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Born in Prague in 1901, Hans, or rather Hanuš Winterberg, had found his style around the mid-1930s, to which he would remain faithful until the end of his life, representing a unique but not untypical symbiosis of different influences for Czech modernism: the Second Viennese School, mediated by his teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, French Impressionism and, becoming more and more prominent over time, the folk-inspired, rhythmically dominated music of Leoš Janáček. Winterberg did not have much time to build a career, because from March 1939 at the latest, after the annexation of the so-called „Resttschechechei“ by Nazi Germany, he, as a Jew, was forbidden any professional activity. Exploited as a forced laborer from 1941, he probably only escaped deportation to Theresienstadt and death in Auschwitz through the protection of his marriage to the respected Sudeten German pianist Maria Maschat. The handwriting of the few compositions written during the war bears witness to the existential hardship in which they were written, but also to the immense spiritual resistance of their creator. The Suite for clarinet and piano from 1944, published here for the first time, is not only a substantial contribution to the clarinet literature, but also a unique document of artistic self-assertion.
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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.
