{"id":5742,"date":"2014-05-04T15:44:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-04T15:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=5742"},"modified":"2020-09-25T21:05:32","modified_gmt":"2020-09-25T20:05:32","slug":"explore-the-score-hans-gal-symphony-no-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2014\/05\/04\/explore-the-score-hans-gal-symphony-no-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Explore the Score- Hans G\u00e1l, Symphony no. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

G\u00e1l: Symphony No.2 in F Op.53
\n\u2018The personal experience which is always expressed in music is very deeply buried in one\u2019s own consciousness.\u00a0One doesn\u2019t know. One never knows.\u2019<\/em><\/strong>
\nHans G\u00e1l
\nHans G\u00e1l was born in 1890 just\u00a0outside\u00a0Vienna, where he studied with Richard Robert and Eusebius\u00a0Mandyczewski. He rose to prominence in 1920s Germany and Austria, particularly as an operatic\u00a0composer and in 1929, with the support of Richard Strauss, G\u00e1l became the director of the\u00a0Conservatory in Mainz. Hitler\u2019s ascent to power in 1933 marked a major reversal of fortune for G\u00e1l\u00a0and his family. Because G\u00e1l was of Jewish descent, he was immediately dismissed from his position in\u00a0Mainz, his music was banned and G\u00e1l suddenly found himself without a job or a country.<\/p>\n

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Internment camp on the Isle of Man where Gal was imprisoned in the early months of WW II<\/p><\/div>\n

G\u00e1l\u2019s dismissal was only the beginning of over a decade of setbacks and tragedies for the
\ncomposer. In 1988, Gal\u2019s wife Hanna spoke of the difficulty of the years following \u2018the trauma of\u00a01933 when, with Hitler\u2019s assumption of power in Germany, he had lost simultaneously his position\u00a0as head of a highly esteemed College of Music, any possibility of having his works performed or\u00a0published, had become unable to protect his children from cruel abuse by their schoolmates and\u00a0even some teachers.\u2019 G\u00e1l and his family escaped to the UK in 1938, but in 1940 he was interned as an\u00a0\u2018enemy alien\u2019 and even found himself held alongside German prisoners of war, many of them Nazis.\u00a0Finally, after his release, he settled in Edinburgh, and taught at Edinburgh University for many years.<\/p>\n

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Tante Jenny, Ilka and Edith, July, 1939<\/p><\/div>\n

The early 1940s were particularly difficult for G\u00e1l. In March 1942 his mother died. The following\u00a0month, his aunt and sister took their own lives to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. The strain of such\u00a0upheaval and tragedy evidently became too much for G\u00e1l\u2019s youngest son, Peter, who took his life in\u00a0December 1942 at the age of only eighteen. Amid such protracted personal and professional struggle,\u00a0it seems all the more remarkable that G\u00e1l had begun working on his Second Symphony, which he\u00a0completed in 1943.<\/p>\n

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Peter Gal<\/p><\/div>\n

G\u00e1l was so pessimistic about the chances of the symphony\u2019s public performance that he initially\u00a0submitted the Adagio as a stand-alone work, which G\u00e1l\u2019s friend and champion Otto Schmidtgen\u00a0premiered in Wiesbaden in October 1947. Schmidtgen gave the symphony\u2019s first complete\u00a0performance in the city a year later, and the sole UK performances took place under the baton of\u00a0G\u00e1l\u2019s former student Rudolf Schwarz with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra in 1950 and 1951.\u00a0After that, the symphony was unheard in concert until the present performers revived it in\u00a0Stratford-upon-Avon in 2012.<\/p>\n

Prior to the first performance in Wiesbaden, G\u00e1l sent Schmidtgen an\u00a0uncharacteristically long and detailed programme note:<\/p>\n

“The Symphony is structured in four movements which, in expression and thematically, stand in an organic\u00a0relationship to one another. The first movement is a calm, freely formed introduction, which presents some\u00a0of the motives that are important for the further course of the work.<\/p>\n

(The iconic chorale theme which recurs at key moments in the symphony<\/em>)<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Consolation.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The “consolation” theme<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The following lively and energetic\u00a0movement stands between this introduction and the broadly laid out Adagio which forms the heart of the\u00a0Symphony; it acts as a drama \u2018of the world\u2019 [Weltspiel] between the two parts of a meditation which is\u00a0turned completely inwards.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Passacaglia.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The “passacaglia-like” episode which opens the Finale of Gal’s Second Symphony<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The actual conflict and its working out is left to the last movement, which,\u00a0starting out from a passacaglia-like episode, develops into an extended sonata form and, in an ever more\u00a0calming coda, spins itself again into the withdrawn mood of the introduction, turned away from the world.”<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Ever-more-inward.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The final recurrence of the chorale theme heralds the beginning of Gal’s “ever more calming” coda, as the symphony ends “turned away from the world<\/em>.”)<\/p>\n

Although the Second Symphony was conceived in an era of global conflict and personal tragedy, it is\u00a0an intimate work of deeply touching lyricism and humour, tempered with melancholy and anxiety.\u00a0It is no accident that the Adagio was the one G\u00e1l thought could be performed separately. Each of\u00a0the other three movements is a constituent part of a single, interconnected symphonic structure. The\u00a0first movement functions not only as an introduction, but as the exposition of the entire symphony. It begins contrapuntally and quietly, not far from the sound world of a late Beethoven quartet, with fragile individual lines gently building a web of sound.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Introduction.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The opening of the Symphony<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The following Allegro energico (the symphony\u2019s main sonata-allegro according to a unitary plan) is\u00a0formally a scherzo and trio, and although it is full of humour, it is also, as G\u00e1l points out,\u00a0outward-facing music, full of vitality and rhythmic energy.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Outwward-Facing.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(Gal called this music from the second movement a “Weltspiel” or “Drama of the World<\/em>“)<\/p>\n

The movement’s Trio section is delicate and sweet natured, vintage Gal.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Trio.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The gently nostalgic atmosphere of the Symphony’s second movement is one of Gal’s most typical soundworlds)<\/p>\n

The true heart of the Second Symphony is the great Adagio in D flat major, which he considered\u00a0calling both \u2018Elegy\u2019 and \u2018Dirge\u2019 (although he was quick to point out that it was \u2018really more\u00a0consolation than funeral music\u2019).<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Adagio-opening.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The opening of the Adagio, the heart of the Second Symphony<\/em>)<\/p>\n

This is music of deepest feeling, tenderness and melodic invention,\u00a0full of delicate reveries and lyrical outpourings, but the gentle and childlike atmosphere in which the “consolation” theme from the first movement returns, is shattered\u00a0midway through by a scream in the violins and a chorale in the brass.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Scream.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The most harrowing moment in Gal’s symphonic output? The tender consolation theme is cut short by a violent scream of despair<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The outline of the Adagio\u00a0must have been in place before Peter\u2019s suicide, and the thematic material of this movement is closely\u00a0linked to the first and fourth movements, but it seems likely that the extraordinary depth of feeling\u00a0throughout is at least partly traceable to that tragedy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\nhttp:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Adagio-coda.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

(The end of the Adagio from Gal’s Second Symphony, in which the consolation theme, interrupted so brutally earlier in the movement, now unfolds in seemingly endless serenity<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The finale functions as the development and\u00a0resolution of the symphony as a whole and, for all its shadows, closes not with darkness and despair\u00a0but with reflection and a fragile promise of the consolation G\u00e1l seemed to be seeking throughout\u00a0the Adagio. With his Second Symphony G\u00e1l composed a wartime masterpiece that contemplates\u00a0peace both personal and universal.<\/p>\n