If we want to bring the general public into living composers, we have to start by making up for the 100 years of composers who didn't get the proper hearing. They need to understand how music evolved, and that music evolved much more slowly and traditionally than they think it did. Every gradation between Mahler on the one side and Schoenberg on the other brings the audience a little closer to understanding 20th century music, and once they figure the Second Viennese School out, everything else gets a little easier.
The very few who got a fair hearing didn't get it because of the quality of their music. Don't misunderstand, the quality of most famous composers is unfathomably high, but who gets known is often still a mixture of lucky connections in 'music politics' and the ability to represent a movement rather than themselves.
I like Steve Reich very much, but even at 90, he and Glass are a 'movement.' They represent it, it's their 'brand', and they sound like no one else even as they always sound like themselves. But that's the thing, you either like the 'brand' or you don't. And those who don't will never buy into Reich because no matter what he does, he always sounds like Reich.
Meanwhile, there are literal dozens or hundreds of composers in every generation writing demonstrably excellent music we don't hear except on rare CDs. Even after you first hear them, you don't know what they're going to sound like from piece to piece because they don't have a 'brand,' and often deliberately so. With very few exceptions, I have always been of the opinion that the best composers are the most curious musical minds, who are not satisfied to write in the same vein every time and are always looking for new musical experiences.
But that means that when you ask, 'what do they sound like?', everybody sort of draws a blank.
What does Karol Rathaus sound like? Well, I think he's in some uncanny valley between Berg, Bartok, Schoenberg, Busoni and Hindemith. But he's good! He's better than good. He sounds like himself, but he also sounds like other composers because he is not willing to go all the way into the artistic revolutions where composers may carve singular names for themselves at the price of earning audience wrath. Does he sound that different from Erwin Schullhoff? Viktor Ullmann? Ernst Toch? Egon Wellesz? Well, we won't know well enough to say until we hear their music more often. I certainly don't and I've heard my share of them all, but I'd bet any amount of money that if we do hear them more often, the differences would mostly be immediately apparent.
Anyway, this symphony may be a masterpiece: very much in the harmonic and coloristic vein of Busoni's Doktor Faustus, but having something truly dark to say. It's yet more proof that expressionism and atonality were separate movements. It's clearly influenced by early Schoenberg: Pelleas and Erwartung, but it also is clearly build on fourth intervals, which was Paul Hindemith's theoretical suggestion of where tonality could head next.
Would it strike new listeners as a masterpiece when they first hear it? Well, does Schoenberg? The point is not that listeners would get it on the first hearing, the point is that listeners would get it on the second or third. Many times I've gone to the symphony two times in a weekend only to encounter a new piece. The first time I heard it, I didn't like it. Then I heard it again: you have the basic outline in your head of how the music is built, you have a general idea of what to anticipate, and you can begin to appreciate the work in more than just an outline. Some works everybody loves are instantly communicative: like Verdi and Dvorak. Some works everybody loves usually take a few listens: believe it or not, a lot of people feel that way about Brahms or Shostakovich. They don't get it on the first listen, but by the time they've heard works by them four or five times, they begin to love the music desperately.
Written in 1923, the height of hyperinflation in Weimar-era Berlin, this is clearly a statement of interwar despair. It also feels a little bit like Honegger 2, yet to be written, only it's far less jazzy and far more monochrome. Monochrome doesn't mean dull, no work is more monochrome than Sibelius 4, but it is clearly dark, cthonic, and possessing a certain kind of Schoenbergian sublimity that's bearing witness to something appallingly dark.
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