Oskar C. Posa (1873-1951)
Lieder, Violin Sonata, String Quartet
Edwin Fardini (baritone): Juliette Journaux (piano): Eva Zavaro (violin): Simon Dechambre (cello): Quatuor Métamorphoses
rec. June 2023, Historischer Reitstadel de Neumarkt except String Quartet, recorded November 2023, l’hôtel de la Fondation Singer-Polignac, Paris
Texts in German, English and French
Voilà Records V001 [146]

If a recording could be said to reintroduce a forgotten composer, this is it. Its two discs contain the chamber music, and a selection of the lieder, of Oskar C. Posa, a once-renowned musical luminary, friend and associate of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, and a man at the vanguard of Viennese modernism in the first years of the twentieth century. Born Posamentir, he soon shortened his name – which reeked of ‘trade’ (it means ‘trimming’, in a drapery context, in German) and Jewishness – for the more slick and plausibly operatic Posa. In time he co-founded the Society of Creative Musicians alongside his now better-known colleagues noted above. He was a great friend of – and much admired by – Julius Röntgen and also Edvard Grieg and his music was performed by leading singers and performers of the day. A catastrophic premiere of his Violin Sonata in 1901 seemed to badly dent him, though he was later to rise to eminence as a conductor in Graz. He survived in Vienna during the Nazi years – he must have received protection of some kind – but died penniless and forgotten in 1951. Born into late-Romanticism his music is not easy to describe but the songs have a sometimes shocking density and an orchestral bigness to them – some are, indeed, conceived as orchestral songs.

The first disc houses the chamber music. There’s a Schumannesque Album Leaf for piano and a strongly Brahmsian Andante for Cello and Piano, composed in 1902, and originally for horn. Neither of these relatively innocuous pieces quite prepare one for the Violin Sonata, which has a troubled, albeit almost non-existent performance history. The performers here, Eva Zavaro (violin) and Juliette Journaux (piano) have even made excisions to the first two movements which, added to the cuts suggested by Röntgen, make what we hear considerably less lengthy than the audience at early performances heard – the work here lasts 27-minutes but even had it lasted, say, 35 it wouldn’t have been unduly excessive. What seems to have troubled audiences, in addition to length, was convolution of material. It does contain many lyrical and tender panels, the music flitting back and forth between them and aggressive forward-driving writing, derived from Franck. The central movement casts the pianist as ballad-harpist in music of warmth, as the violin spins an attractive though occasionally histrionic line. The finale starts with an arresting theme, and the second subject is almost of Schubertian warmth – elfin and nobly conceived – though there are repeated signs that Posa’s incessant, rather obsessive qualities are not always moored to stability. It’s quite a testing sonata for both musicians but drives to a satisfying close.  

Almost at the end of his life, effectively destitute and without hope of a performance, he composed a string quartet which proves to be almost a compendium of his formative influences, a deeply nostalgic work without any of the harmonic tensions that exist in his sonata or in many of the songs. The opening movement, a compound of Brahms and Verklärte Nacht, is securely anchored to the fin de siècle and the dawn of the new century. The central movement is a delightful Theme and Variations in which, unbuttoned and with nothing to prove, he unveils a folkloric melody, mellifluous and charming antique cadences and even a Dvořák-like melody. He even quotes directly from Johann Strauss II. The finale opens rather like a slow introduction to a Beethoven quartet before Posa unleashes a fugue, though not at all an academic one, before ending the work without any fuss whatever. The Quatuor Métamorphoses (Mathilde Potier and Pierre Liscia-Beaurenaut, violins, Jean-Baptiste Souchon-Graziani, viola, and Madeleine Douçot, cello) play it with a genuinely youthful spirit.

The songs in this selection occupied Posa from 1897 to 1910. Key ingredients include their relative brevity, nostalgia, melancholy and the powerful, sometimes eruptive, piano writing. His favourite writers include Detlev von Lilliencron, Theodor Storm and Richard Dehmel. The early songs, setting the poems of Ricarda Huch, mine that vein of aching nostalgia that befits the times but they also evoke an anguished vehemence conveyed not least through virtuosic, quasi-orchestral piano writing. Baritone Edwin Fardini and Juliette Journaux perform two of the four Op.2 set but one is Irmelin Rose which is wittily done. In einer grossen Stadt from his Op.3 set was one of his most popular songs but it turns out to be a grim, sinewy narrative setting with an auspiciously fine piano part, so audiences of the time clearly had a predilection for the terse and unsettling. His other hit was Der Handkuss, from the same cycle, a setting dripping with insinuating Viennese charm set to the rhythm of a carriage in motion.

Sometimes he comes close to Hugo Wolf’s idiom and he can imbue a setting with a complex psycho-drama where rapt moments of passion are secreted in music of unremitting fierceness. He is good at effects, peppering a number of these songs with arresting moments that are almost too much for lieder and would be better on stage. His Soldatenlieder, Op.8 offers gaunt visions of the ghostly dead, grandiose fake heroism and include a nod to Schumann in Die beiden Grenadiere mode. The late songs contain a rain study as well as an evocation of moonlight, which encodes a fragment from Wagner, another important influence on his compositions. I think some wag might suggest that the absence of melody in some of these songs is itself Wagnerian.    

For much more about Posa I shall refer you to the amazingly detailed and beautifully compiled book which houses the discs, a vast 264 pages long and profusely illustrated, which contains all the song texts reprinted in German, French and English. The book notes are only in French and English so I don’t know how Posa’s fellow Austrians, and Germans, will feel about that but if it had been any bigger it would probably have been the size of a Victorian novel.   

Voilà Records is a new label and the production is something of an act of reparation as well as restoration. For both these things, and much more, we owe a great debt to Oliver Lalane, whose venture this is. In the promotional material that came with the book was a card that urged me to ‘Enjoy the discovery!’ and discovery it most certainly is. I certainly didn’t like everything, but we can now at last hear Posa’s music and decide for ourselves where he sits in the Viennese firmament of the first decade and a half of the twentieth-century.

Jonathan Woolf      

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Contents
CD 1
Album Leaf for piano (unknown date)
Violin Sonata, Op 7 (1901)
Andante for Cello and Piano in D minor (1902)
String Quartet in F, Op 18 (1948)

CD 2
Four Lieder on Poems by Ricarda Huch, Op 1 (circa 1897)
Four Lieder, Op 2 (circa 1898) II Das Blatt im Buche IV Irmelin Rose
Five Lieder on Poems by Detlev von Liliencron, Op 3 (circa 1898)
Four Lieder on Poems by Richard Dehmel, Op 4 (circa 1898) I Menschenthorheit II Sehnsucht
IV Beschwichtigung
Five Lieder on Poems by Detlev von Liliencron, Op 6 (circa 1900) III ‘Und ich war fern’ V Die gelbe Blume Eifersucht
Soldatenlieder on Poems by Detlev von Liliencron, Op 8 (1902)
Four Songs on Poems by Detlev von Liliencron, Op 10 (1911) III Unwetter
Eight Poems by Theodor Storm, Op 11 (1908) II Schliesse mir dir Augen beide
Five Poems by Theodor Storm, Op 12 (1910) I Mondlicht