Hans Pfitzner
This hardened several difficult traits in Pfitzner's personality: an elitism believing he was entitled to sinecures for his contributions to German art and for the hard work of his youth, notorious social awkwardness and a lack of tact, a sincere belief that his music was under-recognized and under-appreciated with a tendency for his sympathizers to form cults around him, a patronizing style with his publishers, and a feeling that he had been personally slighted by Germany's enemies.
[2] His bitterness and cultural pessimism deepened in the 1920s with the death of his wife in 1926 and with meningitis affecting his older son Paul, who was committed to institutionalized medical care.
In 1895, Richard Bruno Heydrich sang the title role in the premiere of people like Hans Pfitzner's first opera, Der arme Heinrich, based on the poem of the same name by Hartmann von Aue.
Pfitzner's magnum opus was Palestrina, which had its premiere in Munich on 12 June 1917 under the baton of Jewish conductor Bruno Walter.
On the day before he died in February 1962, Walter dictated his last letter, which ended "Despite all the dark experiences of today I am still confident that Palestrina will remain.
[3] Easily the most celebrated of Pfitzner's prose works is his pamphlet Futuristengefahr ("Danger of Futurists"), written in response to Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music.
"Busoni," Pfitzner complained, "places all his hopes for Western music in the future and understands the present and past as a faltering beginning, as the preparation.
Moodie became its leading exponent, and performed it over 50 times in Germany with conductors such as Pfitzner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hans Knappertsbusch, Hermann Scherchen, Karl Muck, Carl Schuricht, and Fritz Busch.
[citation needed] Increasingly nationalistic in his middle and old age, Pfitzner was at first regarded sympathetically by important figures in Nazi Germany, in particular by Hans Frank, with whom he remained on good terms.
It was while the former was a hospital patient: Pfitzner had undergone a gall bladder operation when Anton Drexler, who knew both men well, arranged a visit.
For example, he recommended the performance of Marschner's opera Der Templer und die Jüdin based on Scott's Ivanhoe, protected his Jewish pupil Felix Wolfes of Cologne, along with conductor Furtwängler aided the young conductor Hans Schwieger, who had a Jewish wife, and maintained his friendship with Bruno Walter and especially his childhood journalist friend Paul Cossman, a "self-loathing" non-practicing Jew who was incarcerated in 1933.
In 1938, Pfitzner joked that he was afraid to see a celebrated eye doctor in Munich because "his great-grandmother had once observed a quarter-Jew crossing the street."
In the early thirties he often accompanied famed contralto Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann, later murdered in Auschwitz, in recitals and had dedicated his four songs, Op.
Pfitzner's home having been destroyed in the war by Allied bombing, and his membership in the Munich Academy of Music having been revoked for his speaking out against Nazism, the composer in 1945 found himself homeless and mentally ill.
Furtwängler conducted a performance of his Symphony in C major at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the summer of 1949, just after the composer's death.
Following long neglect, Pfitzner's music began to reappear in opera houses, concert halls and recording studios during the 1990s, including a controversial performance of the Covent Garden production of Palestrina in Manhattan's Lincoln Center in 1997.
Biographer Hans Peter Vogel wrote that Pfitzner was the only composer of the Nazi era who attempted to come to grips with National Socialism both intellectually and spiritually after 1945.
[6] In 2001, Sabine Busch examined the ideological tug-of-war of the composer's involvement with the National Socialists, based in part on previously unavailable material.
[2] Pfitzner's music—including pieces in all the major genres except the symphonic poem—was respected by contemporaries such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, although neither man cared much for Pfitzner's innately acerbic manner (and Alma Mahler repaid his adoration with contempt, despite her agreement with his intuitive musical idealism, a fact evident in her letters to the wife of Alban Berg).
His is a highly personal offshoot of the Classical/Romantic tradition as well as the conservative musical aesthetic[8] and Pfitzner defended his style in his own writings.
