Hans Winterberg

Life

Winterberg began music lessons at the age of nine with the concert pianist Therèse Wallerstein. He went on to study at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Prague (Composition with Fidelio F. Finke, and conducting with Alexander Zemlinsky) and at the Prague Conservatory, where he studied with Alois Hába. Gideon Klein was a fellow pupil during the terms of 1939/1940, as it was the case before for several well-known composers like Viktor Ullmann.

Hans Winterberg composed and worked for a good deal of time as vocal coach and repetiteur in Brno as well as for a number of other opera houses and ensembles.

He married Maria Maschat, a Roman Catholic, on the 3rd of May 1930. The couple was divorced on the 2nd of December 1944 in accordance to the stipulations of the Third Reich Marriage Laws.

Due to his classification as a Jew, he was interned in Theresienstadt Ghetto on January 26, 1945. On 8. May 1945, he was freed and initially returned to Prague. From there, he composed a number of works until his immigration to Germany in 1947. Hans Winterberg was a Czech citizen and applied for a passport allowing him to travel. In correspondence found at the Ministry for Education addressed to the Foreign Office we read: “The Ministry confirms that the composer Hans Winterberg wishes to travel abroad in order to locate his manuscripts, which due to his internment in Theresienstadt, he sent to various addresses abroad. On behalf of the Ministry, it is advised to allow the applicant the full freedom to travel in all European countries with a valid passport.”

He arrived initially in Riederau am Ammersee, before coming to Munich where he worked as an editor at Bavarian Radio and as a music pedagogue at the Richard Strauss Conservatory. He subsequently moved to Bad Tölz where he dedicated himself solely to composition. Despite his many unhappy experiences, he never gave up a belief in universality as a 'Bridge between the West (meaning the German) world and the East'. He saw himself as 'an artist belonging to the group of the unilaterally disadvantaged'. Winterberg was also a painter. Art and music were the two artistic elements that were to define Winterberg right from childhood. His final years were spent in Stepperg in Upper Bavaria, and he was eventually buried in Tölz, also in Upper Bavaria. Bad Tölz would be the location of his last fruitful years of musical creativity. Winterberg was a member of the Artists' Guild of Esslingen.

Works

Winterberg's compositions are almost exclusively instrumental. He composed orchestral works, a number of chamber and piano solo works; music for radio plays as well as some vocal music. In the course of his creative life, he would be exposed to, and fall under the influence of Wagner and Claude Debussy, as well as the Second Viennese School, the works of Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alois Hába, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and perhaps also Paul Hindemith. Some of his music might be seen as a bridge between this later one and Bohuslav Martinů. He was inclined to assimilate and expand in his own manner all of these disparate elements while at the same time, avoiding dodecaphonic compositional techniques.

As a result, he would follow his own stylistic instincts which were noted for their polyrhythmic characteristics. He was an acknowledged master of interweaving and condensing parallel rhythmic structures into a single acoustical sound-idea and effect. His ability to keep to motivic and thematic principals in the development of thematic-melodic ideas should also be noted in addition to his rhythmic and musical vitality. Nevertheless, one can find also a powerful pathos and deep emotional content in many of his slow movements, like it's the case in the Suites (for example in the Piano Suite 1927 or 1945), something remembering a bit similar features in Alban Berg's music. Polytonality in harmony is another side of his stylistic language.

Winterberg largely composed in expanded chromatic tonalities while avoiding both 12 tone and microtonal techniques. He referred to his first symphony 'Sinfonia dramatica' as a premonition of the catastrophe of the Second World War when it was first broadcast by Bavarian Radio in a performance conducted Karl List and the Bavarian Philharmonic.

Towards the end of 1954, and to great acclaim, the pianist Magda Rusy would perform a number of piano works by Winterberg in recitals in various countries including Austria and Yugoslavia.

Important premieres were his concerto for piano and orchestra performed by the pianist Agi Brand-Setterl on 13 November 1950 and three further premieres, his Sinfonia dramatica January 17./18. 1949 in Mannheim, his suite for String Orchestra on February 12, 1952 and his Symphonic Epilogue on June 13, 1956 with the Munich Philharmonic, conducted by Fritz Rieger. The Winterberg music estate is housed at the Sudeten German Music Archive in Regensburg, though due to contractual conditions laid out upon handover of the estate to the Archive, it remains barred to scholars or musicians until January 1, 2031. This contract was deleted on July 17, 2015.

Orchestral Music

Ballett

Chamber Music

Piano

Vocal

radio play

works of light entertainment

with pseudonym Jan Iweer

Teaching material

Radio broadcast of Bavarian Radio: 1950 – 1981

Symphonieorchester Graunke (1981), Leitung: Kurt Graunke

Münchner Philharmoniker (1959), Dirigent: Rudolf Alberth

Agi Brand-Setterl (Klavier), Münchner Philharmoniker (1950), Dirigent: Fritz Rieger

Liesel Heidersdorf (Klavier), Münchner Philharmoniker (1952), Dirigent: Fritz Rieger

Gitti Pirner (Klavier), Münchner Philharmoniker (1970), Dirigent: Jan Koetsier

Populartitel: Sinfonia drammatica, Münchner Philharmoniker (1955), Dirigent: Karl List

Münchner Philharmoniker (1952), Dirigent: Jan Koetsier

Bamberger Symphoniker (1975), Dirigent: Rainer Miedel

Koeckert-Quartett (1951), Rudolf Koeckert (Violine), Willi Buchner (Violine), Oskar Riedl (Viola), Josef Merz (Violoncello)

Sonnleitner-Quartett (1971), Fritz Sonnleitner (Violine), Ludwig Baier (Violine), Siegfried Meinecke (Viola), Fritz Kiskalt (Viloncello)

Gerhard Seitz (Violine), Walter Nothas (Violoncello), Günter Louegk (Klavier)

Bamberger Symphoniker (1963), Dirigent: Joseph Strobl

Münchner Philharmoniker (1956), Dirigent: Fritz Rieger

Streichtrio (1962), Angelika Rümann (Violine), Franz Schessl (Viola), Wilhelm Schneller (Violoncello)

Textdichterin: Luise Pfeifer-Winterberg, Ich ging heute abend, Leise murmelt der Regen, Jede Stunde ohne dich, Wie tobte der Sturm, Edith Urbanczyk (Sopran), Hortense Wieser (Klavier)

Textdichterin: Luise Pfeifer-Winterberg, Irmgard Lampart (Sopran), Ernst Mauss (Klavier)

Awards

Accompanying literature