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Hans Winterberg's 2nd String Quartet from 1942 is one of the few works that he was able to compose under unimaginable living conditions during the period of Nazi terror in Czechoslovakia. In that year, his mother was murdered in a Nazi extermination camp in the Ukraine, Winterberg himself was separated from his wife and daughter and relocated to a „Jews' house“. The fact that he had to do forced labor and was not deported to Theresienstadt, like almost all other representatives of the country's Jewish cultural elite, saved his life. Winterberg emigrated to Munich in 1947 and was able to gain a foothold in musical life there relatively quickly. Through close contact with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, the 2nd String Quartet found its way into the repertoire of the Koeckert Quartet, which premiered it in Munich on 15th January 1951. The highly expressive, complex work is not only a sounding diary from a time of horror and uncertainty - it is above all a deeply moving document of artistic creation as an expression of spiritual resistance against dehumanization.
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Turning Points - Episode 2: Hans Winterberg
Turning Points - Episode 2: Hans Winterberg
Turning Points - Episode 2: Hans Winterberg
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Hans Winterberg, born in 1901 into a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky and Alois Hába. Until the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany in 1939, he worked as a conductor, pianist, and composer. Unlike his friends and colleagues Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, and Gideon Klein, he survived the Shoah through a series of miracles. In 1945, he moved to Munich, where he began a promising second career. As a representative of a moderate avant-garde, he found himself increasingly marginalized from the late 1960s onwards. After his death in 1991, his artistic estate was locked away in a German music archive and, since none of his works had been published during his lifetime, he was forgotten. Since 2023, Boosey & Hawkes has been publishing Winterberg's chamber music in an extraordinary edition project as first editions in cooperation with the Exilarte Research Center at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. They reveal music of unique charm, in which influences from Janáček, the Second Viennese School, and French Impressionism are amalgamated into an original and exciting personal style.
Following the chamber music, the edition project will focus on the first editions of Winterberg's piano works and songs.
