Album Release: Manu Scriptum

from Latin, meaning written by hand

by Adrián Díaz Martínez

This album is inspired by composers’ manuscripts and their first sketches and ideas for their works. Interpreting such first musical ideas is a particularly exciting task, because in this way one can trace the original idea of these sounds. Certainly, many of these ideas were later revised and partially modified by the composers themselves. If the creator had revised and corrected his work in such a way, I was in this case always of the opinion that it is not strictly necessary to find out what came before. Yet, a quote by Robert Schumann inspired me for the project achieved with this CD: “The first concept is always the most natural and the best. The mind misleads, the feeling does not.” In order to get as close as possible to this first stage of music creation, Ikuko Odai and I embarked on a long and intense search for information about manuscripts, old letters, books, and materials that were often kept in hidden drawers. It has been a fantastic journey. Moreover, it proved to be a wonderful opportunity to discover how the selected composers thought, what they dreamed of, and how they loved and lived.

The search for Gounod’s manuscripts is undoubtedly a great challenge. Despite numerous attempts to find them in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, among other places, we have never succeeded in finding his first sketches for the Six Melodies for Horn and Piano. Yet, we came across the first edition of 1839, published very soon after he wrote it. These pieces, which he composed shortly before he began his studies and travels through Europe, are of particular importance to the history of the horn since they were written for the cor à pistons, a more advanced version of the natural horn. This instrument had two valves which made it possible to play chromatic steps on the horn for the first time. Gounod dedicated the Six Melodies for Horn and Piano to his friend, the horn player and horn craftsman, Marcel-Auguste Raoux. (Shortly after their publication, Raoux subsequently wrote the first Méthode de cor à pistons, helping horn players to better understand this new instrument, which would continue to be developed in the following decades.) In the Six Melodies, the sheet music for which was discovered along with many other melodies for voice and piano in a Paris bookstore, Gounod sought simple melodies which the horn would be able to play always at a pitch typical of the male voice.

Thanks to the cooperation of the Schumann Institutes in Düsseldorf and Zwickau, we have been able to arrive at our interpretation of the manuscript of his work Adagio and Allegro Op. 70 for Horn and Piano. The first sketch is named Romance and Allegro. The greatest obstacle in dealing with Schumann’s manuscripts was his complex personality, full of seriousness, skepticism, and a lack of conformity. We found it extremely difficult and sometimes almost impossible to discern what his original idea for some passages was. Even harmonies were difficult to discern, as he crossed them out and revised them over and over again. Staying loyal to his credo (mentioned above) was thus anything but an easy task: for us as well as, certainly, for Schumann himself, whose complex and difficult psychological situation probably never allowed him to believe in his first instincts. The Adagio and Allegro Op. 70 for Horn and Piano was written in 1849, in a year when the composer wrote numerous master pieces despite his impaired mental health. It presents an enormous technical challenge for the valve horn in F. The instrument was the German-Austrian parallel to Gounod’s cor à pistons, which was still in development. At the same time, Schumann wrote the Concert Piece for Four Horns and Large Orchestra in F Major, Op. 86, in which he sought to explore the various facets of this “new” instrument with horn players from the Dresden Hofkapelle. The valve horn in F was later further developed into what we know today as the Vienna horn.

In the draft entitled Romance and Allegro, we are able to hear these new features of the instrument: the chromaticism, the use of two extreme registers (both low and high), as well as the coloration of new keys and modulations, which were now much more feasible because they no longer required a crook change, as was the case with the natural horn. The piano, meanwhile, was Schumann’s own instrument, and so his Opus 70 also shows great knowledge of the technical possibilities, which he adopted in his characteristic Romantic style. Yet, the composer soon realized the high technical challenges his work posed to horn players, prompting him to edit it and correct some parts. To promote the work, he even wrote a version for cello and piano.

Richard Strauss had a great affinity and love for the horn from his childhood; his father, Franz Strauss, was a horn player himself, after all. The first Horn Concerto, Op. 11, composed by the son in 1882 at the age of 18, is inscribed, “Dedicated to his beloved father, Mr. Franz Strauss, royal Bavarian chamber musician.” The younger Strauss himself arranged the version for horn and piano.

