Matthias Schmidt: “Fritz Kreisler – A Theater of Remembrance” – Culture

How do you unveil the secret of your violin playing? Fritz Kreisler.

Instrumental virtuosos, conductors and singers belong to that species of musical artists for whom – loosely based on Schiller – posterity does not weave wreaths. All the grandiose violin queens and princes, cello heroes and heroes, piano lions, trumpet winners and flute gods, then the stars on the opera stages and song podiums, the lectern imperators and baton wielders – the publishing house Edition text + kritik is now dedicating a separate one to them Series: “Solo”.

Five books are already available: The Karlsruhe musicologist Thomas Seedorf wrote about the tenor of all tenors, Enrico Caruso. The portrait of the violinist king Fritz Kreisler turned out to be particularly extensive for the Basel music professor Matthias Schmidt at 170 pages. The Munich musicologist Oliver Fraenzke tries to grasp the enigmatic pianist Eduard Erdmann. Two volumes are dedicated to living personalities: the Australian Simone Young is portrayed by Kerstin Schüssler-Bach and the advocate of modernism, Michael Boder, is profiled by the experienced music author Jürg Stenzl.

The most interesting book in the series is dedicated to the violinist king Fritz Kreisler

Seedorf’s Caruso biography is of course serious, but very smooth and somewhat impersonal. Now there is a huge number of books and illustrations about Caruso. So it makes sense that Seedorf couldn’t find anything radically new. To praise Caruso in particular would be as idle as it is cheap. And yet a little more personal fascination and the attempt to get closer to the voice of the century and the singing aesthetics it suggests wouldn’t hurt the whole thing.

On the other hand, Oliver Fraenzke remains all too caught up in a heavy-footed biography in his efforts to track down the strangeness of the composer and pianist Eduard Erdmann. On the central question “What does he play and how”? Fraenzke finds no approach at all. His comments on Erdmann’s recordings are meager and make the former fascination of this unusual musician hardly noticeable. The fact that Erdmann, despite all his willfulness, became a member of the NSDAP in order to be able to perform, is bitter. But his friendship with Ernst Krenek, who had gone into exile, and other ostracized musicians did not end. So if you want to discover Erdmann as a pianist beyond his biography, you have to get your own picture from the recordings.

The two portraits of the living conductors are each coherent in their own way. Kerstin Schüssler-Bach describes Simone Young’s long path from Australia to the European metropolises and to the podiums of the most important opera houses as a vital, emancipatory path to self-determination and self-confidence as an internationally successful orchestra and opera conductor.

It is clear that Young’s success is also related to her ability to work in a team. And her biographer describes convincingly that she is also a pioneer in this area. Jürg Stenzl also describes Michael Boder as a passionate team worker who is decidedly lacking in startum and maestro glory. Michael Boder, born in Darmstadt in 1958, convinces the musicians and singers with whom he works through his knowledge of the work and his camaraderie and reliability as a conductor. The testimonies of musicians, which Stenzl quotes at the end in praise of his “hero”, also testify to this. This ranges from composers like Friedrich Cerha, Aribert Reimann or Henze to artistic directors and directors like Pamela Rosenberg, Ioan Holender or Stefan Herheim to singers like Marlis Petersen and Barbara Hannigan.

The most interesting book in the series in terms of approach and execution, however, was written by the Basel musicologist Matthias Schmidt about the violinist king Fritz Kreisler, even if it was a bit too long overall.

Schmidt shows how Kreisler made himself an actor in a “theater of remembrance”, enriching and reshaping his life story with creative imagination in order to create a biography that not only suited one of the most important violinists of all time, but him also as the legitimate heir to 19th-century musical life in Vienna, a Vienna that also includes Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, with whom Kreisler was very connected. Schmidt also describes that Kreisler more or less veiled his Jewish origins, especially under the management of his wife Harriet, who even tried to get along with Hitler’s Germany – Kreisler lived in Berlin until 1939, but had not performed in Germany since 1933.

In addition to clarifying previous biographical blurring, Schmidt impresses with his attempts to come close to the magic of Kreisler’s violin playing using exemplary recordings such as that of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under John Barbirolli from 1936. Whether trill length and intensity, whether vibrato or Sheet-fed printing variants, Schmidt listens very closely to this impressive recording in order to unveil the secret of Kreisler’s effect. And in the end, an impressively differentiated picture of one of the most important musicians of the 20th century emerges.