René Leibowitz
He was historically significant in promoting the music of the Second Viennese School in Paris after the Second World War, and teaching a new generation of serialist composers.
Although his compositional ideas remained strictly serialist, as a conductor Leibowitz had broad sympathies, performing works by composers as diverse as Gluck, Beethoven, Brahms, Offenbach and Ravel, and his repertory extended to include pieces by Gershwin, Puccini, Sullivan and Johann Strauss.
[3] According to his pupil and translator, Jan Maguire, who wrote two studies of him for Tempo magazine in the late 1970s, Leibowitz was of Russian Jewish parentage; his father was an art historian.
[4] During the First World War the family was obliged to move from Warsaw to Berlin, where, Maguire writes, Leibowitz began a career as a concert violinist at the age of ten.
[5] Neither is now believed to be correct: Sabine Meine wrote in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 2001, "Leibowitz's claims of having met Schoenberg and studied with Webern in the early 1930s remain unsubstantiated",[3] and in 2012 Nicole Gagné wrote in the Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, "despite his claims to the contrary, he never studied with Arnold Schoenberg or Anton Webern".
[9] For Leibowitz, according to Maguire, composing was his most regular activity, and the one he thought most important, although he was known more for his commentaries, his critical and analytical writings, his conducting, and his teaching, all of which he considered secondary.
He did not succeed in emigrating, but, as the musicologist Reinhard Kapp puts it, "managed to survive somehow, partly hidden by [Georges] Bataille in Paris, at other times with his family in the Unoccupied Zone".
[4] After the liberation Leibowitz resumed his interrupted career, teaching, conducting and writing, drawing on the extensive material he had produced during his enforced wartime seclusion.
The book was among the earliest theoretical treatises on Schoenberg's twelve-tone method of composition; Leibowitz (like Humphrey Searle) was among the first theorists to promulgate the term "serialism".
[16] Grove has articles on thirty-two composers who studied with Leibowitz in Paris or attended his sessions at Darmstadt or elsewhere: as well as Boulez and Monod, they include Vinko Globokar; Hans Werner Henze; Diego Masson; Serge Nigg; and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
[n 2] The writer Joan Peyser summed up Leibowitz's career: one long splendid moment in his life, stretching from Paris in 1944 through Darmstadt in 1948, devoted to the promulgation of Schoenbergian ideas.
When, in the late 40s and early 50s, Webern displaced Schoenberg as the venerated man and composers applied the serial idea beyond pitch, Leibowitz's time had passed.
They were Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles; Gluck's Alceste and L'ivrogne corrigé; Mozart's Zaïde; Offenbach's La Belle Hélène and Orphée aux enfers; and Ravel's L'Heure espagnole.
[18] A set of Ravel's orchestral works was less well reviewed,[19] but Leibowitz received qualified praise for his set of Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder ("Leibowitz makes a serious attempt to produce a convincing performance; his slow tempi find justification in Schoenberg's markings, but his artists cannot persuade us that Gurre-Lieder is other than an historical curiosity").
[24] In 1995 Richard Taruskin, analysing a selection of Beethoven recordings, concluded that Leibowitz, like Scherchen, delivered performances that were musically and musicologically superior to more recent attempts by "authentic" conductors such as Christopher Hogwood.
[22] By the 21st century the performances had come to seem old-fashioned, in the view of a critic in Fanfare, who found them more akin to those by Herbert von Karajan than to those by specialist authenticists such as Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner.
They included large-scale works such as The Rite of Spring, symphonies by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and concertos by Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, as well as short pieces by more than thirty composers ranging from Bach to Gershwin, from Wagner to Sullivan, Puccini and Johann Strauss.
