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Published: Wednesday, 11 December 2024 at 09:30 AM
Franz Schmidt: the brilliant composer cancelled for pleasing the Nazis
Read on to discover all about Franz Schmidt, a talented composer marred by his association with the Nazis…
Who was Franz Schmidt?
Although highly regarded in his native Austria as one of the last great composers of the late-Romantic era, Franz Schmidt’s substantial achievements have been recognised only fitfully elsewhere. There are various explanations for this neglect. His reluctance to self-promote his music as aggressively as some of his contemporaries doubtless counted against him, as perhaps did his failure to secure the imprimatur of influential performers who could have helped to make his works better-known abroad. But more uncomfortably, his long-term reputation has inevitably been tarnished by an ill-fated willingness, towards the end of his life, to allow his music to be appropriated by the Nazis.
Franz Schmidt: the Nazi connection
An unfortunate commission…
In his final year, Schmidt regrettably accepted an official commission for a choral work entitled Deutsche Auferstehung (German Resurrection) featuring a text celebrating the 1938 Anschluss (the Nazi incorporation of Austria into Greater Germany) – the work is rounded off with a shouted ‘Sieg Heil!’.
Early support for the Nazis, but later repudiation of the regime
Though, like many Austrians, Schmidt had sincerely supported this political objective ever since the end of World War I, he entirely repudiated Nazi anti-Semitism and continued to maintain close friendships with Jews.
What’s more, in 1943 his first wife, Karoline Perssin, would be euthanised by the Nazi regime on account of her mental illness. Nonetheless, although Deutsche Auferstehung remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1939 and received only one performance after the score had been completed by one of his pupils, its mere existence did irreparable harm to Schmidt’s reputation following the end of the Second World War.
Franz Schmidt: dismissed for being old-fashioned
But arguably the most important factor that prevented Schmidt from establishing a more secure place on the musical map relates to the turbulent environment he faced during his lifetime. In the Vienna of the early-20th century, Schmidt’s music was competing for attention with the works of a host of hugely important Austro-German composers that included Richard Strauss, Mahler, Reger, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg and the precociously gifted Korngold.
Then, following the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, he faced a rather different landscape, dominated on the one hand by radical composers from independent Eastern European countries (Bartók, Szymanowski, Enescu, Janáček and Martinů), and on the other by neo-classical and modernist Austro-German figures, including members of the Second Viennese School, Hindemith and Kurt Weill. Although by no means unresponsive to the changes in style pioneered by some of these, his dogged adherence to long-standing musical principles branded him, perhaps unfairly, as being irredeemably old-fashioned.
When was Franz Schmidt born?
Born in December 1874 into a family of mixed German and Hungarian origin in the formerly Hungarian city of Pozsony (or Pressburg – today the Slovakian capital, Bratislava), Schmidt demonstrated remarkable musical gifts from a very early age. At 14, he left his birthplace, moving permanently to Vienna and living with relatives after his father was imprisoned for defrauding the Post Office.
A musical prodigy and astonishingly versatile instrumentalist
He enrolled at the Vienna Conservatoire, where he excelled as a solo pianist, later securing the admiration of the great Leopold Godowsky, who regarded him as the only contemporary performer he would acknowledge as a serious rival. Schmidt was also a fine organist, an instrument for which he composed several substantial works. Even more remarkably, after mastering the violin, he turned his attention to playing the cello and gained a sufficiently fine technique to join the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, where he played for many years under Gustav Mahler. Such an experience was to prove invaluable in enabling him to write so effectively for a large symphony orchestra.
Composing ambitions and early setbacks
Despite his astonishing versatility as an instrumentalist, his ultimate ambition was to become a composer. A student of Robert Fuchs at the Conservatoire, more significantly he briefly attended a counterpoint class given by a rather frail Bruckner, and a burgeoning contrapuntal mastery worthy of his great predecessor is in evidence in the finale to his First Symphony, composed in his mid-twenties. This youthful, high-spirited work was awarded the coveted Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Beethoven Prize in 1900 and performed with some success by the Vienna Philharmonic two years later.
In stark contrast, his attempt to secure a reputation as an opera composer failed to take off. Mahler turned down the opportunity to put on his first opera, Notre Dame, though it eventually reached the stage of the Vienna State Opera in 1914. Schmidt’s disappointment at Mahler’s rejection was slightly mitigated by the huge popularity of the opera’s Carnival Music and Intermezzo, which quickly established itself as an orchestral piece in its own right. In particular, the gorgeously rich string sonorities of the Intermezzo, with its slightly exotic Hungarian flavour, became a trademark stylistic feature that was to recur in many of his later works.
Franz Schmidt: a troubled and tragic personal life
Repeated bouts of ill-health, coupled with growing dissatisfaction at the standard of conductors that had followed Mahler after his departure to New York in 1907, caused Schmidt to resign from the Vienna Philharmonic three years later. His personal life was also troubled – marriage to Karoline foundered after she suffered her severe mental decline and, later, his only daughter Emma would die tragically during childbirth.
