Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker, dated February 1–6, 1924 [written in upper left corner: Erschrecken Sie nicht vor dem langen Brief, nichts darin hat Eile!] 1.–6. II. 24 Lieber und verehrter Herr Professor! Mit grossem Dank würde ich Ihre Beethoven-Ausgabe annehmen. Ich besitze davon die zuerst herausgegebenen Sonaten op. 109, 110, 111; sonst keine. Die 2. Aufl.des Kulturbuchs u. des Bruckner-buchs sende ich Ihnen als Drucksache. Sie schreiben mir doch noch, was Sie von meiner Kammermusik schon haben, u. ob Ihnen an den Stimmen zu dem A-dur-Quartett gelegen ist. Die Hefte Tonwille wurden mir bisher immer vom Verlag zugesandt. Das Improvisieren als Grund u. Trieb des Schaffens ist mir schon lang wichtig gewesen u. Ihre verschiedenen Ausführungen u. Bermerkungen nach dieser Richtung haben diese Einsicht bestärkt u. erhellt; auch das Bewußtsein, daß es mir hierin fehlt u. daß man das auch meiner Musik anspüren müßte, hat mir nicht gemangelt. Ich habe auch mit der Zeit da einiges gelernt u. manchmal auch so improvisieren können, daß ich selbst dachte, daß man es anhören kann. Andere dachten schon besser darüber u. meinten, es sei irgend ein fertig komponiertes Stück "von wem"! Aber ich weiß selbst besser Bescheid darum. Neulich habe ich (das zweitemal in meinem Leben) eine Fuge so improvisiert, {4} Daß Sie Brahms so hoch stellen, hatte mir zuerst einen ziemlich empfindlichen Stoß gegeben, u. auch heute noch denke ich: sollten Sie vielleicht in diesem Punkt Herzlich grüße ich Sie, Ihr Ja, ich hätte viel auf dem Herzen gegen Sie u. es könnte mich wirklich noch einer Fehde gelüsten, in der einmal zwei Gegner miteinander das Rechte suchen wollen, nicht aber Recht behalten wollen. Sie besprechen einmal den Anfangsakkord des Scherzos der 9. Bruckner-Sÿmphonie. Warum blicken Sie da nicht auch ins Weitere? Im 35. Takt erscheint er wieder in seiner 2. Umkehrung— {9} (wie fein ist die 1. Umk. umgangen, unkenntlich gemacht!)—alles dazwischenliegende ist Durchgang,[written in top margin: u. alles zusammengehalten durch den fest bleibenden Leitton cis]—ähnlicher (für mich aber schönerer) Fall wie im Anfang der C-mollsonata, op. 111. Und wieviel Feinheiten in der harmon. Rhythmik, dann noch die Komplikation der 2. Umkehrung mit scheinbarer [corr.] [music example] Erinnerung an die noch stark im Gedächtnis stehende Rückung gegen den Schluß des ersten Satzes Es-moll D-moll Akkord, u. den immer wieder sich aufzwingenden Esdur Akkord unmittelbar vor dem letzten Dmoll des ersten Satzes. Noch eine Frage: Mein Buch “Von Gränzen u. Ländern der Musik” (es sind gesammelte Aufsätze, unter diesem, wie mir zuverlässige Leute sagen, sehr unglücklichen Titel—ich wollte damit nur ausdrücken, daß ich mich auch auf die Peripherie u. zum Teil auch außer sie begeben habe).4 Kennen Sie anscheinend nicht. Ich habe Sie einmal auf eine Abhandlung {10} Brahms: Sie werden mich noch nicht ohne weiteres für blind u. taub halten.5 Wie gern bewundere ich die erste tonartlich Exposition im Cmoll Quartett. Aber die Geste des Themas! Nein, u. zehnmal nein. Und kein Bißchen Ja dabei. Die Geste*, die Geste; die mangelnde Körperlichkeit! Sie* ist mir bei Beethoven auch häufig feindlich—aber doch auch da überzeugend, naturhaft, "wie seiend"!6 Dann noch eine Bitte: lesen Sie in dem Brucknerbuch (auch wenn Sie die 1. Auflage schon kennen) zuerst die Analyse S. 147 usw., die ich erheblich verbessert habe. Dann den ebenfalls verbesserten Abschnitt S. 173 usw., dann das Nachwort (S. 242)5. Der Brief hat nun schon seinen ungeordneten Tagebuchcharakter; ich will also noch einen Punkt betrachten. Sehen Sie, fast alle unsere grossen Meister konnten nicht geigen, u. ich spüre das. Mozart konnte auch geigen, wahrscheinlich konnte er viel, Haydn vermutlich desgleichen—aber "im Nebenamt" beide. Beethoven konnte kaum geigen (ich weiß schon, ich weiß schon). Händel konnte, ja, aber Bach allein konnte wirklich {11} geigen, von ganzem Herzen u. Geblüt. Ich bin überzeugt, daß er selbst seine Solosonaten mit Genuß u. mit Überlegenheit sich selbst gespielt hat. Sollte ich mich da täuschen, so ists nicht von größter Wichtigkeit: jedenfalls sind diese Sonaten so aus dem Griff der Geige geboren, wie sonst nichts in der ganzen Literatur. Bach allein fühlte (außer dem was die andern auch fühlten) die jugendliche Schnellkraft, die Quellkraft des Geigentons (am nächsten, aber