"The saxophone is ideally suited to the expression of all human and animal feelings (…) The conversation between two lovers should be led, both on the male and on the female side, with a saxophone, so that the libido would not suffer a loss of energy. Thus erotically healthy generations would be created ad infinitum; having been brought up with a saxophone, they would surely not know prudery." (Erwin Schulhoff in the musical journal Der Auftakt, 1925)

In the nineteen thirties, composers began to ex­plore the saxophone as a classical instrument. After this examination was interrupted by repression and war, it was not taken up again until the eighties. This CD opens a three-part series documenting chamber music works for alto saxophone and piano, all written by composers from Berlin. Beginning with pieces dating from 1930, the series progresses towards early 21st-century compositions. While Vol. 1 and 2 focus on the thirties (1930–1932, 1934–1938), Vol. 3 introduces music from 1982 onwards, the most recent works having been dedicated to the duo Frank Lunte and Tatjana Blome.

Erwin Schulhoff, born in Prague in 1894, came from a German-Jewish merchant family. His extraordinary musical talent was discovered early on; at the age of ten, he was admitted to the piano class at the Prague Conservatory on recommendation of Antonín Dvořák. From 1908 onwards, besides studying piano, Schulhoff began to study composition under Max Reger at the Leipzig Conservatory. In 1913, he graduated and won the Wüllner award in Cologne. In the same year, he won the Felix Men­delssohn Bartholdy award for piano in Berlin – five years later, he won the same award again, this time for composition.

Following the First World War, during which Schul­hoff had served as a soldier in the Austrian army, he went to Germany. In 1922, he moved to Berlin, at a time when the saxophone was prima­rily known as an instrument for popular music. One reason for this was the fact that it was almost exclusively used in night clubs – indeed it had the cliché-ridden function of providing a grotesque or erotic finishing touch. Another reason was that it was considered a minor instrument and therefore played mostly by dilettants. Its use as an instrument for light music only certainly did not make it easy for the saxophone to be accepted in the sphere of classical concerts.

Against this background, in 1930, Erwin Schulhoff wrote the Hot Sonata for alto saxophone and piano, in which he uses the sharply accentuated, syncopated hot jazz of the twenties as a stylistic device. At that time, he was reaching the end of a period in which he had mainly concentrated on new dance music and contemporary jazz, a genre which he managed to combine with forms of traditional Western music in his Hot Sonata. Schulhoff has a special position among the composers recorded here, since he left Berlin as early as 1923 because his career was not developing as he wished. In Prague, he wrote the Hot Sonata as commissioned by the Berliner Funkstunde and played himself in the first performance with the American saxophone player Billy Barton in a radio broadcast on 10 April, 1930. In addition to this, he frequently gave piano performances in Germany, his repertoire including not only jazz and contemporary music, but also classical works.

The political upheaval in 1933 put an end to his career in Germany, as he was now undesirable due to his Jewish descent and his tendency towards communism. He made his living with occasional engagements and planned to emigrate to the Soviet Union in order to improve his situation. In 1941, Schulhoff became a Soviet citizen and acquired an exit visa which, however, was of no use to him anymore; the German declaration of war against the Soviet Union suddenly made him a citizen of an enemy country. As such he was interned and deported to the Wülzburg concentration camp. He died of tuberculosis there on 18 August, 1942.

With his Hot Sonata, Schulhoff struck a contemporary chord. Never before had the saxophone been treated as a classical instrument in Germany. In France, the land of the saxophone's origin, there were composers who, from its invention in 1842 onwards, were interested and keen to experiment with the instrument – from Hector Berlioz, Jules Massenet, Georges Bizet and Vincent d'Indy to Claude Debussy. It was still a long time, though, until the instrument came to be appreciated by German composers. In fact it was hardly possible to popularize it without accomplished and ambitious saxophone players and a university-based educational system. In France, on the other hand, the inventor of the saxophone, Adolphe Sax (1814–1894), was himself a teacher at the Paris Conservatory. He established an educational tradition which has been kept up until the present day, and motivated a group of qualified musicians to help promote the saxophone further in the sphere of serious music.

