I am in the process of a fairly major change of mind with regard to the quality of the music of Franz Lachner. What has spurred me on to explore him further is the 5th Symphony (on Marco Polo). This is a giant symphony (around an hour) which takes its time in a Schubertian manner and which clearly stands in line of descent from Schubert 9 and points forward to Bruckner (and Rufinatscha). I am also mightily impressed by the String Quartets available on the Amati label.
I know that John White has always been keen to promote Lachner (and his brothers): now I can confirm that I am a fully paid-up member of the fan club!
If only the other symphonies (apart from 1, 5 and 8 which Marco Polo have done) had been recorded. John: I believe you have a high opinion of No.6 - can you give us any hints as to its character at all?
Congratulations, Alan, on your new found championship of Franz Lachner!
I cannot say anything about his 6th Symphony, which I have neither seen nor heard, except that a young music critic by the name of Robert Schumann, who was later to also make a name for himself in the symphonic field, reckoned it to be twice as good as No 5! Sometime in the near future I shall need to get in touch with Gareth for further advise on how to acquire a copy of the score from the British Library.
As regards to No 5, I would say that, in the outer movements at least, it is more indebted to Beethoven than to Schubert. By the way my favourite Franz Lachner quartet is the Op. 76 in A, which sounds just like a late work by his good friend , Schubert. If you haven't already acquired them, the quartets by his kid brother Ignaz are well worth hearing.They are however, more conservative in style being influenced both by Schubert and Haydn.
The author of the liner notes, Dr Harald Mann, has also written a book in German about Franz Lachner and his family. If you go to the Rain an Lech web site you may be able to order a copy. Maybe you could negotiate with Dr Mann to produce an English translation!
Thank you, John. Very helpful as always.
You may care to know that Chris Fifield is currently studying the symphonies of Lachner and intends programming No. 8 in a concert later this year with his Lambeth Orchestra: http://www.lambeth-orchestra.org.uk/ (http://www.lambeth-orchestra.org.uk/)
That's splendid news Gareth! I shall have to see if I can make my way to Lambeth to hear what may well be its British premiere.
Me too, John! We should try to meet up...
Gareth, I went to the Lambeth Orchestra's web site last night and was very impressed by the list of lesser known works performed by them over the past 30 years. However, I could find absolutely no reference to Lachner in any forthcoming concert. Anyway, many thanks for putting us in touch with such an enterprising orchestra. By the way, am I correct in believing that their conductor was once on our old forum?
John: Lachner 8 is planned for 2010 - the date has yet to be confirmed.
And yes, Chris Fifield was a contributor to the Raff Forum until about 18 months ago. Wish he'd come back. Maybe I'll email him by your leave.
Chris is very busy at present; in addition several of us are in touch with him anyway, so there's no need to e-mail him with regard to the forum.
OK! :) As long as he knows where we are...
Yesterday my copy of the Lachner 5 arrived, and I have listened to this more than one hour lasting symphony twice. Released by Marco Polo (1993), a label which acts like the successor of the VOX/Turnabout from the 1970s in their tradition of releasing unsung work.
Of course this symphony, written in 1835, is a fine piece of music. But almost anything written between 1820-1900 sounds fine to me, although there are big differences, also between our unsung composers.
Although pleasant to hear, this symphony is in fact too long-winded for me. Themes or successive notes are repeated quite often, but in another gamut, particularly in the 3rd movement (Do-Re-Mi > Re-Mi-Fa > Mi-Fa-So, and so on. I hope you understand what I mean, because, as I've said before, I'm not a musician). The 2nd movement weaves its way gently forward with music of considerable leisurely charm, as Keith Anderson puts it in his booklet notes, and I fully agree on that.
I think this is an example of music which needs "to sink in", as Alan strikingly puts it in his interesting reply #1 (topic: Justified or Unjustified Unsung). And this symphony certainly deserves to be heard more times in order to fully appreciate it. I wonder how Lachner's 6th sounds, which is according to Schumann twice as good.
Remarkable is the price some sellers ask for this CD. I have bought it at Amazon.fr for EUR 7.99 but I also found it offered for EUR 94.41, Amazon.co.uk offers the disc for £70.01 and in the US for $69.99. Most peculiar.
Time to order Lachner's 8 while listening to his 5 for the 3rd time!
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If you like listening to singing-birds, you might know the difference between the song of the (European) Blackbird and of the (European) Song Thrush. What a coincidence. While listening again to Lachner's 5th I also heard a Song Thrush singing in my garden. Then I thought there is a certain resemblance.
Lachner's 5th is like the Song Thrush: this thrush repeats every tune a few times before continuing his song... Schubert's 9th is like the Blackbird. ;D
I think you are right about needing to play certain works through several times to get them to grow on you Peter. However, when this CD first came out back in the 90s, I took to it straight away and it went straight up to No 1 in my charts. I had previously only heard Lachner's No 1 which was coupled on a Marco Polo disc with the first ever CD of Spohr's No 2. At the time, I regarded the Lachner 1 as rather a run of the mill symphony for the period just as I regarded Schuberts first 3 symphonies, the only special thing about it being the fugal nature of the scherzo.
I was really taken aback by massive nature of No 5 and decided there and then that I had found the missing link between Beethoven/Schubert and Bruckner/Brahms! You say its too long and repetitive but then I thought that way about Schubert's Great C Major when I first heard it!
I think my favourite movements are the opening one, which I find most majestic.
(Look out especially for that passage in the coda where he quotes from Bach and Beethoven successively in the course of a few seconds.) and the huge plodding canonic minuet with its trio that reminds me of a typical melancholic Victorian drawing room song.
Dear all,
I have the Lachner 8 + Ball Suite.
