{"id":121018,"date":"2024-01-23T12:54:40","date_gmt":"2024-01-23T11:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/programm\/termin\/other-en\/der-sohn-des-lebens-121018\/"},"modified":"2024-02-02T18:38:32","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T17:38:32","slug":"der-sohn-des-lebens","status":"publish","type":"event","link":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/programm\/termin\/concert\/der-sohn-des-lebens-121018\/","title":{"rendered":"The Son of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paul Ben-Haim (1897 \u2013 1984): String quartet op. 21<\/strong><\/p>\n

Con moto sereno
\nMolto vivace
\nLarge e molto sostenuto
\nRondo-Finale. Allegretto commodo<\/p>\n

2 p. m. room 306<\/strong> Orient and occident
\nmovement 2 and 4<\/p>\n

2.30 p. m. room 320<\/strong> China and Europe
\nmovement 3 and 4<\/p>\n

3 p. m. room 320 <\/strong>
\nmovement 2 and 4<\/p>\n

3.30 p. m. room 306 <\/strong>
\nmovement 3 and 4<\/p>\n

Musicians<\/strong>:
\nErez Ofer, violin
\nNadine Contini, violin
\nAlejandro Regueira Caumel, viola
\nHans-Jakob Eschenburg, violoncello<\/p>\n

A dreamy coexistence of four voices of equal rank and yet for long stretches a searching dialogue in brittle fourth and fifth melodies: Paul Ben-Haim’s String Quartet op. 21 is both intriguing and puzzling. In his use of the two intervals fourth and fifth, the composer avoids the third, which generally defines the tonal gender and gives direction to tonal music – to which this work, composed in 1937, belongs.<\/p>\n

Paul Ben-Haim was born Paul Frankenburger in Munich in 1897. After graduating from high school in Munich, he studied composition with Friedrich Klose and Walter Courvoisier and piano with Berthold Kellermann at the Akademie der Tonkunst in his home city from 1915 to 1920. He began his musical career as assistant conductor to Hans Knappertsbusch and Bruno Walter at the Bavarian State Theatre. From 1924, he was Kapellmeister in Augsburg, a position he lost in 1931 due to increasing anti-Semitic hostility. Paul Frankenburger emigrated from Germany as early as 1933 and lived in Tel Aviv as a composer and conductor. In Palestine, he learnt Hebrew and chose the surname Ben-Haim: “son of life”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t

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The turning point<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Even before his emigration to Palestine, Paul Frankenburger had composed more than 80 piano songs in the style of Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler. His early chamber music and choral works also ranged stylistically between Mahler, Reger and Strauss. Immediately after arriving in the Middle East, Paul Ben-Haim realised that he would not find any interest in his music, which was based on German Romanticism. He reacted astonishingly quickly and flexibly to the new challenges, so that Paul Ben-Haim’s music differed fundamentally from that of Paul Frankenburger. While texts by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Eduard M\u00f6rike, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Christian Morgenstern, Joseph von Eichendorff and Hugo von Hofmannsthal were his daily companions in Germany, Sephardic melodies, biblical texts and poems by contemporary Jewish writers found their way into his compositions in Palestine. The Yemenite singer Bracha Zephira taught him to understand Jewish and Arabic songs, so that the study of their melodies and rhythms influenced his works from then on.<\/p>\n

A string quartet speaks volumes<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The first work written in Palestine after four years of pianistic and conducting activity was the String Quartet op. 21. The new tone reflected the unmistakable distance from German traditions. “Instead of polyphony, there are parallel shifted sounds, instead of chromaticism, diatonicism, instead of development, order. Paul Ben-Haim was looking for a new synthesis of Western and Eastern musical styles” (Albrecht D\u00fcmling). The new string quartet immediately became one of the most popular chamber music works written in Palestine. At the same time, the composer ordered that all the music he had written before 1933 was to be destroyed – which fortunately did not happen and was later relativised by the composer himself.<\/p>\n

In his only string quartet meaning derives from a compositional style, which will later manifest itself in the two symphonies (1940 and 1945), the Piano Sonatina op. 38 (1946) and the symphonically conceived Piano Concerto op. 41 (1949): Oriental melodies merge with influences of French Impressionism, dance rhythms meet dreamy pauses. Prayer-like sequences are replaced by passages of percussive drama. This is particularly true of the quartet’s finale, where Jewish themes and dance rhythms form the substance. Delicately sad interludes abruptly interrupt the exuberance, only to shake off the gloom again and again – right up to the desperately defiant conclusion, which seems as if something precious has been broken.<\/p>\n

This is preceded by two movements: a Scherzo in an agitated gallop, which has several interruptions with an elegiac undertone, finally taking on ghostly dimensions before the music fades away with Mendelssohnian elegance, as if in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. And a Largo molto e sostenuto, whose basic pulse consists of extremely slow quarter notes (40 beats per minute, i.e. much slower than the resting pulse of a human being). Even this great song does not manage without a violent climax in the centre. The predominant melodic direction in all four movements is a permanent downward movement – known for 500 years in musical rhetoric for not necessarily confident messages.<\/p>\n

The string quartet echoes the bitter caesura of forced emigration. Paul Ben-Haim’s first symphony, composed in 1940, already recognises the catastrophe of the systematic persecution of the Jews and the horrors of the Second World War. Hurried marching rhythms and the brutal percussion depict the horror. But the symphony also contains resounding symbols of consolation and hope. European idioms merge with Israeli and Arabic ones, sacred with secular music, folk music with art music.<\/p>\n

Far beyond the artistic idea, Paul Ben-Haim pursues a social ideal – an equal coexistence in Palestine, where people of different origins and cultures can benefit from and interact with each other. This ethos qualifies Paul Ben-Haim as one of the founding fathers of Israeli musical life. Numerous students, including Tzvi Avni, Ben-Zion Orgad, Ami Maayani and Noam Sheriff, followed in his footsteps. Ben-Haim received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972 and died in Tel Aviv in 1984.<\/p>\n

Steffen Georgi, concert dramaturge of the RSB<\/em><\/p>\n

Micro Concert #2 is part of a series of concerts in which RSB musicians engage into a dialogue with the exhibitions. The Humboldt Forum and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin are jointly organising the Micro Concerts on Museum Sundays until June 2024 – as part of the RSB’s 100th anniversary.<\/p>\n

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