1929 – Roaring Twenties Woodwind Quintets

Henk Badings

Henk Bading’s Wind Quintet No. 1 was written in 1929 and was published in Amsterdam by Stichting Donemus. It’s duration is about 15 minutes but I have not been able to find any recording of the 1929 quintet online or in catalogs.

Badings used a somewhat confusing dual numbering system, so his Wind Quintet No. 1 is also called Kwintet No. II (Quintet No. 1 being for a different quintet instrumentation). His Wind Quintet No. 2 is also known as Quintet No. 4 and recordings may use either numbering system. Sometimes he also used Roman numerals in his numbering system.

Henk Badings was born on January 17, 1907 in Bandung in Java, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). His Dutch parents died and left him an orphan in 1915 when he traveled to the Netherlands to be raised by guardians. Although he studied violin and piano, his guardians insisted he attend the Delft Polytechnical Institute, where he graduated as a mining engineer and paleontologist. So his first woodwind quintet was a student work, but from a student sufficiently advanced to have his First Symphony performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra the following year, beginning a fruitful collaboration with the ensemble. By 1934, he was teaching composition and theory at the Rotterdam Conservatory.

During the 1941 to 1945 German occupation of The Netherlands, Badings directed the State Conservatory in The Hague, for which, in 1946, he was accused and convicted of being a collaborator with the Germans. But by 1948, the Concertgebouw commissioned him to write his Fifth Symphony for their 60^th anniversary. His Second Woodwind Quintet (Quintet No. 4) was also finished in 1948, and is the work normally performed and recorded by woodwind quintets. Badings would later do a great deal of experimentation with microtones, different scale systems, and electronic music, but his second woodwind quintet is relatively conservative. By the time of his death on June 26, 1987 in Maarheeze, Netherlands, he had written over 1000 compositions and received international acclaim and a reputation as an excellent teacher.

Other chamber music for winds by Henk Badings include:

• Trio [No. 1] (1943) for oboe, clarinet and bassoon, published in Amsterdam by Donemus in 1948.
• Trio No. 2 (1949) for oboe, clarinet and bassoon published by Donemus in 1949.
• Trio No. 4A (1946) for 2 oboes and English horn.
• Trio XII (1986) for clarinet, English horn and bassoon.
• Sextet for woodwind quintet and piano of 1952.
• Octet (also 1952) for clarinet, bassoon, horn, 2 violins, viola, cello and bass.

For larger wind ensembles, Badings wrote Reflections for wind orchestra; a Concerto for Flute and Wind Orchestra No. 2 (1963); a Concerto for [4] Saxophones and concert band in E-flat Major “Quadrupelconcert,” and a Sinfonietta for Concert Band No. 2.

Pavel Haas

Pavel Haas’s Wind Quintet, Op. 10 (1929) was published in Berlin by Bote & Bock in 1992 (also available through Boosey & Hawkes). Also in Prague by Tempo (which I’m not familiar with), and in the U.S. by McGinnis & Marx Music.

Pavel Haas, born June 21, 1899 in Brno, Moravia (now Czechia), was a student of Janáček. The quintet is dedicated to the Moravian Wind Quintet (founded by František Suchý Brnensky, see 1928) who premiered it in 1930. The work is 16 minutes long. The movements are: 1. Preludio–Andante ma vivace; 2. Preghiera–Misterioso e triste; 3. Ballo eccentrico–Ritmo marcato; and 4. Epilogo–Maestoso. There are several excellent performances of this work on YouTube.

Known as Janáček’s best student, he was still forging his own artistic vision when he created his quintet. (Note that Janáček had completed his sextet, Mladi, for woodwind quintet and bass clarinet in 1924, just five years earlier.) In general, Haas’s quintet is fairly somber, except for the third movement which is light-hearted with comical glissandos towards the end. The quintet is substantial and unique, standing up to the standards of the more well-known composers in this list.

In 1941, Haas was deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. (Before then, he had officially divorced his wife Sona so she and their daughter, Olga, could avoid the same fate.) Although he had contacted family and a fellow composer in the United States to try to get legal passage to New York, the permission did not arrive in time.

