Zubin Mehta, are you reading me?
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
If you’ve never heard of the composer Walter Kaufmann, you are not alone. A Czech Jew in Hitler’s Germany, Kaufmann was hired as a composer by an Indian friend who was founding a film company in Bombay. He was soon promoted to head of music at All India Radio, co-founded (with Meli Mehta) Bombay’s Chamber Music Society and lectured at the University.
As political winds shifted, he migrated in 1946 to London, where he composed for Arthur Rank Films. He moved on again to become the first music director in Winnipeg, Canada, and again in 1957 to teach at Bloomington, Indiana, where he died in 1984. Now you see why you’ve never heard of him? None of his music was published….
Read on here.
And here.
I listened to that album a couple of weeks ago, particularly the Indian Symphony and Symphony No.3. And liked it quite a bit. It’s colorful, it doesn’t succumb to old-age “exotic” music cliches, and – most importantly – it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Kaufmann is no Bruckner imitation. Thank God, because we’ve got too many of those already.
I am not sure what time frame was intended with N.L.’s statement that “none of his music was published,” but some of it is available now. See, for example
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/explore?q=Walter%20Kaufmann&Ntt=Walter%20Kaufmann&aff_id=50330
I assume that is the same Walter Kaufmann.
in November Kaufmann’s 2nd Symphony and some other orchestral works will be performed for the first time in Europe:
https://www.theaterregensburg.de/produktionen/2-philharmonisches-konzert-fernweh.html
It’s an excellent moment to discuss Maestro Metha: this blog should note how impressively active he’s been over the past year. Besides his usual 2 weeks with LAPhil as CE, he lead them on a short tour of S. Calif with SJ Cho; then took the Munich Phil on a multi-week EU & USA tour that included a stop at Carnegie Hall where he was showered with applause; showed up with Vienna Phil the other day (and likely other EU bookings); and will return to the Hollywood Bowl this summer for the first time in over 20 years. Onward!
I dd his opera, ‘The Scarlet Letter’, in Bloomington, many years ago, and knew him personally.
Sounds like would be a nice new addition to James Conlon’s “Recovered Voices” project. Did he write any operas?
I’ve listened to the recording of his piano concerto, so great! Also chamber music.
And actually, Doblinger has published some things, at least the ones on the CD recordings.
I was fortunate to have taken a Musicology course with Professor Kaufmann prior to his retirement at IU and enjoyed it immensely. Learned a lot too!
I studied musicology with Prof. Joseph Kerman at University of California. He never recanted his statement about Tosca!
Highly interesting. Years ago I did research on Kaufmann and published an article, “Walter Kaufmann and the Winnipeg Ballet: A Fruitful Collaboration Soon Forgotten”, Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique 14, no. 2: 89–99 (2014). A German scholar named Agata Schindler published quite a lot on him (mostly in German but sometimes in English). It is not true that “none” of his music was published, but it may be true of his post-emigration output. There may be a lot of high-quality music to be discovered in his archives in Bloomington; I would recommend his two scores for the (Royal) Winnipeg Ballet, “Visages” and ” The Rose and the Ring,” which have not been performed since at least 1954. The autograph of a symphony (his Fifth, I believe) is at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa; it experiments with dodecaphony (which says nothing about its quality, of course).
It’s amazing, gratifying and kind of frustrating how much unknown music is out there. Some of it we get to hear and it’s a great time to be alive when companies like CPO are digging through the libraries of forgotten music. Maybe no earth-shattering masterpieces will be found, and that’s ok. There’s a lot to enjoy.