noch in sehr sehr großem Abstand von ihm fernbleibend kommt ihm da, wie mir scheint, Haÿdn. [Beiläufig gesagt, es ist mir ein grosser Trost, daß Sie oft u. mit so viel Liebe von Haydn sprechen, ich wünschte manchmal über ihn zu schreiben, das gehört zu den Dingen die ich mir versage.] Wenn Sie vom Improvisieren sprechen, denken Sie vermutlich ans Klavier oder etwa die Orgel. Wenn ich auf dem Klavier improvisierte, so war ich, wie gesagt, meistens unzufrieden mit mir; aber geradezu kläglich kam ich mir vor, wenn ichs auf der Geige versuchte (auch damit ists besser geworden, aber das Verhältnis des einen zum anderen gab mir sehr zu denken). Haben Sie schon bemerkt, daß die Geiger, wenn sie ein Instrument {12} probieren, fast ausnahmslos (mir ist meines Erinnerns noch keine Ausnahme begegnet) in Moll "fantasieren"? Daß es meistens Dmoll ist, hat technischen Grund, weil sie den Quartschritt a-d so schön auf der G-Seite schleifen können (oder noch schöner a-cis mit dem 1. Finger); aber daß es Moll ist: ja, weil ihnen keine Melodik zu gebot steht, deshalb wird Pathos u. Tragik vor die Leere vorgeschüft. © In the public domain; published with the permission of the heirs of August Halm, March 2006. |
Handwritten letter from Halm to Schenker, dated February 1–6, 1924 [written in the upper left corner: Don’t be startled at the long letter, nothing in it is urgent!] February 1-6, 1924 Dear Professor, I would accept your Beethoven edition with much gratitude. Of them I own the ones that appeared first, sonatas Op. 109, 110, 111, and otherwise none. I will send you the second edition of the Culture book and the Bruckner book as printed material. You are going to write me yet about what you already have of my chamber music, and whether you are interested in having the parts of the A-major string quartet. Up to now, the Tonwille volumes have always been sent to me by the publisher. Improvisation as the foundation and motivation for creativity has long been important to me, and your various discussions and commentaries in that direction have reinforced and illuminated that insight. The awareness, too, that I am deficient in that regard, and that one must also detect it in my music, has not been lacking in me. Over time, I have learned various things and sometimes I can improvise such that I myself thought that one can enjoy it. Others thought better of it and said it was some ready-composed piece “by someone.” But I know better. Recently, I improvised a fugue (for the second time in my life) so that I was tolerably satisfied. What I at first lacked, and had to laboriously acquire is good figuration, and it should be no surprise to me if that were still not {2} up to snuff. But, dear Professor, from the start I had difficulties with my role models. In part, I did not understand them and therefore underestimated their artistry in figuration. [written vertically in the left margin: In part, even now it is for me not yet convincing,] [and] in part I was missing that which makes the art of figuration difficult, and sought it on my own. Even today I have not come to terms with the classicists. I can say that I have come to admire them ever more (also very much through you!), and that they have still probably not become any closer to me (or I to them) because of it. I have virtually hated Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—no, but, perceived as an adversary it is to me today entirely alien. And when what you say about is correct ten times over. For my part, I am prepared (and always was) to find some genius in it. You see, I simply have need for a certain lifestyle, or race in music, corporeality,1 which for my sensibility is expressed above all in dynamic rhythm. All arts, even the whole art of voice leading, do not replace for me what I miss here—do not befriend me when something repels me. I seek to apply this corporeality in my music, and in my judgment have come so close to it that one can see and feel it. {3} That is above all important to me. I try to avoid shortcomings in individual designs, or to remedy them. Some things may inhere in the type itself, thus unavoidable. That is not always easy to distinguish. I believe I am capable of highest candor with regard to my works, and similarly capable of valuing candor from others, even if it is against my music. I assess my musical talent carefully. The simplest things