The composer and music teacher Gustav Bumcke (1876–1963) met Adolphe Sax's son during his stay in Paris in 1902. He returned to Berlin with eight saxophones of all sizes and began to learn the instrument in a classical way, building on his study of the trumpet and the piano. As early as 1903, Bumcke had begun to teach music theory, harmony and composition at Stern’s Conservatory in Berlin. From 1924 onwards he taught saxophone there as well and established the first saxophone class in Germany. In the late twenties, he founded the 'First German Saxophone Orchestra' as well as a saxophone quartet with his pupils Emil Manz, Carl Petzelt and his daughter, Hilde (whose pseudonym was Ingrid Larssen), which in the early thirties became an important and innovative part of concert life in Berlin.

In the early thirties, the composers Wolfgang Jacobi, Ernst-Lothar von Knorr and Erwin Dressel became keen supporters of the developing saxophone school. Wolfgang Jacobi, who had lived in Berlin since 1919, was one of the first composers to take to the new aesthetics of the saxophone. Born in 1894 on the island of Rügen, in Bergen, he deve­loped a keen interest in culture and classical music thanks to his committed parents. At the age of 23, as a soldier taken prisoner by the French, he made up his mind to devote his life to music. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was sent to Davos, where, impressed by the music of Ravel and Debussy, he began to compose for the first time. After the war he went to Berlin, where he studied composition under Friedrich E. Koch until 1922. Immediately after his graduation, Jacobi became a teacher of music theory at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and began to do freelance work for the Berliner Funkstunde. Jacobi considered himself a 'neo-classical' composer, which is reflected in the clear formal conception of his works. In his Sonata for alto saxophone and piano, composed in 1930, he used the sonata form as a structural basis, which is why he fits in well with the sonatas recorded on this CD, since all of them are in a Classical-Romanticist style.

Jacobi's works were not appreciated by the Nazis. In particular, his Menschenmaulwurf ('Human Mole') for mixed chorus, speaker, solo baritone and wind orchestra caused a stir. The piece, which was written for the workers' choir movement, was to be performed in 1933. However, it was cancelled by the regime, as a letter from the workers' choral society to Wolfgang Jacobi, dated 4 April, 1933, shows: "I am sorry to say that what has been feared for a long time has now happened. Yesterday evening the district government decided to indefinitely postpone the celebration of the jubilee and thus the première performance of the Menschenmaulwurf." Having become aware of Jacobi, they imposed a professional ban on the composer, who was rated a half-Jew in addition. His attempt to establish a new existence in Italy in 1934 failed and he had to return to Germany just one year later. He stayed in Munich during the war, still banned from working, and only after the war could he start to participate in musical life again. He contributed to the reestablishing of musical and cultural life in his adopted city with great dedication and became a key figure in post-war Munich. Wolfgang Jacobi died on 15 December, 1972.

Gustav Bumcke, the aforementioned pioneer for the use of the saxophone in classical music, created an ideal basis for the work of another pioneer of this instrument. Sigurd Manfred Raschèr (1907–2001), born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, established himself as a soloist in the early thirties and introduced the saxophone as a solo instrument into classical concert life. After having studied clarinet in Stuttgart, Raschèr changed over to the saxophone and moved to Berlin, where he encountered an interested audience and soon established a reputation for himself as an excellent virtuoso performer. His extraordinary way of playing inspired many well-known and avantgarde composers to write for the saxophone. Thus between 1930 and 1940 about 50 works were written for him, including several saxophone concertos. The conservative press, however, tended to judge Raschèr's commitment to the works dedicated to him negatively, though his instrumental skills were nonetheless always praised. For the young soloist (and for many of the composers inclined towards him), it was difficult to stand his ground in the predominant reactionary mood. He was eventually forced to leave Germany in 1933 as a result of the hostility directed towards him. After first of all settling in Denmark, he emigrated to the United States in 1939. There he continued his career and carried on to motivate many composers to write for the saxophone. Besides Wolfgang Jacobi, composers who dedicated their works to him included Erwin Dressel and Ernst-Lothar von Knorr.

Due to his unusual musical talent, Ernst-Lothar von Knorr, who was born in Eitorf an der Sieg in 1896, received violin lessons as a child and began to study music at the Cologne Conservatory when he was only eleven. Aged thirteen, he wrote his first compositions for his instrument, and when he was fifteen he received the Berlin-based Joseph Joachim Foundation award for his violin skills. From 1915 to 1918, he fought at the Western front. Determined by what he had experienced during the war, von Knorr wanted to give up the violin at first, until he was offered a position as a violin teacher at the Music Academy of Heidelberg. Shortly afterwards, he took a similar position at the Mannheim College and, in addition, was director of the Pfalz Orchestra at Ludwigshafen. In 1924, von Knorr moved to Berlin, where he became one of the founders of the country's first music school in the district of Neukölln, the 'Städtische Volks- und Jugendmusikschule'. As director of this new institution, he eminently contributed to making music available to a broader public. The fact that no less a man than Paul Hindemith could be engaged for work at the school is proof of the high quality of the institution.