I confess taht I like the Symphony in spite of It would be considered an attempt to follow the Schubert way of music after the Schubert´s die. That is, a way to nowhere or cul de sac.
Would be possible that I detected some of Bruckner´s music in the Symphony?
Regarding the Ball Suite, It is funny music for a joggig time or car trip playing.
Greetings,
Fernando.
I would say that Schubert was clearly only just beginning to find his 'symphonic feet' when he died. Lachner was a close friend of Schubert and must have sensed where the latter was going with the symphony. There is absolutely no doubt that Lachner was following along Schubert's path in attempting to develop an epic-scale symphonic form - one which was later taken up by Rufinatscha and, eventually, Bruckner. It was definitely not a symphonic dead-end...
I would say that Lachner's later symphonies were probably more influenced by Beethoven than Schubert. If you want hear a Lachner work that sounds almost like pure late Schubert, try his string quartet in A Op 76, obtainable on the Amati label played by the Rodin Quartet.
I think that Beethoven's symphonies cast a shadow over the entire symphonism of the nineteenth century - including Schubert, Lachner and everyone else. What I find interesting - and significant - is that Schubert and Lachner did not follow Beethoven in the expansion of the symphony to include voices along the lines of B9. There is also something quite extraordinary in the composition of such an epic-scale (hour-long), purely orchestral symphony as L5 in the mid-1830s. This scale is not approached by anyone else, with the exception of Rufinatscha in his own 6th Symphony from the mid-1860s, until the emergence of Bruckner (and Rubinstein - although the latter does not operate in his longer symphonies at anything like the level of inspiration). Raff 1 is, of course, a very lengthy symphony too, but, with its 5-movement structure, proved to be - at least as far as length was concerned - an early symphonic one-off in a cycle in which a classicising concision would become more typical than Romantic expansion.
I'd love to know why Lachner abandoned the symphony at the age of 48. He then seemed to go into retro mode, producing a series of 7 "Neo Baroque" style suites over a number of years, each one ending with a fugue.
However, his string quartets of that later period are by no means retro, becoming more and more advanced in style, unlike those of his brother Ignaz, who stuck to Schubert and Haydn as his models. All the surviving quartets of these composers have been available on the Amati Label for some years, played by the Rodin String Quartet. Well worth hearing.
Hello to all. Sorry I have not been contributing much, but recording work (Robert Hermann Symphonies 1 and 2 out on Sterling very soon) and my PhD on the 19th century German symphony's fall and rise have kept me busy. Mustn't stay long now, as I should be writing up. However I was pleased to read all the positives about Lachner, to which I must add that my thesis is going backwards in time from 1851-1876 and now starts with the deaths of you know who in 1827 and 1828 (as I do not consider Mendelsson (pace No.3 and to a certain extent No.4) or Schumann as PRIMARILY symphonists). So that leaves us with a symphonic crisis lasting 50 years! Into the mix must be thrown Kalliwoda, who is an incredibly important figure, Spohr and Lachner as three who kept the genre alive in the 1830s. (Remember this is German or German speaking (i.e. Austrian/Bohemian too) only so no Berlioz please. The Lachner/Schubert connection is surely there, I'm convinced he had a sighting of the Great C major. Remember Lachner 5 was a competition symphony, so maybe its length was because lots of boxes had to be ticked to satisfy the jury (Raff No.1 did the same thing 25 years later if not so long a work). Then Lachner stops for 15 years, but has a last hurrah with No.8 in the year of Schumann's last (No.3 in 1851). He turns to Suites (Volkmann to Serenades), a soft option for the symphony, prescribed format, popular with the public, programmable, short. Listen to Kalliwoda 1 whose Scherzo Schumann used (first eight notes and its canonic imitation) in his 4th 16 years later. Some glorious music in Kalliowda's seven, including No.3 with its five-note motto theme one of his children kept hammering out on the piano! He is all Sturm und Drang in the minor, cheery and Rossinian in the major. I'm sure you all knwo them.
By the way I hope to conduct Lachner 8 next February with my Lambeth Orchestra. We haven't ratified my programme yet (Kalinnikov 1 in December, York Bowen viola concerto next July, Taneyev Suite for violin and orchgestra (if a concert performance of Tosca falls through rather than over the battlements!) may interest some). Committee meeting on Sunday. Let's hope they have the courage to go along with me!!
Good to read your posts again. Excuse the ramblings above! Christopher Fifield
Many thanks, Christopher, for your very informative latest contribution. I must definitely make the effort to get up to London for your February concert to hear one of my favorite composers in the flesh, as it were. I'm sure the conductor on that Marco Polo CD took that Andante introduction far too slowly---sounds more like funeral pace than walking pace!
It might interest you to know that I was at school down your way back in the 40's. Sadly, my school closed in the 60s and they built a huge great comprehensive on our lovely school playing field.
Of course, we mustn't forget Lachner's connections with Bruckner, who studied counterpoint with Lachner's old teacher, Simon Sechter. After seeing the score of Bruckner's F minor Study Symphony, Lachner offered to programme it in one of his concerts but, in the end, nothing appears to have come of this.
I also suspect that Bruckner got his idea for brassy climaxes from Lachner.
I'm intrigued by what you have to say about Kallivoda's symphonies as, to the best of my knowledge, only Nos. 3, 5, 6 & 7 have been recorded. Maybe you and your orchestra would be interested in filling in the gaps sometime.
Anyway, I look forward to your forthcoming Hermann release.
In the meantime, I wish you every bit of luck with your very worthwhile PhD project. If you haven't done so already, I strongly suggest you get in touch with Dr Harald J Mann, who appears to be a world authority on the Lachner family and their music. If you point your browser at Rain am Lech+ Lachner you'll probably find him. I'd have done so myself but my knowledge of German is rather limited.