have sometimes been so difficult for me to grasp that I see myself as barely above average (at times it was better). However, regarding my artistic, productive nature—I just believe in it, and without wavering for some time now. Or rather I believe in the image of music for which I strive. I do not believe in that of Brahms, to name one example, whether he executed it perfectly or imperfectly (I have not yet pursued that question. The opening the like of his F-major symphony, F-minor piano sonata, suffices to alienate me completely. His Requiem is for in great part almost tormenting, in part unbearable.) {4} That you rank Brahms so high at first gave me a rather painful jolt, and still today I think: could it be that, in this point, you are looking only at the natura naturata, but not at the natura naturans?2 Granted that I see the former here as inadequate, compared to you even as entirely inadequate. But why do I know Brahms so inadequately? Because he does not induce me to pursue him. Beethoven, recently become entirely foreign to me, never lets me loose, belongs to my conscience, is for me as a standard even more important than Mozart, was often for me an exhorting (so to speak my evil) conscience. Thus it With cordial greetings, Indeed, I have a lot on my mind against you, and I could really be in the mood for a feud in which two opponents want to seek what is right, though without wanting to be proved right. You discuss the opening chord of the Scherzo of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Why don’t you also look into the ramifications? In measure 35 it reappears in second inversion {9} (how wonderfully the first inversion is circumvented, made unrecognizable!)—everything in between is passing, [written in top margin: and everything held together through the firmly fixed leading tone, C#]—a similar case (for me, however, nicer) than the beginning of the C-minor sonata, Op. 111 [of Beethoven]. And how many refinements in the harmonic rhythm, then too the complication of the second inversion with apparent reminder [music example] of the jolt near the end of the first movement, Eb-minor–D-minor chord, still prominent in memory, and the Eb-major chord imposing itself repeatedly right before the final D minor of the first movement. Another question: You apparently do not know my book Of Boundaries and Countries of Music (collected essays by that unfortunate title, as reliable people tell me—with it I just wanted to express that I, too, have placed myself on the periphery and, in part, outside of it).4 I once pointed out to you a discussion {10} Brahms: You don’t simply take me to be blind and deaf.5 How gladly I admire the first tonal exposition in the C-minor Quartet [Op. 51/1/i]. But the gesture of the theme! No, and ten times no. And not a bit of Yes mixed in. The gesture*, the gesture, the lacking corporeality. With Beethoven, it* [the gesture] is for me also frequently inimical—but certainly even there, it is convincing, natural, “how existing!”6 Then another request: read in the Bruckner book [second edition] (even if you are already familiar with the first edition) first the analysis on p. 147 etc., which I have significantly improved. Then, the likewise improved section, p. 173 etc., then the Afterword (p. 242)7. The letter has taken on the disordered character of a diary. I want to consider one more point. You see, almost all of our great masters could not play the violin, and I detect that. Mozart could also play the violin. He was probably capable of a lot, Haydn presumably the same—but both “part time.” Beethoven could barely play the violin (I know, I know). Handel could play, yes, but Bach alone could really {11} play, with whole heart and family lineage. I am convinced that he played his solo sonatas with pleasure and with superiority. Should I be deceiving myself in that matter, it isn’t of greatest importance. In any case, those sonatas arise idiomatically for the violin like nothing else in the entire literature. Bach alone felt (besides what others also felt) the youthful vitality, the surging force of the violin tone (next to him, it seems to me, comes Haydn, but at a very, very large gap removed from him. [Parenthetically, it is a great comfort to me that you speak often and with so much fondness of Haydn. I sometimes wished to write about him. That is among the things I have