Zemlinsky: Sonata for Cello - Movement II

We have the humorist and Z Cars theme writer Fritz Spiegl to thank for Alexander Zemlinsky’s Cello Sonata. It is an extraordinarily beautiful piece, crucial to understanding Zemlinsky’s development as a composer – and how it ever came to light is a shaggy dog story to rival anything from Spiegl’s pen.
Never published, the Sonata was originally dedicated to Friedrich Buxbaum, cellist of the Rosé Quartet and principal cellist of the Vienna Hofoper under Mahler and his successors. Buxbaum’s own successors were conscientious curators of their descendant’s papers, but they were somewhat less careful with their toner cartidge: they sent Spiegl, a celebrated collector of obscure music, a photocopy of the mysterious manuscript, but Spiegl couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and handed it to the pianist Peter Wallfisch, who couldn’t make sense of it either. Twenty years later, Zemlinsky’s biographer Antony Beaumont was contacted by Wallfisch’s son Raphael. Beaumont finally put the pieces together, tracked down the original manuscript, and restored to the world one of the more heart-stopping pieces of the cello repertoire.

Tags

Adrian Brendel, Brahms, cello, Malvern, sonata, Tim Horton, Vienna, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg