Pfitzner's Orchestral Music

Extract

Hans Pfitzner was born in 1869 in Moscow—where his parents were temporarily residing—and is sometimes described as a German-Russian composer, although in fact he had no Russian blood. He grew up in Frankfurt o/M, where his father was Musikdirektor at the Municipal Theatre. From him he had his first music lessons, and perhaps the environment helped foster his interest in opera and music for the stage. He studied piano with James Kwast and composition with Ivan Knorr—the teacher of Cyril Scott and Percy Grainger—at Hoch's Conservatoire in Frankfurt. After finishing there, he took up the first in a series of teaching and conducting appointments which lasted until the advent of Hitler in 1933. These included a period as Director of Strasbourg Conservatoire, conductorship of the Kaim Orchestra in Munich, and frequent appearances as conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he also made very notable recordings, especially of the Beethoven symphonies—performances which rank with the finest I have ever heard. Strasbourg University honoured him in 1913 with the degree of Ph.D., and in the same year he was married—in Canterbury, Kent, to which city he and his bride had fled to avoid unpleasant entanglement with Percy Grainger, who considered himself a suitor for the same girl's hand.