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The period around the mid-1930s was a particularly fruitful and eventful time in Hans Winterberg's life. He wrote his first important orchestral compositions and chamber music works as well as his first piano sonata. Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, a child prodigy as a pianist and a cautious composer, finally ventured into the great forms and genres of tradition, but also experimented with unusual combinations of instruments, as in his first chamber music work, the Quintet for Violin, 2 Clarinets, Violoncello and Piano. The eccentric instrumentation may come as a surprise, but Winterberg chose it deliberately because the clearly delineated color spectra of the instruments suited him in his experiments with the overlapping of independent rhythmic levels. With the Quintet, Winterberg succeeded completely in amalgamating the influence of Schönberg and Berg, passed on by his teacher Zemlinsky, with the characteristics of the Bohemian-Moorish tradition passed on by Janáček. The result is music of enormous inner tension and rhythmic drive.
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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.
