HANS WEISSE: Chamber Music = Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 10; Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet in F-sharp Minor ‒ Berolina Ensemble ‒ Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm multichannel SACD MDG 948 2078-6 (2+2+2); 70:33 (10/16/2018) ****
Austrian composer Hans Weisse is not only not a household name, he gets no mention in music resource guides such as Grove’s Dictionary. So some background to Weisse and his music is in order. He can be grouped with German and Austrian composers known as post-Brahmsians, such as Hans Gal and Adolph Busch, who carried on Brahms’s tradition of Classical Romanticism—and pretty much mimicked Brahms’s style—far into the twentieth century. Weisse was born in Vienna in 1892, a mere five years before Brahms’s death, so the master was long gone before Weisse began producing a series of very Brahmsian chamber and solo piano works, including the Sonata (1921) and Quintet (1926) on the current disc.
Weisse studied music theory for a number of years with Heinrich Schenker, the leading theorist of tonal music and its tenets. Schenker was no champion of the New German Music. Though he’d been a student of Bruckner, Schenker found that composer lacking in classical rigor; he was not an admirer. Among other important ideas that Schenker espoused was the use of Urtext versions of classics, stripped of critical interventions by Romantic editors. Weisse studied piano with Schenker’s friend and advocate Moriz Violin, so Schenker’s conservative musical prejudices were doubly reenforced.
From early in his career, Hans Weisse was in demand as a teacher, starting in Munich and then in Berlin and finally in America. Here, he joined the faculty of Mannes School of Music in 1931, lecturing as well at Columbia University. He died unexpectedly in 1940, aged forty-eight.
Of the two works under review, the more unashamedly Brahmsian is the Clarinet Sonata, which not only sounds like Brahms but has much of the temperament of late Brahns: quietly elegiac, vaguely nostalgic, the soundscape that is often referred to as autumnal. (I find it interesting and somewhat frustrating that these post-Brahmsians emulate the older master and not the more dramatic, even fiery young Brahms of the Piano Quintet and C Minor Piano Quartet. Oh, well.) At least Weisse’s sonata takes an unusual structural approach, beginning with two fast movements followed by a slow one. However, the first has more the discursive nature of a Brahms intermezzo than of the typical big-boned sonata-allegro that Brahms usually steps off with. Bigness of gesture comes in the expansive Allegro molto second movement. It’s cast in A-B-A format, the A section starting in heroic fashion, though it has elements of reflection and playfulness as well. The central section is quietly meditative.
Ending with a slow movement (Andante, un poco Adagio) is an unusual, even bold, gesture. And this finale is attractive but clocks in at less than half the time it takes to play the second movement, so you might come away with the impression that the piece is somewhat unbalanced.
The Quintet is a more individual work, less overtly Brahmsian, notwithstanding that it’s more conventionally structured, with two big sonata-allegro movement where they should occur, fore and aft, and an equally big and ambling slow movement that’s a bit long for its material. This piece is more adventurous in terms of harmony, the slow movement beginning with a series of dissonances that sound as if Weisse is taking his cue from Franz Schreker rather Heinrich Schenker. The Quintet is also looser in terms of architecture, though that’s partly because the thematic material isn’t very distinctive or memorable, so melody and the development thereof is less easily followed—or is more of a chore to follow. I think my favorite movement is the scherzo, the least Brahmsian of all, with none of Brahms’s usual headlong pace and directed-ness. No, this scherzo has an amiable casualness about it, unfolding in leisurely fashion and charting a course that’s unpredictable almost to the point of waywardness. Why not change things up a bit? The Quintet is an interesting work, put together with enough sophistication to invite another hearing or two (or three), though for me the melodic material just isn’t memorable enough to encourage repeated listening.
The fairly young (founded in 2009) Berolina Ensemble specializes in out-of-the-way repertoire, inspired by the work of the Melos Ensemble and Consortium Classicum but extending their search for novelty into the twentieth century. They certainly give Hans Weisse his due, playing with the sense of discovery this music needs in order to make an impression, at the same time matching each other’s interpretive gestures with a real sense of unanimity. And MDG’s engineering is, as usual, a model of transparency and presence. If you’re a listener with an appetite for adventure, the music of Hans Weisse offers one that has elements you’ll find comfortably familiar as well.
—Lee Passarella
