George Rochberg (1918–2005)
Symphony No. 2 (1955–56) • Imago Mundi (1973)
George Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey on 5th
July, 1918, and died at Newtown Square, near
Philadelphia, where he had lived for over forty years, on
30th May, 2005. From 1951, he was Director of
Publications for the music publishing house Theodore
Presser, in 1960 becoming Chairman of the Music
Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1979 he
was designated Annenberg Professor of the Humanities,
retiring from the University in 1983. Rochberg’s music
has been honoured since his earliest substantial
compositions, his Night Music receiving the George
Gershwin Memorial Award in 1953. Since then,
Naumberg Recording Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships,
Honorary Doctorates, a Fellowship at the American
Academy in Rome, and Fulbright Scholarship in 1950-51
(the year in which he met and befriended Luigi
Dallapiccola), the ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award
in 2000, and countless other honours accumulated in ever
greater profusion. In 1996, his manuscripts and papers
were acquired for the archives of the Paul Sacher
Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.
Although not completed until the spring of 1956,
George Rochberg’s Symphony No. 2 is unquestionably a
wartime work. Living in New York in 1941-42 with his
new wife, Gene, making ends meet by playing at jazz bars
and clubs while studying with Hans Weisse, Leopold
Mannes and George Szell at the Mannes School of Music,
Rochberg’s student life and idyllic early years of marriage
were interrupted by call-up into the United States Army in
November 1942. There followed three testing years
serving as a captain with Allied forces in Europe. At the
Battle of the Bulge, Rochberg was severely wounded,
spending close on a year in recovery and rehabilitation. As
the war ended, he was able to take up his studies again at
the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he
honed his skills in counterpoint under the great Rosario
Scalero, who had been a member of Brahms’s circle in
Vienna sixty years earlier.
The hour-long First Symphony [to appear on Naxos
8.559214], written in 1948-49, was the first large-scale
work to result, an important stepping-stone on the way to
the Second. Exploring the power of the orchestral palette
for the first time, delineating his expressive boundaries and
challenges, establishing a powerfully individual personal
language, still essentially “tonal” but ever more sharply
pressing the harmonic limits of that language, the First
Symphony is a young composer’s assertive laying-down of
the gauntlet.
All of the accumulated anger and anguish about the
Second World War was now freed, through the First’s
refinement of a mature technique, to explode onto the page
in unfettered spontaneity, an immediacy of compositional
vision sharpened, if anything, by the four years spent
polishing the score of the Second in the intervals of other
work.
“My war experience had etched itself deep in my
soul. After the end of the war, I lived with an ever
sharpening awareness of the approach to the
abyss I saw in a world coming apart at the seams.
I was distressed at the growing slovenliness of
people’s bad thinking and worse behaviour and
became nauseated by the growing narcissism on
all sides, more particularly as it surfaced in
public comments and statements of leading artists
and writers of the day, but even more as it showed
itself in the works being produced in a never
ending stream of bad taste, bum ideas and sloppy
craftsmanship. There was no recourse but to
stubbornly pursue my own purposes and
disregard virtually everything and everyone
else.”
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The Second, moreover, is a fully-fledged twelve-tone
work; the first twelve-tone symphony composed by an
American, and the composer’s logical solution to the
tensions of language already explored in the First.
“I needed to find a language expressive enough to
be able to say what I felt I had to. … I found ways
of organizing the row based on hexachords in
such fashion that its transpositions through
inversion could take on an analogical relation to
tonal centers through locus, … [that is] a scheme
of tonal loci … that had the status of “keys” in the
old sense.”
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Rochberg’s arrival at twelve-tone technique owed
nothing to his contemporaries and compatriots, who were
pursuing, or on the brink of pursuing similar techniques;
they were stand-offish and protective of what they felt to
be their private discoveries, and he failed in his attempts to
establish contact and dialogue with them. It was his private
study of the works of Schoenberg and Webern, and
perhaps, too, the influence of his friendship with Luigi
Dallapiccola while he was Composer-in-Residence at the
American Academy in Rome in 1950-51, that led to his
highly personal mode of expression in this new language.