failed to do.] When you speak of improvisation, you probably think of the piano or perhaps the organ. When I improvised on the piano, as I said, I was usually dissatisfied with myself. But it seemed to me really lame when I tried it on the violin (it has gotten better with violin but the relationship of the one to the other gave me a lot to think about). Have you noticed that violinists, when they {12} try out an instrument, almost without exception “fantasize” in a minor key (to my recollection I have not yet encountered an exception)? That it is usually D minor has a technical reason, because they can slide so beautifully over the fourth A-D on the G-string (or even more beautifully A–C# with the first finger). But the fact that it is minor: yes, because no melodic material prescribed for them, therefore pathos and tragedy are churned out into the emptiness. The violin is the sternest touchstone for melodic gold. Viewed differently: do you seriously believe that Beethoven, indeed even Mozart, could have written an entire sonata for solo violin? I don’t. I even believe definitely that they could not have done it—unless after a prior act of penance, indeed only after pronounced repentance [μετάνοια, change of mind/heart]. So that there is no error: my sonatas for solo violin are small-scale, modest music, intend in no way to compete. Those of Reger are, as far as I know them, a misunderstanding. © Translation Lee Rothfarb, 2006. |
COMMENTARY: FOOTNOTES: 1 Regarding "Körperlichkeit," see Die Symphonie Anton Bruckners, 14, 166; Einführung in die Musik, 39-40; “Musikalische Erziehung III," Von Form und Sinn der Musik, 210. In “Musikalische Erziehung III,” Halm says that in Wickersdorf it is not necessary actually to hear the music the school valued most—Bach and Bruckner. Rather, it is the ideals of the music that guide the Wickersdorf mentality (p. 201): “not insight into the artistic qualities [of the music] but rather our impression of the lineage, of the race, of the materiality (Körperlichkeit) of a music speaks here the first and last word.” My essay, “August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music,” 19th Century Music 29.2 (2005), 123-124, 125 (and elsewhere) discusses Halm’s notion of corporeality in music. 2 See Die Sinfonie Anton Bruckners, 87, and Von zwei Kulturen, 139, on natura naturans. Natura naturans, the realm of the demiurges, the "seed," is the Naturgeist (Naturgesetz) before it is concretized in manifestations of Nature. Natura naturata, the realm of physical nature, is the Naturgeist manifest in Nature (geschaffene Natur), e.g. a tree that grows from the seed. See also “August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music,” 130-132, 134; and Alexander Rehding, “August Halm’s two cultures as nature,” Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 144, 158, 159. 3 Halm criticized Reger’s music harshly in various publications, among them “Der Führer Max Reger und die Ästhetik,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 6, 1914 (insert), reproduced in Von Form und Sinn der Musik, 275-77. See also Von Form und Sinn der Musik, 179, 246, 252, 256; Halm, Beethoven (Berlin: Hesse, 1927), 193. 4 Halm, Von Grenzen und Ländern der Musik (Munich: Georg Müller, 1916). 5 Federhofer, Heinrich Schenker: nach Tagebüchern, p. 148, mentions that Schenker noted in his diary that Halm is confused in criticizing Beethoven and Brahms and praising Bruckner, and mentions, too, Halm’s comments on improvisation in this letter. 6 “Wie seiend!” is a phrase from Goethe’s Italian Journey, Part 1, Venice (October 9, 1786), where Goethe expresses his deep admiration for animal life at the seashore: “A living creature is such an exquisite, magnificent thing! How adapted to its condition, how true, how existing!” (“Was ist doch ein Lebendiges für ein köstliches, herrliches Ding! Wie abgemessen zu seinem Zustande, wie wahr, wie seiend!”). See “August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music,” 125-126, 136. Halm’s asterisks at the words “gesture” and, in the next sentence, “it” are meant to clarify that the pronoun (“sie”) refers back to “gesture” (Geste), not to “corporeality” (Körperlichkeit), which is also feminine gender. 7 1st edn, pp. 132ff, 156ff, 291–23. SUMMARY: © Commentary, Footnotes, Summary Lee Rothfarb, 2006
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