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Each of the four string quartets by the Bohemian composer Hans Winterberg (1901-1991) has its own unusual history. The first, composed in happy times in Prague in 1936, had to wait until 2024 for its premiere. The second was composed under dramatic circumstances in the war year 1942, when Winterberg, by a twist of fate, was not deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp like his colleagues Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Gideon Klein, thus surviving the Shoah. The third, like all his other works not published during his lifetime, was composed in 1957, at another existentially difficult time after his great success as a composer in Munich in the early 1950s, where he had fled shortly before the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1947. Due to its enormous interpretative challenges, it was not until 1970 that Winterberg found an ensemble in the legendary Sonnleitner Quartet - members of the Munich Philharmonic - that could do justice to the technical and emotional demands of the work.
This first edition of the second string quartet documents both versions of the quartet: the original from 1957 and the second with the retouching that the composer made after the failure of the first performance in 1969 by the concertmaster quartet of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
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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.
