Karl Weigl - Symphony No. 5 "Apocalyptic Symphony" (1945)

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Symphony No. 5 "Apocalyptic Symphony" (1945)

I. Evocation: Moderato - Allegro moderato [0:00]

II. The Dance around the Golden Calf: Allegro moderato [16:11]

III. Paradise Lost: Adagio [23:20]

IV. The Four Horsemen: Allegro moderato [38:55]

The fifth symphony by the prolific Austrian composer Karl Ignaz Weigl (1881-1949). Weigl was a composition student of Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Music Academy and a musicology student of Guido Adler at the University of Vienna, where Anton Webern was among his classmates. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, Weigl fled the country with his family and moved to the United States, where he assumed important teaching positions at the Hartt School of Music, Brooklyn College, Boston Conservatory and Philadelphia Academy of Music.

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The Apocalyptic Symphony was composed at the height of the Second World War. Its dedication to the memory of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a gesture of solidarity with the United States, as well as an expression of gratitude to the country that had offered the composer safe haven in a dangerous time. Weigl never lived to see the symphony's 1968 premiere at Carnegie Hall by conductor Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra. The work opens with a striking theatrical gesture: The orchestra is instructed to enter the stage at their own leisure and begin tuning their instruments; suddenly, the conductor emerges on stage and cues the three trombonists who are situated on a raised platform behind the orchestra to begin the Evocation. Thus, order emerges from chaos. The second movement, characterized by heavy rhythms, quasi-Jewish themes in the Phrygian mode and echoes of the Dies irae, evokes the Dance around the Golden Calf, a well-known episode in the Book of Exodus where the Israelites begin worshiping a false idol at the foot of Mount Sinai. In this case it is clear that for Weigl, the false idol is the Nazi ideology. The profoundly nostalgic slow third movement is marked "Paradise Lost". The symphony closes with an ominous vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse marching inexorably towards destruction. Nevertheless, the climactic coda is marked by the joyful pealing of bells - could it be a hint of good hope of the future?

Conductor: Thomas Sanderling

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin

Karl Weigl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Ignaz Weigl (6 February 1881 - 11 August 1949) was an Austrian composer. He was born in Vienna, being the son of a bank official who was also a keen amateur musician. Alexander Zemlinsky took him as a private pupil in 1896. Weigl went to school at the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium and graduated from there in 1899. After that, he continued his studies at the Vienna Music Academy, where he became a composition pupil of Robert Fuchs, and also enrolled at the University of Vienna, studying musicology under Guido Adler, having Anton Webern as a classmate. His only opera, Der Rattenfänger von Hameln, premiered in Vienna in 1932.[1]

When the Nazis occupied Austria, in 1938, Weigl emigrated to the United States of America, together with his second wife, musician and composer Vally Weigl (née Pick), and his son. There, he obtained a number of increasingly important teaching posts: at the Hartt School of Music, at Brooklyn College, at the Boston Conservatory and, from 1948 on, at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. He died in New York after a prolonged battle with bone marrow cancer.

Weigl wrote many compositions including symphonies, chamber music pieces including string quartets, and songs for solo piano.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Weigl

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For later.

thanks!

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Thank you for pointing me to this.

That was a beautiful piece.