Search - Trepulka, Hannenheim, Herbert Henck :: Johann Ludwig Trepulka, Norbert von Hannenheim: Klavierstücke und Sonaten

Intriguing collection of interwar sonatas

Philippe Vandenbroeck | HEVERLEE, BELGIUM | 12/27/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is due to Herbert Henck's scholarship and artistry, and Manfred Eicher's courage in letting the ECM catalogue stray far from the beaten path, that we can partake of the musical testament of two utterly unknown composers. Both had been forgotten for more than 50 years. A number of parallels tie the two lives together: Johann Ludwig Trepulka and Norbert von Hannenheim were born around the beginning of the 20th century and died in rather dramatic circumstances at the end of the second World War. The former perished as a soldier in West-Prussia during the final months of the Reich, whilst von Hannenheim died shortly after the war in an hospital for the mentally ill.



The works collected on this CD represent their complete pianistic legacy available to us today. From Trepulka no more works for piano are known; von Hannenheim wrote much more but none of it seems to have survived the end of the war. Most likely his work was used as heating fuel by Russian soldiers occupying Berlin. Both composers wrote in a twelve-tone idiom but there the parallels stop. Interestingly, even a casual hearing reveals the significant differences in style. This can be explained by the fact that Trepulka was a pupil of the Viennese composer and music theoretician Josef Matthias Hauer who developed a twelve-tone technique a few years before Schoenberg, from whom von Hannenheim took his inspiration. However, Hauer's twelve-tone system is different from Schoenberg's in that tonal harmony is allowed. Hence the music sounds much more approachable than what we are used to from orthodox dodecaphony.



Although Trepulka wrote the Lenau pieces, op. 2, when he was only 21 years old (they date from 1923/1924), the music sounds surprisingly assured. Stylistically I was quite surprised to be reminded of Satie, or early Messiaen. The music is measured, contemplative and bathes in that same kind of luminous, floating harmony that we know, for example, from Messiaen's Préludes for piano (1928). The collection of seven pieces build nicely into a climax with the last and longest piece, a brooding, monumental fantasy built around bell-like, pealing chords.



The von Hannenheim sonatas are very short pieces in two or three movements. The briefest of the sonatas barely lasts four minutes. All were written in a very short timeframe, presumably before 1929 (before his mental collapse in 1932). Compared to Trepulka, the style is predictably more nervous and ascerbic but altogether still quite lyrical to early 21st century ears. These are certainly pieces that warrant careful and repeated listening.



This recording invites a number of disturbing questions. How many talented composers have perished without us having the slightest inkling that they ever existed? How many timeless masterworks have been grinded into oblivion by the wheels of history? How much masterpieces didn't see the light of the day because their potential progenitor's talent was prematurely, fatefully extinguished? We can't be sure. The questions are particularly acute when we are reminded, as with this ECM recording, of the sad, sickening fate of the many gifted men and women that happened to be at the wrong place in the 1930s and 40s.

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