Hans Pfitzner
Hans Pfitzner was born
in Moscow in 1869, the son of violinist from Saxony, Robert Pfitzner, who
was later to return to Germany as music director of the Stadttheater in Frankfurt.
He received musical training at the Frankfurt Hoch Conservatory under Iwan
Knorr, studying, and the pianist James Kwast, whose daughter Mimi he married
in 1899. He began his professional career as teacher at the Conservatory in
Coblenz Koblenz and in 1897 was appointed to the staff of the Stern Conservatory
in Berlin, where, in 1903, he became First Kapellmeister at the Theater des
Westens. Five years later he moved to Strasbourg as director of the conservatory
and conductor of the symphony orchestra. In 1910 he added to his the position
of director of the opera, winning a reputation there and elsewhere with his
opera Palestrina, first staged in Munich in 1917. After the war, Pfitzner,
his position in German music firmly established, held composition master classes
at the Prussian Academy in Berlin and in 1925 was appointed a life member
of the Munich Academy of Music, an honour terminated by the National Socialist
government in 1934. He continued to work as a conductor and an accompanist,
and to write music, in spite of deteriorating health and the final poverty
of his last years in an old people's home in Munich. He died in 1949, leaving
unfinished a Cantata setting of Goeth's Urworte Orphisch for soloists,
chorus.
At the height of his fame Pfitzner held a position in popular German esteem that rivalled that of Richard Strauss. In particular the opera Palestrina, which is concerned with the integrity and inspiration of the artist, as reflected in the story of Palestrina's composition of the Missa Papae Marcelli, a work that served to persuade the Council of Trent to permit the continued use of polyphony in Catholic worship, made a profound impression and in spite of its complexity remains in German repertoire. The subject and its operatic treatment had a precedent in Wagner's Die Meistersinger and a successor in Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, banned by the National Socialists in 1933.
Pfitzner's essential espousal of a specifically German musical tradition, conservative and looking back to an age that had passed, and his approval of more notorious aspects of Wagner's polemical writing, has not helped his general reputation abroad. At one time close enough in his thought to Thomas Mann, who was influenced by the composer in his novel The Magic Mountain, with its sympathy with death, he was to diverge markedly from him during the years of the Weimar Republic, when Mann became a champion of democracy, the subject of satirical treatment in the second act of Palestrina. To this one might add the judgement of a distinguished Jewish exile from Vienna, who was to describle Pfitzner as "a quirky, quarrelsome little man" always highly critical of the music of his fellow composers.
