Johanna Senfter (1879-1961)

[Serial_Apologist]

A composer totally new to me as of today, and a tantalising figure whose music bridged the Germanic Late Romantic worlds of composers such as Reger, Schmidt, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, and the Schoenberg/Berg/Webern triumvirate during its roughly 1904-1908 period of transition from extended tonality into atonality. Listening to the music presented here one has at times that feeling of musical processes at the critical point of abandoning tonal gravitation to just allow free chromatic contrapuntal interplay to dictate structure and growth, and yet Senfter shifts back and forth between these two worlds, making her an ideal guide to anyone fearing that they are entering musical territory too dangerous or unsettling to take on board, while at the same time emphasising essential continuities.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wqsx

I can't wait to find out what the rest of the week will reveal!

[smittims]

I find that period fascinating, especially the various ways composers came to terms with developments outside their natural sphere, e.g. Britten and Walton 'trying out' 12-tone ideas, like dipping a toe in the water. Robert Craft tells an amusing anecdote of Otto Klemperer arriving at Stravinsky's home , before Igor Fyodorovitch himself embraced serialism, seeing a modern score , and counting out the twelve notes in the opening bars in a loud vouce so Stravinsky would hear, and saying ' nowadays no-one is doing anything else'.

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting if slightly, for me, disappointing series of programmes. Senfter came across as as reticent in her music as her life, notwithstanding the incipient tendencies of her quite advanced harmonic/tonal idiom, which one felt at various points could have slipped over into Second Viennese School terrain by way of her chromatically wayward way with voice-leading - that being as far as she ever went. Maybe the latter was the most attention sustaining aspect of her music, given that she seemed less preoccupied with colouristic or timbral elaboration than with balance, neatness and practicability. There was a slight tendency to longwindedness, as with Reger. I didn't hear much in the way of virtuosity being a pre-requisite for playing her music. Of the better-known figures of her time and place, though more modest I would think she came closest in spirit to Franz Schmidt.