Its chief characteristics are that it is impassioned while
being hard-edged; at the same time discursive yet rigorous
and economical; by turns ferocious and elegiac yet always
utterly unsentimental. The composer later came to call this
expressive style “hard romanticism”.
The symphony’s formal scheme, too, “essentially four
movements linked by brief interludes into a thirty-minute
uninterrupted musical whole” lends additional urgency
to what is an outburst of rage at the ugliness and evil of
which humankind is capable. Yet this music is not without
long, lingering glances at beauty, especially in its Adagio
movement. As Rochberg has written elsewhere:
“Making the world a better place is not a project
for the artist. His project is to express the fire in
the mind, to make, as Robert Browning said,
beautiful things that ‘have lain burningly on the
Divine Hand’.”
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Written between the winter of 1955 and the spring of
1956 (though some sketches date from 1952), the work
was premičred by George Szell and the Cleveland
Orchestra on 26th February, 1959, in Cleveland. With the
New York performance by Szell and the Cleveland at
Carnegie Hall in 1961, the Second Symphony immediately
established George Rochberg among the leading
composers of his generation, and it has remained one of his
most recognised, most representative, and in many ways
still most urgently compelling works, right down to its
Coda of unsurpassed regret and resignation, whose
unresolved final chord lingers long in the memory.
Imago Mundi can better be described as a Ritual than
as a Symphonic Poem. It was commissioned by the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and first performed in
May 1974 under Sergiu Commissiona. A three-week visit
to Japan in the early summer of 1973 left George
Rochberg with visual, aural and cultural impressions more
profound than those he had drawn from any other of his
travels. A group of four, related works were rapidly
written in subsequent months, three chamber works,
Ukiyo-E – Pictures of the Floating World, Slow Fires of
Autumn (Ukiyo-E II), Between Two Worlds (Ukiyo-E III),
and the present work for large orchestra, Imago Mundi
(Image of the World). Exploration of ways of perceiving
and representing the world is at the heart of this series of
works.
Ukiyo-E is the traditional Japanese school of painting,
typified by the famous and much-reproduced “Hollow of a
Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa” and “Thirty-Six Views
of Mount Fuji” by the early 18th century master Hokusai,
or in the later master Hiroshige’s “One Hundred Views of
Famous Places of Edo [Tokyo]” and bird and nature
paintings. The sounds of the koto, the shakuhachi, the sho,
and above all of the Gagaku orchestra, lie equally close to
the surface of Rochberg’s music of this year. As does his
vivid description of a Japanese doctor singing a Noh song
at a private dinner, “profoundly moving in its
melancholy”. But most of all, Gagaku, for centuries the
private court music of the Emperor, forbidden to any
outside ear; “a music of powerful presence ...... not simply
exotic sounds, but a music of chiselled-out melodic lines
and vivid colours. ...... I fixed on a particularly gripping
Gagaku piece that had a riveting intensity about it — a
slow, ceremonial, harsh, chant-like processional
intensity.”
The third element that is explored in ways not usual
for Western consciousness in these four works is the
element of Time (and it had been for a Conference at
which he delivered a paper entitled “The Structure of Time
in Music” that Rochberg had travelled to Japan). The
chamber works especially embrace “a marked propensity
for motionless motion and stasis ..... gestures of freefloating
sounds and sound complexes”. The slowness of
Noh theatre, which “through a kind of intuitive
understanding below the level of language ...... allows one
to reach into the core of existence itself” is another
profound influence in this music.
Imago Mundi, the composer concludes in his remarks
in Five Lines and Four Spaces, “is a picturing of the
external world — but only insofar as our pictures of the
world outside ourselves are imaginings, mental fictions,
shadowed reflections of the “reality” of past as well as of
present times”.
Christopher Lyndon-Gee