Karl Amadeus Hartmann belonged to a generation that was marked — one might even say sacrificed — by dictatorship (similar to his friend Luigi Dallapiccola, who had a comparable experience during the Second World War). Under the tutelage of orchestra conductor Hermann Scherchen, Hartmann’s composing was just reaching maturity as Hitler was coming to power. Hartmann described his isolation during the twelve years of the “Thousand-Year Reich” as undertaken “so as not to demean [myself] in compromises.”¹ He made the decision to stay true to himself and his beliefs by refusing all performances of his work in Nazi Germany while continuing to compose and deliver work abroad.

Then came the year 1933, with its misery and hopelessness, [and] with it, that which must needs have developed logically from the idea of despotism, the most horrible of all crimes — the war. In that year, I recognized that it was necessary to make a statement, not out of despair and anxiety in the face of that power, but as an act of protest [Gegenaktion]. I told myself that freedom triumphs even at those times when we are annihilated…²

After the war, Hartmann’s compositions in traditional forms seemed obsolete to stalwarts of serialism.

The war thus divided Hartmann’s career in three parts, making him a contemporary of three generations of composers. First is the generation of Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and the Vienna school (Hartmann was an admirer of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg and began studying with Anton Webern in 1942). Second came the generation of his colleagues and sometime friends, whose compositions were played alongside his in concerts in Munich in the 1920s. Many of these composers did not choose the same path of moral rectitude as he did and continued building their careers under the Nazis (including Carl Orff, to whom Hartmann nonetheless dedicated his opera Simplicius Simplicissimus, and Werner Egk, to whom he refused to provide administrative support after the war). Third were the first members of the Darmstadt School, including Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono, who helped set the course for the reception of Hartmann’s work after the war. In high praise of Hartmann, Nono wrote,

An expansive and generous humanity brings life to Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s music as it does to every one of his acts. The violence, beauty, and truth of passion, suffering, love, conflict, unbearable injustice, enthusiasm, hostility, civic hatred, responsibility, and choice galvanize his presence, deeply rooted in his time, like the tree of life in his Simplicius Simplicissimus.

Nono also recalled Hartmann’s “passionate vehemence in discussions” and “conscious civic responsibility” to actively oppose “his brothers and his socialist family against the Hitlerians of yesterday and today,” as well as his “enthusiasm for the simple life.”³

Likewise, Henze spoke of his relationship with Hartmann, his elder, not in terms of a master over a student, but as a “brotherly” and “democratic” friendship between equals.⁴ He also remembered an artistic dialogue attuned to the retreats and advances of a barbarism deeply anchored in the minds of certain peoples, in which the writer Ingeborg Bachmann played a significant role. Hartmann and Henze connected through the idea of art as a “subversive force,” as a “capacity for resistance rooted in tradition, with a rich future.”⁵

Writing of Hartmann, it is far too easy to portray a tutelary figure while neglecting actual study of his compositions, or to study his musical work by assessing it solely through his life story and its political and moral content. What is important to bear in mind with Hartmann is the utopian quest for balance between the political and the musical, since according to him, no artist should never shirk their obligation to engage with the world — unless they have devoted themselves to nihilism.

This essay explores Hartmann’s catalogue by genre: opera, symphonic works, which were his core repertoire, and chamber music.

Opera

Das Leben und Sterben des heiligen Teufels (Life and Death of the Holy Devil), Der Mann, der vom Tode auferstand (The Man Who Rose from the Dead), Chaplin-Ford-Trott, Fürwahr? (Really?), and Die Witwe von Ephesus (The Widow of Ephesus) are five short operas that together are known as Hartmann’s Waxworks (Wachsfigurenkabinett — literally, “Cabinet of Wax Figures” or “Waxworks Museum”). Each libretto offers an example of contemporary social criticism. The first condemns religion for its interference in politics and its despotism; the holy Devil, an evil prophet, is personified as the wandering mystic Rasputin. In the second, the titular man who rises from the dead is a rich American, whose wife pulls him out of the nightmare of revolution. Chaplin-Ford-Trott mocks the American way of life, with its films (Chaplin) and its capitalism (Ford), the one leading to fatuousness (“I want to be famous, I want newspapers and magazines to talk about me, I want to be a household name”), the other urging us to pile up dollars like “grains of sand,” making love between different social classes impossible. The clipped dialogue of Fürwahr? portrays two drunken men, while Die Witwe von Ephesus is the story of a man unable to support his starving wife and seven children. Unemployed, unable to tithe to the church, he is “without utility and superfluous,” and should be “hanged for the good of the world,” since those who do not work do not eat, and those who do not eat cannot live.

