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Symphonie Nr. 5 in E major (“Lenore”), Op. 177 by Joachim Raff (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a928795

1534-150X

Marie Sumner Lott,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: Symphonie Nr. 5 in E major ("Lenore"), Op. 177 by Joachim Raff Marie Sumner Lott Joachim Raff. Symphonie Nr. 5 in E major ("Lenore"), Op. 177. Edited by Iris Eggenschwiler, in collaboration with the Joachim-Raff-Archiv Lachen. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2022. (Partitur-Bibliothek Urtext) [1 score (x, 220 pp.) PB 5698 ISMN: 9790004216354, $111] The year 2022 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of composer Joseph Joachim Raff (1822–1882). In recognition of this milestone, a year-long festival of performances, exhibitions, publications, and conferences took place in his hometown, Lachen (Switzerland), where the Joachim Raff Society maintains an archive of scores and other memorabilia and fosters research into the composer's life and works. (An extended report in German, or "Schlüssbericht," on the 2022 Jubilee is available at the Raff Society's website: https://joachim-raff.ch/raff-foerderwerk-2022/.) The 2022 Jubilee also celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Raff Society's founding in 1972. A Swiss composer who spent most of his adult career in Germany, and whose music found champions in Britain, the United States, and Italy during the 1870s through 1900s, Raff demonstrates the cosmopolitan nature of concert music in that era. He achieved both renown among music purchasers and audiences and respect from his peers and professional colleagues, who included Felix Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Hans von Bülow, and his symphonies in particular were some of the most frequently performed and highly regarded works of the era. Some contemporaries criticized him as overly productive (i.e., not critical enough of his own work to refine pieces that needed greater polish before sending them out into the world) and too willing to publish light pieces for the salon that seemed to contradict his reputation as a serious musician. But his catalog of compositions in almost every genre of his day shows how composers of the late nineteenth century, especially those without lucrative court appointments, which mostly ceased to exist in Raff's lifetime, made a comfortable living by addressing their work to a broad musical public, writing in styles and genres that ran the gamut from the ephemeral entertainments of the parlor to the almost religious rituals of the theater and concert hall. Perhaps to demonstrate that range of creative activity, the Raff-Archiv collaborated with music publisher Breitkopf & Härtel to produce a collection of new "Anniversary Urtext Editions" of representative works from Raff's output, released to coincide with the anniversary in 2022. The series includes two piano sonatas (opuses 14 and 168) and a set of twelve piano pieces titled Frühlingsboten (Signs of Spring, op. 55); several chamber works for string quartet (opuses 77, 90, and 192), piano with violin (Six Morceaux, op. 85), and piano with cello (Sonata, op. 183); two choral works, the cantata Die Tageszeiten (Times of Day, op. 209) and a biblical oratorio Welt-Ende—Gerich—Neue Welt (World's End—Judgement—New World, op. 212); and two works for orchestra, a cello concerto (opus 193) and Raff's Fifth Symphony, reviewed here. This selection, a tiny sampling from Raff's 214 published works, provides a welcome introduction to the composer and to the range of genres and styles prominent in the musical life of Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. Raff composed his Fifth Symphony "Lenore" in E Major in 1872, so the [End Page 731] work fits nicely with the anniversary theme of the set. According to the preface by editor Iris Eggenschwiler, it was one of the more popular and well received symphonic works Raff composed in his lifetime. Alongside his Symphony No. 3 "Im Wald," op. 153 (1869, published 1871), "Lenore" played an important role in establishing Raff's reputation in German cities and abroad (p. viii). For modern students of nineteenth-century musical life, the work also demonstrates Raff's precarious historical position between two opposing aesthetic schools and provides a good example of the "middle path" that some composers of symphonies and other classical genres sought to stake out for themselves after the mid-century. A student and colleague of Liszt who was, nonetheless, critical of the...