How great it is that Hans Gál is Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3. He is one of music's most genuine undersung heroes and last year it was wonderful that so many people helped to crowdfund conductor Ken Woods' latest recording in his series of Gál's works with the Orchestra of the Swan. You can listen to the programmes online and for seven days after broadcast here.
Here is an article of mine about him that I think fell down a crack between some editorial floorboards a couple of years ago. Plus a video in which Ken talks about Gál's life and work and we hear a sample of the latter. Enjoy.
Someday an
alternative survey of 20th-century music should take a thorough look
at the myriad composers who were reviled, then exiled, for being born in the
wrong place at the wrong time, or for writing the ‘wrong kind’ of music, and
often for both. When that happens, Hans Gál’s star will shine bright.
The Austro-Hungarian
composer and scholar was born in 1890 and grew up in Vienna; later he and his
family were forced to flee first Nazi Germany, then Austria, for Britain. He wrote
prolifically, clocking up more than 100 works, and he lived to be 97. Yet for
decades even his finest music lay unrecognised and unplayed.
But in the last
year or two, a series of recordings spearheaded by the Hans Gál Society and the
composer’s daughter, Eva Fox-Gál, has been bringing him back at last to the public
notice he deserves.
Gál effectively
suffered a threefold misfortune. He believed himself part of the great German
tradition of music-making; then the Nazis decided he was not. After escaping to
Britain, he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man, and his music was
sidelined for sounding too German. Earning his living by teaching at Edinburgh
University, he continued to write symphonies in the tradition of Haydn and
Beethoven as recently as the 1970s – but by then, the musical elite tended to react
vituperatively to new music that did not toe the line of accepted contemporary style.
Kenneth Woods is
the conductor for several of the new recordings – the latest is Gál’s Symphony
No.4 (on Avie Records). When he first realised Gál had written so much music,
he says, he was astonished. Though familiar with Gál’s performing edition of
Brahms’s symphonies and his superb books on Brahms and Schubert, Woods had had
no idea that the academic was primarily a composer. Many of his finest works,
such as the early Violin Concerto, had gone unperformed for 70 years.
“It’s tremendous
stuff,” says Woods. “It’s the opposite of what people thought they had to
conform to at the time; Gál just kept on writing in his own style.
“The standard of
his works is uniformly high. To my mind, the closest comparison between Gál and
another composer would be Haydn: the surface beauty of the music is there, but
it’s only the tip of the iceberg. What’s vital is the subtlety of what goes on
beneath. And because the language is so classical, the writing is very
‘exposed’, making his music tremendously difficult to play.”
Eva Fox-Gál (who
was born in Britain in 1944) has made it her mission to champion her father’s
works; and her son, Simon Fox-Gál, is the sound engineer on the Avie recordings.
“My father was genial, well known for his wit, modest, good fun to be with, and
never pushed himself or his own work forward,” Eva remembers. “But that was his
outer shell. To know what he was like inside, one needs to listen to his music.
“His writings
about other composers are also very revealing about himself. At the beginning
of his book on Schubert, he talks about Schubert’s outer persona and how the
composer’s contemporaries mistook that for the real person. My father thought that
that was what Schubert needed, in order to safeguard his inner core for his
work. It’s his defence. I think that was what my father also had to do.”
One of Gál’s
most successful works, in the 1920s, was his opera Die heilige Ente (The Sacred Duck), which stayed in theatrical schedules
constantly from its premiere in 1923 until it
was banned by the Nazi regime, along with all works by Jewish composers. Gál
was appointed director of the Music Conservatory in Mainz in 1929, but the
Nazis had him thrown out in 1933.
He and his
family returned to Vienna, which they escaped at the time of the Anschluss in
1938. After a false dawn in Britain – in which Gál was much assisted by the
great musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, who brought him to Edinburgh University
to catalogue the music library – the composer was interned on the Isle of Man.
This was one of
the most difficult times of all, says Eva: “That collection of refugees really
represented Hitler’s greatest enemies, yet they were seen as a danger. The idea
that they were a ‘fifth column’ that put the country under threat was
completely ridiculous. There was no understanding of who they were, or of the
horrors that they had already been through.” The ever-increasing stress proved
intolerable for the Gáls’ younger son, who took his own life before the war was
over.
Michael Haas, a
distinguished record producer and music curator of the Jewish Museum in Vienna,
is among Gál’s most passionate advocates. He describes Gál as an
‘anti-Romantic’: a composer who was convinced neither by the effusive styles of
Liszt and Wagner, nor by the mainstream trends of his own time such as
atonality, 12-tone ‘serialism’ and the neo-classicism of Stravinsky and Poulenc.
“His antidote to
Romantic excesses was to reach back to earlier models,” Haas suggests. “Most people
assume the model was Brahms, but I believe that actually it was Mendelssohn.
This accounts for his frequent lack of overt emotional abandonment.
“For me, Gál is the
‘Everyman Composer’ of the Weimar years. He was conventional, but not banal. He
was far more representative of what musical life was actually like than, say,
Alban Berg or Darius Milhaud. It would be like comparing Norman Rockwell with
Andy Warhol. I love some of his more expressive works and admire his aesthetic
composure and his extraordinary intelligence and cultivation.”
The
rehabilitation of Gál’s music is long overdue – but better late than never.
“Because the music is so difficult to play,” says Woods, “even when occasional
performances were given, sometimes they didn’t make a strong enough case for
it. But now, working with great musicians who are hungry to perform it, we hope
these recordings will give people a chance to hear what wonderful stuff it is.”