In the early thirties, von Knorr began to explore new compositional techniques as well. Together with Wolfgang Jacobi and Paul Höffer, he was commissioned by the radio station Berliner Rundfunk to experiment in the area of electronic sound generation. The instruments available to them in the studio were two Thereminvoxes, two Trautoniums, a Vierling violin, a Vierling cello, a Neo-Bechstein Grand Piano, two vibraphones and percussion. Once more Berlin was the starting-point for innovative projects such as this – but in 1933, the first attempts at electronic sound generation were forbidden by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Von Knorr also explored new possibilities of saxophone sound. In his Sonata for alto saxophone and piano (1932), he used the so-called slap-tongue, a percussive effect achieved by a special tongue technique. What is more, he required the high register (comparable to flageolet with string instruments) to be used, which exceeds the normal range; a technique mastered by very few saxophone players at that time. The sonata has a range of three octaves plus a small third (d–f3). The dedicatee, Sigurd Raschèr, however, encouraged von Knorr to use this extreme register, a step which enhanced the expressivity of the piece. A chamber concerto for piano, saxophone, orchestra and chorus, also written in 1932, was destroyed in a bomb attack in 1944.

Labelled undesirable by the Nazis, von Knorr’s music soon could not be performed anymore. In order to escape manipulation by the party, he took up the position of a music official in the high command of the army (music corps), which was subordinate to the Wehrmacht, from 1937 to 1941. After a performance of Brahms' Requiem in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1943, a high-ranking party official addressed him. Von Knorr recalls in his memoirs: "The Gauleiter (Sprenger) looked me up and down and said: 'I see that there is no party badge in your buttonhole.' I immediately replied that I was not a party comrade and therefore did not wear a badge. (…) With a certain malignant delight I explained to him that I had been an active officer in the high command of the army until the entrance into my position in Frankfurt so that a membership in the NSDAP was impossible." On later occasions, too, he was able to get round demands by high-ranking functionaries to join the party. After the war, Ernst-Lothar von Knorr continued to maintain an important position as a composer and music teacher. He died on 30 October, 1973 in Heidelberg.

Even whilst he was young, Erwin Dressel, born in Berlin in 1919, enjoyed a good reputation as an opera composer. Aged only 14, he made his debut with stage music to Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado about Nothing at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin. Dressel received his musical education at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. From 1919 onwards, he was a composition student under Wilhelm Klatte, in 1924 he changed over to Paul Juon at the Hochschule für Musik. In 1926, he began to cooperate with Arthur Zweiniger, a sculptor and writer from Dresden who wrote a number of opera librettos for him. In 1928, the first work by the two of them, the opera Armer Kolumbus, was performed at the Staatstheater Kassel with great success, on which critics foretold a brilliant future for the 19-year-old composer. This was followed by further premières of his operas which were all based on texts by Arthur Zweiniger. From 1927 to 1928, he directed the music section at the Städtische Bühnen Hanover and did freelance work for the radio until the war.

Dressel's music is characterized by catchy, though not trivial, melodics and opulent harmonics which avoid being bombastic. His Sonata E-flat major op 26 for alto saxophone and piano keeps to that texture as well. In its epic formal layout, the first movement in particular is an example of this stylistic preference. He wrote three works for saxophone and piano, two of them in the thirties. The sonata recorded here was composed in 1932 and, like all later works for saxophone (including two concertos), is dedicated to Sigurd Raschèr. After his return from British captivity, he could not continue his former successes. He was eventually forgotten as a composer and lived as a freelance musician in Berlin until his death on 17 December, 1972.

The works recorded here date from the years before the Nazis seized power in 1933. The compositions in Vol. 2 were written between 1934 and 1938 from emigration (or partly in a state of passive resistance). They are works by Edmund von Borck, Paul Dessau, Bernhard Heiden, Erwin Dressel and Gustav Bumcke.

Tatjana Blome and Frank Lunte, July 2002

(Translation: Andreas Göbel)