After the Second World War, German culture, to which Richard Strauss had dedicated his life up to that point, lay in ruins. With it, the pillars of his personal and musical life were also largely shattered. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the composer withdrew into the musical world of his youth, into the memories of his father and his childhood ideals. At this time, thus, composing certainly had a somewhat therapeutic function for Strauss and served as a writing exercise in his old age. Perhaps it was also a kind of private memoir: he no longer urged the performance of his pieces as he had done in his youth, instead viewing these last works as occasional compositions. He himself even declared that these pieces were “of no significance in the history of music.” His main goal, he said, was rather to spread joy with those works: “I continue to work for myself in silence.” This is how new works such as the Second Horn Concerto came into being. The first manuscript of the work, which Strauss also conceived for horn and piano, is dated the 11th of November 1942. The manuscript is privately owned and has remained largely unknown to this day. The words “Dedicated to the memory of my father” can be found inscribed on the manuscript. Two weeks later, Strauss wrote the orchestral score, which is owned by the British publisher Boosey & Hawkes and, unfortunately, cannot be accessed. In the score, written by the composer himself, the sentence: “In the beautiful house in Vienna, the 28th of November 1942” is written at the end. My previous research indicates that the first version for horn and piano was a gift from the composer to Karl Böhm as a token of gratitude for the premiere of his work. However, its location is currently unknown. I therefore visited both Prof. Hans Pizka and my colleague, the eminent horn player Johannes Ritzkowsky in Munich. They were so kind as to allow me to consult copies of the manuscript. Strauss wrote the piano section partly for three or four staves, requiring a second pianist to perform this version. However, the concerto still holds many unsolved mysteries, especially regarding Strauss’s early sketches. (At the moment, I am pursuing a doctorate on this very mysterious topic at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, and there is certainly more to be explored here.) This CD presents our interpretation of the reviewed copies of the manuscript in a version for horn and two pianos, making it possible to hear all the notes that the composer wrote.

The composer and violist Volker David Kirchner, who died only recently in 2020, possessed a unique writing style, with his understanding of contemporary music differing markedly from that of colleagues of his time. Kirchner was eager to experiment, but soon realized that the world of atonal music, twelve-tone technique, not to mention all the 20th-century trends, was not his path. “I went out into nature and made music with everything that was around me: with the sounds of the wind, with the whistling of the birds, with all that. I felt it physically, so to speak. For me, writing music is something physical. Music without a meaningful message is not music for me” Kirchner said, describing his artistic work.

The composer created his work Tre Poemi for Horn and Piano during 1986-1987 for the horn player Marie Luise Neunecker who premiered the music in New York on March 24, 1987 (with Teresa Turner-Jones) and in Karlsruhe, Germany on May 6, 1988 (with Nina Tichmann). I myself studied with Prof. Neunecker, which is why I dedicate this album to her in eternal gratitude for all that she has taught me and continues to teach me—especially with regard to Kirchner’s music. After all, the manuscripts of this work are still in Neunecker's possession, meaning that with her help (and the experience of having conceived the work together with Kirchner himself), I was able to delve very deeply into the composer’s world.

The three movements of Tre Poemi—Lamento de Orfeo, Danza de Orfeo, and La Gondola funebre—are part of the larger cycle Orfeo, a trio for tenor, horn, and piano. The text is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s 55 Sonnets to Orpheus (1922). Kirchner here employs techniques with new effects, sounds and coloring that have never been performed before in the repertoire for horn and piano, and hence have never been heard before. Through the Tre Poemi, the ensemble of two instruments becomes one, as it were, as one is completely dependent on the other to create this new sound world. In many ways, Kirchner tries to create a three-dimensional reality with two musical instruments, for which he positions the horn in different spots and often writes the piano part almost at the limit of what is possible. For example, he allows one of the lowest notes of the piano to be struck pianissimo, demands the violent and rapid repetition of chords, the brutal plucking and pizzicato directly on the strings of the grand piano, or the fading of a note to the inaudible point of niente, i.e., the dynamic with which music fades away in an almost soundless whisper. Volker David Kirchner’s Tre Poemi undoubtedly represents an extremely important development in horn-piano instrumentation that will help define the repertoire of the 21st century.

Manu Scriptum is available on Spotify.