Hans Rosbaud

 

 

Where was I reading that Hans Rosbaud was a truly great conductor? Oh yes it was what Poulenc said in 1954;

“Music buffs believe that the greatest living conductor is Toscanini; musicians know that it is Hans Rosbaud.”  

also Pierre Boulez;

"a ‘model’ of what a conductor should be: a ‘very great conductor’ who was ‘not specialised’, but was ‘very involved in contemporary music’." 

Kenneth Woods writing in 'Mahler, Music and media, nuts and bolts' in 2013 puts it (excellently) this way;

Rosbaud was one of the few Austro-German conductors of his generation to remain untainted by affiliation with the Nazis, and tensions with them led to his departure from Frankfurt in 1937 and a period out of the spotlight in Münster and Strassburg. In the aftermath of the War, Rosbaud returned to the world of the radio orchestra in which he felt most at home, first in Munich, and then from 1948 until his death at the South West German Radio Orchestra, Baden-Baden, which Rosbaud built into one of the finest orchestras in Germany... Other highlights of his post-War career included his affiliation with the Donaueschingen Festival, where he became a champion of the post-War modernist school of composers led by Boulez and Stockhausen, and long partnerships with the Tonhalle Orchestra and the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Perhaps his most legendary achievement was conducting the premiere of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron on just eight days’ notice in 1954.

Like Boulez, Rosbaud seems to have seen Gustav Mahler as perhaps the key figure in the birth of twentieth-century music, rather than as the last of the Romantics. While the extent of the neglect of Mahler’s works in the years after his death in 1911 has often been overstated, his music did fall into obscurity in Germany after the Nazis banned performances of his ‘Entartete Musik’ (degenerate music) in the 1930s. Rosbaud understood that the more generous rehearsal conditions of the radio orchestras were ideal for restoring Mahler’s complex and demanding scores to the repertoire.

Rosbaud’s extremely undemonstrative podium presence (even as famously low-key a conductor as Bernard Haitink said of Rosbaud that ‘as he approached the podium you thought, surely that can’t be the conductor’) might have seemed an unlikely fit with Mahler’s volatile musical language, especially in a work like the Fifth Symphony, which ranges from the extremes of violent histrionics to moments of great intimacy and tenderness. But on this occasion in 1952, working with one of his favourite orchestras, the KRSO (Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, now the WDR Symphony Orchestra), Rosbaud manages to elicit a performance of great stylistic sensitivity from an orchestra which could not have had a very strong Mahlerian tradition at the time. Long before Mahlerians began arguing over the correctness of extremely fleet or languorous tempi in the Adagietto, Rosbaud’s reading here seems the very epitome of an innately musical balance of emotional engagement and common sense, with an effortless ebb and flow of tempi and a welcome lack of point-making. On the other extreme, in the outer movements, this most soft-spoken of maestri (in Chicago, where he became a regular guest conductor from 1959 until his death, the musicians were known to have had to pass his comments to the back of the section as his speaking voice was only audible to the front desks) unleashes brass-playing of striking stentorian power.

Rosbaud’s beloved radio orchestras may have been the perfect medium for bringing Mahler’s music, and that of so many essential twentieth-century masters, back into the repertoire after the War, but it is a pity that his devotion to the live broadcast seems to have left us with a small and sometimes uneven recorded legacy, where in many cases modern listeners find frustration with less-than ideal radio sound, or occasional slips in orchestral accuracy. And yet a document like this Mahler 5 reveals, far more meaningfully than any meticulously edited studio recording could, a great conductor at the height of his powers bringing important and hugely challenging music to life solely through a profound knowledge of and engagement with the musical text, without the safety net of an orchestra who know the work through other recordings or past performances. Surely Boulez was right to hail Rosbaud, in this respect as in others, as a ‘model’.

How did I come into Rosbaud's orbit? Through his recording of Gluck's 'Orphee' by Philips with Leopold Simoneau in the title role. It's not bad for a 'contemporary music expert.' Bloody marvellous actually.

 An amazing footnote by Gerald Fenech;

Hans Rosbaud (1895-1962), like the famous Karl Böhm, was from Graz in Styria. He was one of the four illegitimate children the pianist Anna Rosbaud had with organist Franz Heinisser, who was her junior by eight years. Although Hans' official father was Hans Strayner it was Heinisser who, in fact, took care of his son's well-being. The mother put two of her children into care but the other two, Hans and Paul, were raised by herself. Very soon it became evident that the young Hans was extraordinarily gifted and at a most tender age he was already an excellent pianist, violinist and cellist. Aged thirteen Rosbaud went to Frankfurt/Main to study piano and composition, where one of his great friends was the multitalented fellow pupil Paul Hindemith, later to become one of Germany's leading twentieth century composers.

In 1921 Rosbaud, although the youngest, won the post of director of the Mainz music school from among eighty applicants and, to top it all, he was also put in charge of conducting the Symphony concerts organised by the city. From then on until the time of his death in 1962 Rosbaud went on to conduct many prestigious orchestras, among which the Sudwestfunkorchester Baden-Baden takes pride of place. Indeed, today the large recording room of the national radio in this city bears his name....

As Artistic Director of the radio orchestra, Rosbaud made sure that several twentieth century new works were given a chance to reach the public, with world premieres of pieces by Schoenberg and Bartók among others. He remains famous for having moulded the Baden-Baden orchestra into maybe the most proficient ensemble for contemporary music. Legendary is the number of compositions premiered by Rosbaud and their creators: Boulez, Henze, Honegger, Messiaen and Dallapiccola among a host of other famous names. But Rosbaud was also a master of interpretation in the classical and romantic repertoire....