But Schmidt never let his problematic domestic situation impinge on his composing, which became his main focus alongside working as a teacher of piano, cello and composition. His outstanding pedagogical skills were widely recognised to the extent that he eventually occupied the position of rector at Vienna’s Music Academy.
Franz Schmidt: the composer
The exuberant Second Symphony
Ironically, liberation from the routine of regular orchestral work did not immediately pay dividends in terms of an increased output. Between 1910 and the early 1920s, his main achievements were limited to a Second Symphony and a second opera, Fredigundis. Despite containing some fine music, the opera, first staged in Berlin in 1922, suffered from an implausible libretto and survived for only a limited number of performances. On the other hand, the wonderfully exuberant Second Symphony, conceived for a huge orchestra and premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1913, was received far more positively.
Schoenberg’s influence and the Third Symphony
Despite securing a reputation as a musical conservative, Schmidt established extremely cordial relationships with his exact contemporary Schoenberg, and in 1912 took part in a notable performance of the latter’s Verklärte Nacht with the famous Rosé Quartet. More remarkably, he honoured his colleague’s 50th birthday by directing students at the Vienna Music Academy in a much-praised performance of Pierrot Lunaire. Alas, his desire to secure Schoenberg a permanent teaching position in composition at the Academy in the mid-1920s was turned down by the authorities.
It may be going too far to suggest that Schoenberg’s music had a direct influence on Schmidt. Nevertheless, some passages in the works he composed during the 1920s manifest an increasingly daring approach to harmony, none more so than the atmospheric and darkly tinged slow movement of his otherwise pastoral Third Symphony, composed and first performed in 1928 for a competition organised by the Gramophone Company, honouring the centenary of Schubert’s death.
The powerful and grief-filled Fourth Symphony
Undoubtedly, Schmidt’s most powerful contributions to the repertoire are the Fourth Symphony and the oratorio The Book with Seven Seals, both composed in the 1930s. Generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece, the Fourth reflects a deepening sense of personal crisis that seems far removed from the sunny demeanour of his earlier symphonies. Already suffering from increasingly poor health, in 1932 Schmidt was devastated by Emma’s death. He channelled his grief into a work that is both intensely emotional in character and highly original in its single-movement symphonic design.
The Book with Seven Seals
Setting a sequence of texts from the Book of Revelation, The Book with Seven Seals was composed from 1935-37 and first performed in Vienna the following year, only three months after the Nazis occupied Austria. It is the most expansive and confessional of his works, but also contains some uncomfortable historical baggage, as its dramatic trajectory proceeds through a sequence of apocalyptic visions of the abyss yet culminates in a powerfully affecting Hallelujah chorus promising a new world order of heavenly and eternal radiance. But whichever way one wants to interpret the subtext, there is little doubt of its musical mastery, which combines the harmonic sophistication of the Austro-German late-Romantic style with passages of contrapuntal virtuosity that allude to Bach’s Passions.
Franz Schmidt: composing style
Orchestration
Although Schmidt was strongly influenced by the orchestral virtuosity and versatility of late-Romantic composers such as Richard Strauss and Mahler, his approach to the orchestra has a very distinctive, almost organ-like sonority, particularly at the big climaxes – for example, in the Finale of his Second Symphony.
Variations
Like Max Reger, Schmidt was particularly adept at writing imaginative sets of variations. Perhaps the best example of his ingenuity in this respect occurs in the Allegretto middle movement of the Second Symphony, where he interlinks a set of slow variations with an extended scherzo, all the material being derived from an extremely simple opening melody.
Counterpoint
As with his great predecessor Bruckner, Schmidt builds up fantastic musical edifices through a great mastery of counterpoint which, despite occasionally featuring clashing individual lines, maintains the same degree of logic that you’d find in, say, Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger.
Hungarian flavour
There’s a lush and somewhat exotic flavour to some of Schmidt’s extended and heartfelt string melodies, which relates back to the composer’s Hungarian origins and is heard to mesmeric effect in the Intermezzo from the opera Notre Dame and the poignant second idea in the Fourth Symphony.
Franz Schmidt: in the wrong place at the wrong time
It is easy to accuse Schmidt of political naivety and opportunism in accepting the commission for Deutsche Auferstehung that followed hot on the heels of the success of The Book with Seven Seals, but his actions were no less reprehensible than those of Strauss, who dedicated songs to Goebbels.
And even in 2024, Schmidt’s misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time continues, with the 150th anniversary of his birth (on 22 December) being pushed into the sidelines by the more widely feted anniversaries of Bruckner, Schoenberg, Holst, Smetana and Fauré, among others. It’s time, perhaps, to create some room to celebrate the works he wrote prior to that last year of his life and reappraise a composer whose finest music deserves to reach a much wider audience.