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Spinner's Violin Sonata – Why op. 1?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
Leopold Spinner composed his Sonata for Violin and Piano at the age of 30, in Vienna, in late 1936, while Studying with Webern. It was performed in Vienna on 22 November of that year under the auspices of the Austrian Section of the ISCM. In 1940—having in the meantime been forced to emigrate to this country—he made a slightly revised version of the work, which seems to have remained unheard until this year.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987
References
1 It was recorded for an ORF broadcast on 12 March by Ernst Kovacic and Ivan Erdd. Kovacic, with David Owen Norris, gives the UK premiere on 25 June as part of the Almeida Festival.
2 Busch, Regina, ‘Leopold Spinner: A List of his Works’ in TEMPO 154 (09 1985), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.
3 In fact the first work of Spinner which seems to have been born with an opus-number was the impressive large-scale Overture dedicated to Schocnbcrg on his 70th Birthday, which was intended to be op.4—but that number was finally attached to the Piano Concerto of 1947, and Spinner seems never to have referred to the Overture's existence after sending Schoenberg a presentation copy.
4 By the ORTF Quartet at a concert to mark the opening of a Spinner Exhibition at the Österreichisches Nationalbibliotek, on 16 December 1986.
5 Given their first performance on the same occasion as the Quartet.
6 The term is Regina Busch's: for a close and revealing analysis of the first song, see her ‘Bemerkungen über das Lied “Selbtvergcssenheit” von Leopold Spinner’ in Professor Rudolf Stephan zum 3. April 1985 von seinen Schülern (Berlin, 1985)Google Scholar.
7 The Sonata exists in no less than four manuscripts: two in pencil and one in ink, all from around November 1936, and a second ink manuscript constituting the 1940 revision. The ink Ms. of 1936, which includes a separate violin part, constituted the performing material for the Vienna première: a facsimile of its first page appears on p.35 of TEMPO 154. The 1940 Ms, written by Spinner in a considerably bolder hand, enshrines some minor revisions (notably the alteration of the first–movement tempo from Andante to Moderato, and a new version of the work's last two bars), but also a reworking of the third section (bars 29–42) of the first movement—a passage which had already been progressively modified in the second and third of the 1936 Mss.—and the metrical displacement of the next section (bars 43–56). Information in this footnote is partly derived from Busch, Regina, Leopold Spinner, Dokumenle mid Studien, in the series Musik der Zeil (Bonn: Boosey & Hawkes)Google Scholar to be published later this year.
8 A very early appearance, maybe the earliest, of a characteristic which Michael Graubart first drew attention to in his analysis of the Piano Concerto (TEMPO 109, p.6). It perhaps arose—though we have insufficient evidence to be certain—as an extension of Webern's methods in his Piano Variations, where he makes the last note of the row coincide with the first of the next form. See Spinner's analysis of the first movement of Webern's op.27 in A short Introduction to the Technique of Twelve-Tone Composition (Boosey & Hawkes, 1960), text p.10, examples pp.8 and 31–35Google Scholar.
9 It would have been natural for Spinner to have studied Berg's Concerto in any case, whether with or independently of Webern, as the most recent example of a work for violin by any of the Second Viennese School. It seems unlikely that he could have had any access to Schoenberg's Concerto, dedicated to Webern but completed as recently as September 1936.
10 Remarks about the Proper Order of the Opus Numbers of my Works', written 1908, published in Von der Einheit der Musik (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1922)Google Scholar, translated by Ley, Rosamund in The Essence of Music (London: Rockliff, 1957), pp. 77–8Google Scholar.