of Lachner's music.

This manner of dealing with musical material, a characteristic of the "southern German style" as a whole, accords essential importance to form. Not only are form and content – technique and expression – of equivalent importance, they are meant to unite in a Romantic afflatus. Lachner is frequently accused of having been so intent on satisfying the idealized, overblown aesthetic demands placed on the symphony from the late 1820s on that it kept him from surmounting and transcending his merely technical talent with the convincing creative urgency of true genius. Regarding this criticism there is, however, no overlooking the fact that it was precisely not his concern to unleash his creative genius to the extent that it ineluctably led him to burst the bounds of formal design. His rejection of musical subjectivity, rather than being grounded in a lack of talent, was deeply rooted in a Classical tradition of thought. Southern German composers were far less subjective than Beethoven; on the contrary, they remained beholden to an ideal of objectivity rooted in the Classical period and probed various strategies for its solution, up to and including Bruckner's symphonic mysticism.

To quote one reviewer: "The motifs from which [Lachner] created his symphony are original, characteristic, fresh, and noble. [...] True to his themes, he spurns any ingredient alien to them; nor does he need such ingredients. [...] And how manifold and rich, how unaffected and lucid are his contrapuntal combinations! How many gradations of passion and feeling he depicts with a single melody! How distinct and well-formed are his periods! And how elevated everything is by his splendid instrumentation! Only in this way is it possible for unity and clarity to reign supreme throughout an entire work, when the themes chosen for each individual piece are maintained and developed consistently and exhaustively, and when the same aesthetic idea informs every section of the tone-poem." Remarkably, the focus of attention falls precisely on Lachner's insistent hold on his existing material, which is developed in changing affects and various combinations. Here clarity in the presentation of relationships is clearly preferred to an emphasis on complexity of devices. The listener takes delight in the variegated richness in his presentation of a fixed set of ideas, whose flexible manipulation is accorded greater value than their emotive content. Accordingly, in this view of music, the notion of formal unity is marked by extreme rigor.

Among the formative influences on Lachner – besides Schubert, with whom he formed a deep friendship – were Beethoven and Spohr. In contrast, traces of Mendelssohn or even Schumann can be dismissed, if only because Lachner came into contact with the Leipzig school too late for it to have a large impact on his musical thought. Asked whether he was a "Mendelssohnian" or a "Schumannian," he is said to have replied, with an amusing but untranslatable pun, "Let's just say I'm myself."
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/wp-content/uploads/vorworte_prefaces/1145.html   (scroll down)

[eschiss1]

Written by Dominik Šedivý, translated by Bradford Robinson.

[Alan Howe]

Thanks, Eric.

[Alan Howe]

CD now available from jpc:
https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/franz-lachner-symphonie-nr-4/hnum/8977558

[gprengel]

GREAT - finally it has been performed and recorded by Gernot Schmalfuss... !! Fantastic, especially the 1st movement, but also the other are just wonderful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFrPZxRUlxM

[Gareth Vaughan]

Now how about No.2?

[eschiss1]

I'd be surprised if nos. 2 & 7 weren't at least one of them already in the can, as quite a few of these discs were for several years...

[Alan Howe]

Several listens later...

...I am slowly changing my mind about Lachner's 4th. For one thing, I find the themes here more convincing than in his other symphonies, and for another, Schmalfuss seems to be really hitting his stride in this particular recording. He encompasses both the music's breadth (all 52 minutes of it - this is Schubert 9 territory) and also its boundless energy. And he has his Taiwanese orchestra playing on top form.
We should also remember that Lachner 4 was composed in 1834; this is less than a decade after Bethoven's death and Schubert's 9th had yet to be published (in 1849).

[eschiss1]

Doesn't mean Lachner didn't know Schubert 9* back to front and top to bottom, assuming he and Schubert were still friends at the time it was composed. Are there, I wonder, letters in which Schubert discusses loaning out a copy of the work to friends, or something... or other letters in which a friend mentions playing a new symphony by and with his friend Franz (well, probably François) in manuscript in piano duet, from around that time (1824, I think?)... Probably not known ones, I guess.

*I prefer calling it 8 or even 7, considering that counting the E major and B minor is a bit arbitrary considering all the other torsos, but "rationality" in that sense doesn't figure in, it gets named by historical tradition and major complete edition &c...