Haas continued composing at least eight more compositions while at the camp. In 1944, the Nazis remodeled Theresienstadt before a planned visit by the Red Cross. According to the noted Czech conductor Karel Ancerl (who was also a prisoner there), Hitler attended a concert there to show the “cultural” aspects of the camp and how well-treated the prisoners were. In the propaganda film made at the time, Theresienstadt children sing Hans Krása’s opera Brundibár, and Haas is filmed taking a bow after a performance of his Study for Strings conducted by Ancerl.

After the Red Cross and the film crew left, 18,000 prisoners, including Pavel Haas and the children who were filmed performing, were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where they were all executed in the gas chambers.

Personal note: Ever since I started writing this series I’ve tried to come up with some lesson or summation of Pavel Haas’s music or life, but I keep coming up against the previous paragraphs and, in spite of all I’ve learned about Nazis and World War II over the years, I’m still speechless.

Szymon Laks

The Quintet of 1929 is reportedly lost. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Laks.

Szymon Laks (also listed as Simon Laks) was born November 1, 1901, in Warsaw, Poland, to a musical Jewish family. He studied mathematics for two years at Vilnius University before entering the Warsaw Academy of Music. His teachers there were Roman Statkowski, Henryk Melcer-Szczawinski, and Piotr Rytel (from 1921 to 1924). Earlier in this blog, we noted that American composers flocked to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and others, but the same phenomenon was common for Polish composers. Laks, after a brief stop in Vienna where he earned a living playing piano for silent films, made the same Parisian pilgrimage, studying with Paul Antonin Vidal and Henri Rabaud at the Conservatoire. It was during or just after these studies that Laks wrote his woodwind quintet for a Parisian audience.

In 1941, he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Pithiviers, France, then, in 1942 shipped to Auschwitz. There, he became a conductor of the camp orchestra which was ordered to perform twice a day for the entrance and exit of the German guards. In October, 1944 he was transferred to Dachau and managed to survive until the camp was liberated by the American army in April 29, 1945. Much of his music was destroyed during the war years, and that fate might have included his woodwind quintet. (Laks wrote of his experiences in the book, Musiques d’un autre monde (later published in English.) Laks returned to Paris after his liberation, became a French citizen, and was active in promoting Polish composers in Paris and rebuilding his repertoire. He wrote no more woodwind quintets, but did write a Concertino pour Trio d’Anches in 1965 and a Concerto da Camera for wind ensemble. In later life he was active in translating between French and Polish, and he also wrote a number of books. He died in Paris on December 11, 1983 at age 82.

Willem Pijper

Pijper’s Quintet voor blazers (Quintet for Winds), K. 80 was written in 1929. It was published in Amsterdam by Donemus in 1949, and was also available from C. F. Peters. It is a 10 minute work.

Born on September 8, 1894, near Utrecht in The Netherlands. The young Willem seems to have suffered from asthma and bronchitis, so he was home-schooled instead of attending elementary school. He was also self-taught in music until he attended the Utrecht Academy of Music in 1915. His few years study there with Johan Wagenaar were his only formal training in composition. The rest of his life was an exercise in discovery to develop his own, unique compositional technique. His Symphony No. 1 is described as Mahler-esque, but from then on his works were based on his own system of polytonality, using variations on a single musical cell, that edged on atonality, but was quite distinct from Schoenberg’s 12-tone style. This technique made Pijper one of the most advanced composers and theorists in Europe during his lifetime. He was also a pianist, a critic and a music journalist.

World War II was difficult for Pijper. His home was destroyed by the German bombardment of Rotterdam. Fortunately he had had the foresight to put his manuscripts in a safe-deposit box several months earlier. During the war he spent years working on an opera about Merlin and the Arthurian legend, which might have initiated an entirely new stage in his creativity, but he never completed it. Shortly after the war, on March 18, 1947, he died of cancer.

His other works with winds include a Septet for flute/piccolo, oboe/English horn, clarinet, bassoon, horn, double bass and piano (1920); a Sextet for woodwind quintet and piano (1923); Phantasie on Mozart’s Phantasie für eine Spieluhr for woodwind quintet and piano (1927); and a Trio for flute, clarinet and bassoon (1926-1927).

