string quartet

Oskar Posa is one of the greatest mysteries in music. He was an Austrian-Jewish composer from the post-Romantic period, a celebrated conductor and a central figure in Vienna around the turn of the century... but his name has been completely forgotten. In 1904, he founded the Vienna Composers' Association together with Arnold Schönberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky, the musical counterpart to Gustav Klimt's Secession. The three friends shared the stage during an extraordinary concert at the Musikverein in 1905, where Posa's Soldatenlieder, Zemlinsky's Die kleine Meerjungfrau and Schönberg's Pelléas et Mélisande had their premieres. In the midst of a unique artistic flourishing, he conceived an extremely original, colorful work in his very first work published by Simrock, a fusion of Brahms and Wagner in which harmony becomes the vehicle for restlessness and sensuality. His approximately 80 songs - some of them orchestrated - made him famous throughout Europe and the United States. The intoxication of love in Du Hast Mich, the melodramatic jealousy in Die Gelbe Blume and the urban tedium in In einer großen Stadt are astounding. In the enormous waves of softening, another, almost Straussian, operatic grandeur emerges. Posa multiplies the countervoices and repeatedly disturbs the balance between voice and piano. One could even go so far as to describe his songs as "compositions for piano with vocal accompaniment". The premiere of his Sonata for Violin and Piano at the Heidelberg Festival in 1901 was a shipwreck: the superhuman difficulty of the work, the obsessive motifs and the tense lyricism brought him into disrepute with international critics. The work was successful in the Netherlands thanks to the friendship of pianist Julius Röntgen, but Posa remained permanently affected and his creative impulses were stifled. As director of the Graz Opera between 1911 and 1932, he championed daring works and opened the city to the symphonic repertoire before accepting a position at the renowned Vienna Conservatory. But everything came to a halt in 1938: a few days after the Anschluss, Posa was summoned and removed from his post because he was Jewish. As a direct target of the Nazi regime, he was banished and disappeared forever from musical life. On the eve of his death, he composed his only string quartet, a final tribute to the vanished Vienna of around 1900: the poisonous fragrances, the ghostly waltzes and the shadows of the past. This double album is the world premiere of a selection of 24 unpublished songs, his sonata for violin and piano and his string quartet.