These short operas, the way they alternate between song and speech, along with their use of a limited number of instruments (piano, harmonium, woodwinds, and percussion) evoke Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, or Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, and indeed all of these composers served as Hartmann’s models. Three other elements of these operas should be highlighted, as well:

1. Brief, separate scenes, organized into numbers as in classical and baroque opera. Though composed on this side of Wagner, they may even be against him, or at least against a tonality judged too bourgeois, as the first opera, Das Leben und Sterben des heiligen Teufels shows: a short prelude; lied and chorus; pantomime; arietta, reduced to a sentence (“Since that day, since I have loved him, I cannot live without him”); scene; duet and chorus; arietta; pantomime; lied and scene; finale.
2. The caustic, distanced, dialectical use of the popular music of the Weimar Republic: for instance, waltz, fox trot, tango, jazz, etc., as Rasputin sings songs from the Russian Orthodox liturgy. This is an assemblage of rubble “hammered and glued together with the fetid mucilage of a soggy potpourri of operas,” as Theodor Adorno wrote of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny.⁶ It transforms the operas’ characters into wax figures — in other words, into subjects with no subjectivity — and renders their feelings impersonal, muted, moribund.
3. The pedagogical, political dimension of their content — which might even be considered a form of agitation and propaganda. It expresses both in the libretti and in the music, either in the distance placed between the music and the action, or in the way Hartmann intentionally opposes it to the story. It was an era of revolutions in performance, brought about by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.

Hartmann’s second opera, which has more of a presence in the German repertoire, is Simplicius Simplicissimus. A first version, which dates from 1934 to 1936, is titled The Youth of Simplicius Simplicissimus: “Images from a development in German destiny,” for dancer, narrator, soloists, men’s choir, five woodwinds, five percussionists, and five strings. Between 1956 and 1957, Hartmann revised it and shortened the title to Simplicius Simplicissimus with the subtitle “Three Scenes from His Youth.” The work exists in a large-scale format (10.10.8.8.6 strings) and a small-scale one (1.1.1.1.1 strings). The libretto by Hartmann and Wolfgang Petzet came after an original idea and script, based on a story by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, which Hartmann attributed to Scherchen. “Hermann Scherchen often suggested compositions to me,” Hartmann wrote.

My idea to write an opera after Grimmelshausen came through him. I remember exactly how, one evening in the car, driving from Winterthur to Zurich, in September 1934, he drew my attention to the old German novel The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus and improvised a whole story for me.⁷

Hartmann stacks four historical periods into his telling of the story:

• The German Peasants’ War, which came to an end on 15 May 1525, to which the third part of the opera alludes. Six thousand peasants were slaughtered by mercenary troops led by the Elector of Saxony. The revolt was incited and led by Thomas Müntzer, a radical theologian of the early Reformation, who was beheaded on 27 May 1525 in Mühlhausen. Marxist thinkers saw him as one of the first modern revolutionaries.
• The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Fought on the fault lines of the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, this war led to the death of two-thirds of the German population (which dropped from twelve million to four million). Allusions to it appear in the opera’s introduction and its finale. The interlude between the first and second parts of the opera quotes from “Tears of the Fatherland,” Andreas Gryphius’ poem recounting the devastation and suffering brought by war.
• The year 1668, when Grimmelshausen (1622-1676) published The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus. This picaresque novel moves between the tragic and the comic to recount the adventures of a young and lonely peasant who, in his simplicity and innocence, not knowing good from evil, has no understanding of justice. The young man encounters the military brutality, famine, and epidemics of the Thirty Years’ War. Grimmelshausen’s account was partially autobiographical, the author having survived the burning of his own city; his account described the world from the perspective of its poorest denizens. Hartmann, working from the assumption that his audience was familiar with the story, kept just three scenes:

• Village life: “You disdained peasants,” one farmer sings. He is joined by Simplicius (a soprano voice), a young shepherd watching for a wolf, fearful of the brutish ways of soldiers. He falls asleep and dreams of a tree of life, and awakens to the unleashing of the same “bloodthirsty hounds” who have always ravaged the world with violence and injustice. Amidst raping and pillaging, animals are slaughtered, a peasant is murdered and mutilated, and Simplicius’s farm is burnt to the ground.
• The education of Simplicius: deep in the forest, a hermit teaches him everything a wise man should know. Here, Hartmann is making the point that religion is a mirage. Simplicius continues to sing of the trees, but now with reference to their “dark arms.” His prayer, though it begins with “Our Father who art in Heaven,” changes course: “Thy will be done in Heaven, but not on earth.” Further on, he implores, “Deliver us from the Kingdom [Reich].” The hermit informs Simplicius that he must pay his debt to nature: to die is part of the divine order; life, in the words of Ecclesiastes, is as a passing mist, and vanishes like vapor. The hermit digs his own grave, demands that Simplicius bury him, and abandons his soul to God, leaving the young man alone and afraid.
• A banquet in the Governor’s Palace, where Simplicius plays the role of jester: After the “Three Dances of the Lady,” the Governor and the Captain sing, crudely, of women’s bodies, ending each strophe with a “Heil.” “Can your souls live in your fat pig bodies?” Simplicius protests, and the Governor asks him to try not to act too smart. The meaning of his dream about the tree of life becomes clear. The poor, upon whom the tree rests, also give the tree its force. A rumbling threat appears, and the opera ends in destruction as peasants massacre the despotic Governor and his court, leaving only Simplicius alive. “An equal law is what we want.” Simplicius’s last words are, “Praised be the judge of truth!”

• The historical situation in the 1930s, in the era between the two World Wars. This historical context is visible in Hartmann’s literary approach to Simplicius: where the Nazis saw him as a kind of archetype of the Hitler Youth, a hero who evolves from a naïve peasant to a valiant soldier, Hartmann drew from Grimmelshausen’s novel the story of how far humans can stray in wartime. It is also detectable in the opera’s political stance, in that it was a protest against class domination and war in the same vein as Käthe Kollwitz’s Nie wieder Krieg. Both are works speaking out against war the artists knew was inevitable.

The weaving in of the Peasants’ War and the Thirty Years’ War in the context of Hitler’s rise to power made Simplicius Simplicissimus into a pedagogical and realist work, a kind of epic critique of current events. Elements we saw in his Waxworks are employed again in Simplicius: the separation of the scenes into a series of tableaux with musical commentaries, archetypal characters that seem like wooden figures, the mixing of spoken word and song. The choir comes in at the end of each part: a spoken chorus of lamentations by the peasants, which involves no action but comments on the story and gives meaning to it. Hartmann included many references: to Johann Sebastian Bach’s choral piece Nun ruhen alle Wälder in the interlude between Part I and Part II; The Rite of Spring in Part I, and, more generally, at the level of the piece’s overall instrumental design; The Soldier’s Tale; the song Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen, from the German Peasants’ War, in Part III; Baroque music, which was deemed nondegenerate by the Nazi regime but was deployed in the opera as a distancing mechanism; the music of Alexander Borodin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Serge Prokofiev (in the overture, which is a kind of tribute), and Berg (in the lyric interlude in Part II); ballads, marches, dance music, military music, and popular songs in strophic form, such as in Part III when Simplicius sings, “In the city they are grumbling and stamping their feet”; and, finally, the Jewish song Eliahu Hanavi, which is threaded through the overture and the choral passage lamenting the hermit’s death. Hartmann no doubt borrowed the song from a collection by Abraham Zevi Idelsohn titled Hebräisch-Orientalischer Melodienschatz (1932) and used it to explicitly identify himself with the Nazis’ victims.

Symphonic works

The numbering system for Hartmann’s symphonies does not follow the order of their composition or of their premières, but a detailed discussion would run the risk of tediousness; the same would be true of an extended discussion of their long emergence — the first six from works composed during his years of inner exile. Instead, this section will highlight his symphonies’ major formal and stylistic principles.

The first of these is the structure of slow movements. For example, in the one-movement Symphony No. 2: “Adagio,” twelve measures prepare the introduction to the theme, in clear contours, passing on to the solo baritone saxophone at rehearsal marker 1, Andante (poco rubato), in an Eastern-inflected motif. The tempo then accelerates, exacerbating the dramatic tension until a climax, fff maestoso, one measure after the marker 15. Then collapse. Then return to the theme, slightly modified, in the clarinet (marker 17). Finally, a conclusion draws the arc to a close, adagio, played on the initial low strings. This example highlights several key features:⁸ the adagios begin with an introduction; the thematic forces emerge from a common source; the movement is designed around the organic model of inhaling and exhaling; it reaches a climax (Höhepunkt) in which the maximally accelerated tempo, the strongest nuance, the fullest use of the orchestra, and the greatest polyphonic complexity are combined; the relaxation that follows this climax is shorter than the rising tension that preceded it. This pattern appeared to be an echo of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, about which Hartmann observed,

For [Bruckner], the front side of the tapestry shows clear images, even as he is counting the threads and knotting them together on the back. His symphonies still show the balanced two-sidedness of a work of art, they create a unity of body and soul in the composition, whose survival depends on the same preestablished harmony as our own existential faculties. Bruckner’s strength lies in the organization of large-scale unfurlings, rather than in the creation of detail.⁹

Or, as Henze wrote of Hartmann:

The precision of his writing — each note of his music is important, buttressing the construction — serves legibility, to banish ambiguity, to mediate: that is why these expanding structures, including the parts and the lines, the horizontal and the vertical, correspond with one another, depend upon one another, intersect. And still and always, rising from the shadows: his lacrimae, which refuse to be timid, which seek their own closure by dragging their fears into the light. But the light is blinding; it is wounding and unbearable to him, and so he must also pull the sounds away from the high notes and bring them back into the world of shadows. Golden, autumnal colors appear; calm ensues. But only for an instant: already, everything is thrown into motion again.¹⁰

The principle of an adagio that arcs around a climactic point reappears in the second and last movement of Hartmann’s Symphony No. 3, growing from a slow opening with solo trumpet, to a vigorous climax (at the number 50), before returning to its original state. Or again it is present in the first of the two movements of Symphony No. 6, which begins with a bassoon solo before developing two themes (played by the English horn and violins) in which the tempo accelerates nonlinearly; the climax in measure 126 is shattered by a slow tempo, adagio, and disintegration. Even the lyrical, plaintive Adagio mesto cantanto e tranquillo from Symphony No. 7 could be seen as an illustration of this principle of inhale and exhale, without the demonstrative eruptions of the previous symphonies.

Second principle: the ABA song form. This ternary form is visible at the scale of the movement: the “Introduction: Misery” from Symphony No. 1, for contralto and orchestra, alternates an Allegro shot through with percussive and brassy fanfare music, evoking the booming gravitas of peplum films, a Largo as recitative, in which the vocalist declaims a Walt Whitman poem, and the reprise of the Allegro, before a brief coda. The same form is also found at the scale of the symphony. Symphony No. 4, for string orchestra, presents a first movement (Lento assai – con passione) in three sections: the first with two themes, the second più mosso, the third returning to the first, but a semi-tone higher, inverted and embellished (ABA’). The highly energetic, almost savage second movement, Allegro di molto, risoluto, rolls out in sections with distinct tempos, dynamics, timbres, and characters, reaching a culminating stretto Tumultuoso. The structured, Adagio appassionato third movement is a response to the first, and begins with a cantabile violin line against a backdrop of pizzicatos played by the cellos and double basses. These instruments chime out the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in a symmetrical tone row whose second part is a retrograde of the first: F–G-flat–A-flat–G–E–A / B-flat–E-flat–C–B–C-sharp–D. The movement dissolves into chromatism, then, in the last measures, to a C minor tonality in tutti.

We can add two specifications to this ABA or ABA’ form:

1. A fast-slow-fast alternation, as heard in Symphony No. 5, for orchestra without violins or violas. This symphony is often described as neoclassical and readily compared to Hindemith; it also shows the influence of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments (which is also distorted into the opening bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring). For these reasons an apt categorization might be “neo-pre-classical.” The first movement, Toccata (lively), is dominated by two trumpets. The woodwinds set a calm backdrop for their energy, except when more active during the middle of the movement. This section is followed by a modified restatement of the exposition (ABA’). The second movement pays tribute to Stravinsky with a touch of humor; Melody (slow) is split by a terse, pre-Beethoven-esque scherzo. The Rondo (happy – very lively) reconnects with the spirit of the first movement, reprising earlier themes in a virtuosic dance-like atmosphere.
2. Like in the operas, multiple successive sections in the symphonic works with voice, then return to the initial section. An example of his extension of the ABA’ form is the fourth movement, “Tränen” (Tears), marked Langsam, of Symphony No. 1; a funereal pace and obsessive, Stravinskian motifs characterize the movement’s ABCDA’ form. Gesangsszene (“Song Scene”) for baritone and orchestra, using excerpts from Jean Giraudoux’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, follows this same principle of musical sections responding to text. After an orchestral introduction with flute, expressions in the main section alternate rapidly between rhapsodic (Liberamente), more legato (Andante), and escalating in intensity (Agitato, Estatico, or Tempestoso). The flute returns in the slow epilogue, this time supported by three tom drums. The piece was unfinished at Hartmann’s death, the last nine verses not composed. Dallapiccola saw it as Hartmann’s “most transparent” work, as well as his “most meticulous.” The effect of the highly precise notation in certain passages is to leave the listener with the impression the music has been improvised.¹¹

Third principle: fugue composition. Largo ma non troppo – Allegro con fuoco (Fugue virtuoso), the first movement of Symphony No. 3 is a prelude and a fugue. The first movement was essentially written for a string quintet of soloists, then made tutti. The second is highly energetic and features an interplay of elements of passacaglia, with variations on the subject of the fugue, characteristic of Hartmann’s approach of writing in blocks: first, the strings, then the woodwinds, and finally tutti in fff con forza before the coda. Similarly, after a short introduction, the second movement, Toccata variata, of the Symphony No. 6, is a succession of three fugues: the first, Allegro assai, written mainly for strings, is opened by the violas at measure 12; the second, at measure 131, is mainly for woodwinds, and offers a first variation played by oboe and clarinet; the third, at measure 418, is a second variation, bringing in the strings and then the entire orchestra, before the coda.

Similar to the Third, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies, Symphony No. 8 was composed in two movements and also features a fugue in the second movement, Dithyrambe: Scherzo – Fuga. However, the structure is more complex, featuring a scherzo and three variations with ostinato, before a lively Finale per tutti (I), a scherzo whose intensity is diminished by a fugue that consolidates the polyphony. This leads into a wild Finale per tutti (II) culmination.

Without weakening the rigor of the fugue, Hartmann is intentionally extreme in his orchestral counterpoint, crisscrossing the fugue with imitations and fugatos. For example, in the first part of the Symphony No. 7, a concertante Introduction by the string section is followed by a Ricercare (Presto assai — con fuoco), which reprises an idea from the Toccata variata of Symphony No. 6, twice following the same path: first, Fugato I, announced by a bassoon; Concerto I, with increasing polyphony; Finale per tutti I; short Coda I. Then, varying on the theme, a Fugato II, this time announced by two bassoons; Concerto II; Finale per tutti II; and an even shorter Coda II.

After an introductory Cantilène, the first movement of the Symphony No. 8, also contains two sections of fugato for strings, the accelerating tempo bringing the listener to a first high point, performed quickly and notated “ecstatic.” Then comes an Andante, which moves up to a second climax, fff impetuoso (con fuoco), before winding down again.

The last of the symphonic principles is opposition between lyricism and ostinato, whose repeating cells seem to ape the mechanics of modernity. The finale of the Symphony No. 7, Scherzoso virtuoso (furioso, con brio, ma leggiero), for example, demands such speed that when one listens to it, it transforms into its own opposite, giving an impression of immobility. A piano cadenza, accompanied by percussion, is followed by a coda in perpetuum mobile, which leads to a stretto noted as giubiloso. Dallapiccola did not see this piece as an attempt to be motor-like but rather as a continuation of the finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4.

These dynamic and rhythmic forces are also present in many other works. For example, the implacable third movement of Concerto funebre seems to be gesturing at the machine-like detonations of cannons and automatic guns. Conversely, lyricism and an expression of humanity emerge in the third movement’s tragic lamentation and funeral march and in

the hope expressed in the two chorale [passages], at the beginning and the end of the work, voicing opposition to the intellectual vanity of the era. The first chorale is primarily driven by the voice of the soloist. The orchestra does not accompany, but merely follows the cadence. The second, in the conclusion, sounds like a slow march, with a singsong melody.¹²

The alternating short and long violin phrases, made up of essentially conjunct motion and motifs that just barely rise and fall, resemble voices, against which the orchestra’s interventions seem to break like waves — a concertante model that would later be taken up by Bruno Maderna.

Chamber music

Hartmann wrote that starting from the time of his first compositions he insouciantly mixed “futurism, dadaism, jazz, and other trends.”¹³ This declaration is misleading. There are no traces of futurism or dadaism in his work, although jazz does play a major role: energy, percussive character, renewed rhythms — overall, the liberation of music into dance — and the unsettling of racial, religious, and social barriers in line with the cosmopolitanism of the Weimar Republic. Cakewalks, syncopation, and jazz timbres and harmony flow through Jazz-Toccata und -Fuge for piano, as well as through his suites for piano and violin.

In his chamber music works, we also find the elements discussed in the previous section:

• ABA’ forms, as in his Little Concerto for string quartet and percussion, whose central part is slow and develops in cells. The tragic elements that float up out of the muted second movement of String Quartet No. 1 also follow ABA’ form, inspired by Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, with two varied counter-expositions and a central section that sways between grating melody and barcarolle, rich with harmonics and rising and falling glissandi. The same is true of the second movement of String Quartet No. 2, where the oppressive lyricism that bookends the piece seems to jolt against the rebellious, con forza middle part, which becomes more and more agitated as it moves along. The third movement combines ABA’ form and the first movement’s perpetuum mobile in sixteenth notes, here in eighth notes, deforming the motif into a negative image of itself.
• Fast-slow-fast alternation at the scale of the work as a whole, demonstrated in his two string quartets, where the first movements’ slow introductions contain the wail of the cello.
• Hindemith-style Baroque sequences, in sections, as in his two suites for piano and his Suite No. 1 for violin: canon, fugue, rondo, three-part song form, and chaconne.
• Fugue-style composition, as in his two violin sonatas or in his fugatos. This is the case, for example, in the first darkly somber movement of String Quartet No. 1, in which counterpoint quickly gives way to destructive, pugnacious accents, chords struck with the heel of the bow, and massive, fierce harmonies.

We can also add

• Wordless quotations of communist songs: his Concerto funebre paraphrases the Socialist funeral song Immortal Victims (Unsterbliche Opfer), which Scherchen had brought back from the USSR, labeled “Chorale” in the score. Similarly, Hartmann’s Piano Sonata No. 2 uses strikingly expressionistic writing for a reprisal of three revolutionary worker songs: “The Internationale”; “Partisans of Amur” (he used the German version, Partisanen vom Amur, of this Soviet battle song); and “Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit” (“Brothers, Toward the Sun, Toward Freedom,” a German rewriting of the Russian song “Brave Comrades, In Step!”), which Bernd Alois Zimmermann would use for Requiem for a Young Poet.
• Quotations from Jewish music, as in Simplicius Simplicissimus. String Quartet No. 1, “Carillon,” was also inspired by Hebräisch-Orientalischer Melodienschatz from Idelsohn.

