Hermann Scherchen

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Hermann Scherchen
Born(1891-06-21)21 June 1891
Berlin
Died12 June 1966(1966-06-12) (aged 74)
Florence
Occupation
  • Conductor

Hermann Scherchen (21 June 1891 – 12 June 1966) was a German conductor, who was principal conductor of the city orchestra of

Pierrot Lunaire, followed by works by Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, later Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono and Leon Schidlowsky
. He usually conducted without using a baton.

Life

Scherchen was born in Berlin. Originally a

Nazi regime and worked in Switzerland. Along with the philanthropist Werner Reinhart, Scherchen played a leading role in shaping the musical life of Winterthur for many years, with numerous premiere performances, the emphasis being placed on contemporary music. From 1922 to 1950, he was the principal conductor of the city orchestra of Winterthur (today known as Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur).[1]

Making his debut with Schoenberg's

Pierrot Lunaire, he was a champion of 20th-century composers such as Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Edgard Varèse, and actively promoted the work of younger contemporary composers including Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono and Leon Schidlowsky.[2]

He was the teacher of Karel Ančerl, Egisto Macchi, Marc Bélanger, Françoys Bernier, Anna Renfer, Frieda Belinfante and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and contributed to the libretto of Hartmann's opera Simplicius Simplicissimus. He also premiered Hartmann's early work Miserae. Conductor Francis Travis was a pupil, then conducting assistant, for five years.

He is probably best known for his orchestral arrangement (and recording) of Bach's

ISBN 3-7957-2780-4) is a standard textbook. His recorded repertoire was extremely wide, ranging from Vivaldi to Reinhold Glière
.

Like

Ian Wallace that interpreting Scherchen's minuscule hand movements was like trying to milk a flying gnat.[4] According to Fritz Spiegl,[5]
Scherchen worked largely through verbal instructions to his players and his scores were peppered with reminders of what he needed to say at each critical point in the music.

However, Scherchen did not always dispense with the baton. The film of his rehearsal of his edition of Bach's The Art of Fugue with the CBC Toronto Chamber Orchestra shows him using a baton throughout.

Family

Scherchen's first wife – who was also his third wife – was Auguste Marie (Gustl) Jansen, whom he married on 17 June 1921. After a brief marriage to actress Gerda Müller from 1927 to 1929, he was again together with Gustl Jansen. In 1936, Scherchen married the Chinese composer Xiao Shuxian in Peking (Beijing). A daughter, Tona Scherchen, was born to them in 1938. She has also made a name for herself as a composer. The last of his five wives was the Zurich-based Romanian mathematics teacher Pia Andronescu,[6][7] with whom he had five children: Myriam, David, Esther, Nathan and Alexandra.

He died in Florence, survived by a number of children from five wives and other women.[8]

One of his sons was Karl Hermann "Wulff" Scherchen. Wulff met Benjamin Britten when they were thirteen (nearly fourteen) and twenty, respectively. Their romantic relationship did not begin until four years later. John Bridcut describes the passionate exchanges of letters between the increasingly-famous composer and the teenager in Britten's Children. Wulff's relationship with Britten is also the subject of Serenade for Tenor, Saxophone and Orchestra, a song cycle by Lyle Chan based on the romantic letters exchanged by the pair.

Until 2014, his daughter, Myriam Scherchen, co-ran the music label Tahra, which released officially authorized historical recordings of conductors such as Scherchen, Furtwängler, Mengelberg and others, generally drawn from primary recorded sources. Tahra ceased business after the death of the co-principal of the label, René Trémine.

The sister of Auguste Maria Jansen, Helene (Lene) Jansen, was married to the Hungarian cartographer Alexander Radó, who, under the alias 'Dora', was a member of the European-wide resistance organization known as the "Rote Kapelle". When Radó was threatened in Switzerland by German security agents and faced eviction, Hermann Scherchen hid him in his apartment in Geneva.[9]

Quote

  • "Music does not have to be understood. It has to be listened to." ("Musik muss nicht verstanden werden. Sie muss gehört werden.")[10]

Recordings

Scherchen recorded an unusually wide range of repertoire, from the baroque to the contemporary. His Mahler recordings, made before Mahler became a part of the standard repertoire, were especially influential; so too were his recordings of Bach and Handel, which helped pave the way for the period-performance practice movement. Included as well were significant recordings of music by Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Glière, Bartók, Schoenberg and many others.

Notes

  1. ^ "koelnkonzert.de". www.koelnkonzert.de. Archived from the original on 29 May 2007.
  2. ^ "Leon Schidlowsky". schidlowsky.com.
  3. ISBN 0-521-48558-4
    .
  4. ^ Story told by Wallace during the BBC radio panel game My Music, 1993
  5. ^ Spiegl, Fritz: Music Through the Looking Glass (London, 1984)
  6. ISBN 978-3-906415-83-3
    – via Google Books.
  7. ISBN 978-3-86163-052-4
    . Retrieved 27 July 2012.
  8. ISBN 978-0-19-977451-7
    – via Google Books.
  9. ^ Heffernan, Michael; Győri, Róbert (2014). Lorimer, Haydenn; Withers, Charles W.J. (eds.). "Sándor Radó (1899–1981)". Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies. 33. London: Bloomsbury Academic: 167–203.
  10. ^ "Produktfamilie – BEETHOVEN Symphonies 1". www.deutschegrammophon.com (in German). 1 May 2020. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  11. ^ "Scherchen conducts Reger". classical.net. Archived from the original on 5 September 2012. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  12. ISBN 88-8342-547-2
  13. OCLC 164858571

External links
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