Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works(Eastman Studies in Music)

About the Book

Places the Swiss composer Schoeck, master of a late-Romantic style both sensuous and stringent, in context and gives insight into his increasingly popular musical works. The work of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) has in recent years enjoyed a surge of interest. His 300 songs with piano accompaniment are now all on CD, as are his orchestral song cycles and five of his eight stage works. Yet despite an impressive discography featuring names such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lucia Popp and Ian Bostridge, no biographical study of Schoeck has ever been available in English. Chris Walton, authorof Richard Wagner in Zurich: The Muse of Place, charts the turbulent course of Schoeck's life and career with care and candor, from a rampant youth to midlife monogamy and an old age ravaged by fears of neglect. He tracesSchoeck's relationships to musicians such as Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky, and to writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and James Joyce. New light is also shed on Schoeck's uneasy relationship with Nazi Germany and its culmination, for him, in public humiliation and private catastrophe. As an accompanist, Schoeck was an arch-Romantic master of rubato; as a conductor, he was a fervent champion of the new; and in his compositions, he moved from late-Romanticism through a modernist vortex to emerge in full mastery of an individual musical language both sensuous and stringent. In this thorough new biography, Waltonplaces Schoeck the man and the artist squarely in the context of his time. Chris Walton is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and Managing Director of the Orchestre Symphonique Bienne in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 Max Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the literary and cultural relationship between Switzerland and the English-speaking world.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Schoeck and the Swiss Childhood and Youth Wolf amidst the Sheep Leipzig, Munich, and an Awful Little Moustache Back in the Fold Hermann Hesse, via the Dentist Look Back in Melancholy Chamber Music The Art of Counterpoint Busoni The Picture on the Wall Touch of Venus Silent Bronze Sucking Sweet Folly Self Portrait, with Sandwich Elegy Goodbye to Geneva The Bee in the Rose Raging Queen Storms in the Pigeon Loft Into the Vortex Wrong-Note Rag Hildebill Variations and Fugue on an Age-Old Theme Put to the Wheel Gisela Lost in the Stars Whores and Madonnas ". . . he can write music all right . . ." Tea with (Ms.) Hitler Aryanizing Music Arms and the Man Castles in the Air Goering's Bullshit Collapse The People at Home The Reckoning Transfigured Summer Nights Silent Lights Fair Measure Rather Nice Horn Sleepless in Wollishofen Echoes and Elegies Running on Empty Epilogue Othmar Schoeck: Concise Work Catalogue and Discography Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
CHRIS WALTON teaches music history at the Basel Academy of Music in Switzerland, is an Honorary Professor at Africa Open Institute (Stellenbosch University in South Africa) and runs a research project at the Bern Academy of the Arts for the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Review :
"Chris Walton narrates the tale of this important Swiss composer with a light touch, yet also with ample authority, backed by complete command of all the documentary sources. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the contexts and forces-including modernism and resistance to it, and the complex cultural politics of the Nazi era-that affected art music during the first half of the twentieth entury." --Arnold Whittall, author of Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation and the Cambridge Introduction to Serialism "For too long now, Othmar Schoeck's followers have reduced him to the near-parody of a 'typically Swiss composer,' guarding the holy flame from the supposed evils of 'international modernism.' Chris Walton has utilized his generational and geographical distance to paint a portrait of the artist that secures this wayward, idiosyncratic composer the place he deserves in the history of music of the twentieth century." --Urs Frauchiger, former director of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia