Places the Swiss composer Schoeck, master of a late-Romantic style both
sensuous and stringent, in context and gives insight into his
increasingly popular musical works.
The work of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957)
has in recent years enjoyed a surge of interest. His 300 songs with
piano accompaniment are now all on CD, as are his orchestral song cycles
and five of his eight stage works. Yet despite an impressive discography
featuring names such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lucia Popp and Ian
Bostridge, no biographical study of Schoeck has ever been available in
English.
Chris Walton, authorof Richard Wagner in Zurich: The Muse of Place,
charts the turbulent course of Schoeck's life and career with care and
candor, from a rampant youth to midlife monogamy and an old age ravaged
by fears of neglect. He tracesSchoeck's relationships to musicians such
as Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Paul Hindemith, and
Igor Stravinsky, and to writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and James
Joyce. New light is also shed on Schoeck's uneasy relationship with Nazi
Germany and its culmination, for him, in public humiliation and private
catastrophe.
As an accompanist, Schoeck was an arch-Romantic master of rubato; as a
conductor, he was a fervent champion of the new; and in his
compositions, he moved from late-Romanticism through a modernist vortex
to emerge in full mastery of an individual musical language both
sensuous and stringent.
In this thorough new biography, Waltonplaces Schoeck the man and the
artist squarely in the context of his time.
Chris Walton is Extraordinary Professor at the University of
Stellenbosch in South Africa and Managing Director of the Orchestre
Symphonique Bienne in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 Max
Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the literary and
cultural relationship between Switzerland and the English-speaking
world.