All of Pijper’s other works for winds were written before he finished his woodwind quintet, (as were four of his five string quartets) making the 1920s his most productive decade of chamber music. The 1929 Quintet was his last chamber work for winds. (Of his chamber works, only his unfinished String Quartet No. 5 (1946) and his Sonata for solo violin were written later.) All this would suggest that his quintet was a summation of his work in the medium.

I must confess that I was unfamiliar with Pijper’s music before listening to his 1929 Quintet and his Sextet for woodwind quintet and piano, written in 1923, on YouTube. Whereas, in Vienna, Schoenberg developed his 12-tone technique, which he considered the logical next step from hyper-romanticism, Pijper, in Holland, offers an alternative in his use of extended polytonality instead of atonality. Pijper’s Sextet repeats themes polyphonically in different key centers which, at times, can be as dissonant as Schoenberg’s, but at other times offers a tonal respite. For example, at the very end of his Sextet, a series of chords creates an ending that sounds almost Debussian in its final bars.

In his Quintet, written six years later, nobody will accuse any of his harmonies of being Debussian. In fact, the rhythmic intensity and difficulty has now increased and, to these ears, sounds like a worthy alternative to anything in the Viennese School. But Pijper’s music is not only distinct from Schoenberg, it also is independent of Hindemith, Stravinsky, and the French schools of composition of the early twentieth century.

Pijper often used an “octatonic” scale built on alternating whole and half tones. His use of variations of “germ cells,” where an opening chord or motif becomes the basis for all the following harmonic and melodic development, might not be entirely divorced from the ways that Sibelius picked apart tonal cells in his music, but the soundscape is entirely unique. In other words, whether you love or hate Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, you should still study and perform Pijper’s Quintet if you want to explore and understand the tug of war between musical styles and musical minds in this marvelous jumble of music of the 1920s.

Miroslav Ponc

Miroslav Ponc’s Tri veselé kresby (Three Merry Drawings) was written in 1929 but not published.

Miroslav Ponc was probably one of the busiest composers of the early 20^th century that you have never heard of. It doesn’t help that his only quintet was either not published, or not currently available. Ponc was born in a small town in Bohemia, now Vysoké Mýto, in the Czech Republic. In 1930 he graduated from the Prague Conservatory, studying with Josef Suk, and later with Arnold Schoenberg (in 1927 and again in 1932), and then with Alois Haba (one of the creators of microtonal and “athematic” music styles).

Ponc was also a noted pianist, organist, conductor and painter/artist. He developed interest in such movements as Bauhaus, Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivism and Expressionism. The Berlin-based art group, Der Sturm, was a major influence. While in Berlin, he also studied Chinese, Javanese, and Siamese art at the Museum of Ethnology. He would become invested in theater works (over 250 scores), radio (over 300 scores), and film music. Much of his career was in the theater.

Of his time during World War II and later in the Communist period of Czechoslovakia, there is virtually nothing I could find excerpt one sentence in Grove Music Online. Perhaps, someday, a Czech musicologist or a musician will open an old, dusty box in some archive or library and come across this quintet.

Although it only has only a little bit of biographical information about Ponc, himself, a PDF article by Petr Haas, from the Czech Music Information Centre and distributed by Karel-Ancerl.com, is a good overview of the period of modernist Czech music expression between the wars. It also mentions Pavel Haas and Emil Burian, other quintet composers of this decade.

Thomas Wood

The woodwind quintetThe Brewhouse at Bures (1928) by Thomas Wood was published in London by Stainer & Bell in 1929.

Thomas Wood (born November 28, 1892 in Chorley, Lancashire in Britain; died 19 November 1950 in Wasperton, in the United Kingdom) was a British composer who had several passions in his life. Being the son of a Master Mariner, he loved the sea and composed many vocal works about it. He traveled to Australia and was a student of Australian culture and folk-music. He, of course, loved music. He was also almost blind. And he was fascinated by ghosts. From the title of his only quintet, one would think it was about a local pub. It could be. But after he married, he moved into his wife’s estate in Parsonage Hall, in Bures, Suffolk, which had a wing called “The Brewhouse.” According to the composer and other visitors, it was haunted and there were several stories about hearing a man and woman arguing where no man and woman belonged. Without knowing the composition, it is difficult to tell which brewhouse he was referring to, but I think it was the haunted one. (See http://www.bures.org.uk/biography.htm , under Dr. Thomas Wood, Part II.)

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