Marx: Maienblüten

The Austrian composer Joseph Marx was for much of his long career a musical authority of world renown. Within his large output, his songs were amongst his greatest musical achievements, unifying romanticism, impressionism and expressionism with revolutionary results. Many thought him the rightful successor to Hugo Wolf and yet today the name and music of Joseph Marx have fallen into obscurity.

The ‘Marx style’ is unmistakable. It is characterised by a highly personal compositional technique displaying a polyphonic harmony of full sonority, allied to masterly contrapuntal skills, and frequent key changes which occur apparently at random but are in fact distributed with utter logic. The music strikes the listener as timeless, refreshingly modern and, above all, surprising, able to exploit tonal means of expression to the full and raise the spirits of every true lover of melody.

Chandos’ Record of the Month sees Jirí Belohlávek conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the long overdue premiere of four choral works, along with the first complete recording of Marx’s orchestral songs for soprano, performed by Christine Brewer.

Three works are of particular note. Herbstchor an Pan, a single-movement cantata written in 1911, lasts very nearly twenty minutes and was Marx’s first, and for many years only, orchestral composition. It has inexplicably fallen into oblivion in the past five decades. However, it has turned out to be one of the masterpieces of its entire era. Ein Neujahrshymnus (A Hymn for the New Year) is richly orchestrated and demonstrates the profound romantic vein of Joseph Marx; it is here performed for the first time in its orchestral version. This disc represents not only the first recording of Berghymne but also its world premiere performance.

We are indebted to the Marx Society for their efforts to promote this composer, and allowing the wider public to hear the outstanding quality of his works. The greatness of the music is indisputable and this recording will make for an important addition to the classical music catalogue.

Marx’s gifts were essentially lyrical. With few exceptions, his songs eschew drama and violent emotion. In the settings from the Italienisches Liederbuch Marx shows himself master of the delicate cameo, albeit without Wolf ’s wit and pungency. Elsewhere expressions of rapture, nature mysticism and nostalgic yearning predominate, in settings of poets ranging from Romantics such as Novalis and Mörike to contemporary authors including Rilke, Dehmel and Hesse.

Of the generation of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, Marx was hostile to their musical radicalism, proclaiming to the end his belief in the power of tonality to express the whole gamut of human emotion. Like his older contemporary Richard Strauss, he remained au fond a late-Romantic (he liked to dub himself ‘a Romantic realist’) in a fractured, modernist age.

During the years 1908–12 Marx composed around 120 songs, some of which were published in the collections Italienische Lieder I–II (1912) and Lieder und Gesänge I–III (1910–12). Nowadays these songs are regarded as the finest works that he produced.