But to merely offer an account of the forms and borrowings in Hartmann’s work is to shortchange his lyricism, and, consequently, the tension between polyphony and expression that drove him. According to the composer, his polyphony grew from a calculus that was hostile to emotions; his always present, always immanent expression was rooted in emotion that was hostile to calculus. The task that fell to him was to reconcile these two tendencies, to create a balance that did not favor either one.

Against the blind optimism of dictatorship, Hartmann’s oeuvre, serious, painful, even oppressive, is to be experienced and communicated, to be understood not necessarily in its structures, but in its meaning. No matter the language — tonal, atonal, or serial — its charm had already taken on a weary quality by the time it pierced the listener’s consciousness. And what meaning? The music of Karl Amadeus Hartmann bears witness to the twentieth century’s tragedies. It is Trauermusik, the music of funerals and lamentation, of grief and dereliction, signifying, not death, but utopia. As with his lyricism, his polyphony is, according to Henze, a

medium capable of reflecting the world as [Hartmann] lived and understood it — as a play full of suffering, a struggle, a contradiction, a conflict — to find one’s own self in its dialectics and to represent oneself as a human among other humans, in the world and not outside of it. The most beautiful self-portraits are always those where the highest degree of brotherhood embodies the future and our dreams.¹⁴

---

^{1. Luigi Dallapiccola, “Karl Amadeus Hartmann (ricordi)” [1970], Parole e musica, Milan, Il saggiatore, 1980, p. 360. ↩}

^{2. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, “Autobiographische Skizze” [1955], Kleine Schriften, Mayence, Schott, 1965, p. 12. ↩}

^{3. Luigi Nono, “[Pour Karl Amadeus Hartmann]” [1964], Écrits, Geneva, Contrechamps, 2007, p. 207. ↩}

^{4. Hans Werner Henze, “Laudatio,” Karl Amadeus Hartmann und die Musica Viva, Mayence / Munich-Zurich, Schott / Piper, 1980, p. 11. ↩}

^{5. Ibid., p. 14. ↩}

^{6. Theodor W. Adorno, “Mahagonny” [1930], Moments musicaux, Genève, Contrechamps, 2003, p. 108. English version: Theodor W. Adorno and Jamie Owen Daniel, “Mahagonny,” Discourse, vol. 12, no. 1, 1989, pp. 70–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389141. ↩}

^{7. Hartmann, “Zu meinem Simplicius Simplicissimus” [1957], Kleine Schriften, op. cit. (note 2), p. 49. ↩}

^{8. See Andrew D. McCredie, Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Sein Leben und Werk, Wilhelmshaven, Florian Noetzel, 1980, 2004. See also Andrew D. McCredie, “Das Instrumentalschaffen Karl Amadeus Hartmanns,” Komponisten in Bayern, vol. 27: Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Tutzing, Hans Schneider, 1995, p. 104-174. ↩}

^{9. Letter from Karl Amadeus Hartmann to Waldemar Wahren, “Die neurotische Symptomatik und ihre Beziehung zur Produktion” [1965], Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Zyklus: 1989-1990, Munich, edition text + kritik, 1989, p. 23. ↩}

^{10. Hans Werner Henze, “[Karl Amadeus Hartmann],” Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Verzeichnis der veröffentlichen Werke, Mayence, Schott, 1989, p. 5. ↩}

^{11. Dallapiccola, “Karl Amadeus Hartmann (ricordi),” op. cit. (note 1), p. 362. ↩}

^{12. Hartmann, “Concerto funebre: Meinem lieben Sohne Richard” [1957], Kleine Schriften, op. cit. (note 2), p. 53. ↩}

^{13. Hartmann, “Autobiographische Skizze,” op. cit. (note 2), p. 12. ↩}

^{14. Henze, “[Karl Amadeus Hartmann],” op. cit. (note 10), p. 5. ↩}