Pfitzner: Symphony in C

Day 235

Pfitzner: Symphony in C

Seattle Symphony Orchestra

Gerard Schwarz

Pfitzner had a complex relationship with the Nazis. He was anti-semitic but at the same time he was protective towards some Jewish musicians. He had been born in 1869 so was quite old during the Nazi years and seems to have become a sad and embittered figure.

I don't really ever having heard any of his music. His opera Palestrina is considered his masterpiece and perhaps one day I will get round to listening to it. This symphony is a late work, dating from 1940.  I found it a curious piece. The first movement is incredibly anachronistic - it looks like Brahms on the page and indeed there is almost nothing in the music itself which would be out of place in Brahms. It was rhythmically very four square and it seems to me to be almost pastiche, although there is nothing that I can see to show that that was the intention.

The slow movement is brief - little more than an intermezzo - with a cor anglais solo which doesn't really stick in the memory. But it is the finale which is the oddest.  It starts in a jolly 6/8 dance style which would not have been out of place in English folk song inspired piece of light music. It continues in that vein for a while and then it is almost as it Pfitzner suddenly realised that he was writing in 1940 and not 1880. The music breaks out into a fugal texture with quite complex textures and cross rhythms. This lasts for a while and then he gets back into the 6/8 mode and writes a really cliched and unconvincing final few pages.

It really is very odd - to be frank I thought that it was awful - one of the worst things I have heard in this project. The first two movements were OK without being anything special but this last movement was just dreadful.