In terms of musical performance, especially operatic, Nazi Germany carried on successfully, and sometimes brilliantly, until the final cataclysm. Even with the flight (or destruction) of those of Jewish faith or ancestry, it was a period rather memorable for its singers. But, apart from Richard Strauss, who wound up in disgrace, and Carl Orff, who enjoyed his most fruitful years, it is difficult to recall the active composers. There was Hans Pfitzner, grown old and reactionary and unproductive. There was Paul Graener, a once-admired composer of songs, now forgotten. There was Werner Egk, who somehow emerged into the postwar world immaculate and made his chief impact there. There was Boris Blacher, suspect as a "modernist." And there was Hugo Distler.
I imagine relatively few people have heard of Distler--or Distler' s mother, for that matter. A Nuremberger and a graduate of the Leipzig Conservatory, he was appointed cantor and organist of the Jakobikirche in Lubeck at 23. Several prestigious professorships followed, and in 1942 he took over the choir of the Berlin Cathedral. But following the premier of his harpsichord concerto in 1935, a Nazi critic had tagged him with the fatal label of "Cultural Bolshevist." The political authorities apparently could not countenance having such a man in so important a position, and he was almost immediately threatened with dismissal and induction into the military forces. Unable to face the collapse of his essentially inward life, he killed himself. (A note on an earlier Distler record issued here gives the impression that he went happily marching away to give his life for his country!)
Though he composed in other forms, church music was Distler's chief interest. He was an authority on it (and taught it at Stuttgart), and was particularly cognizant of the practices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when both worship and the music that went with it were an essential part of daily life. As a practical composer on the one hand, and as choirmaster on the other, he was particularly interested in making his church music both functional and accessible to the worshippers. In other words, he wrote much of it with an eye to performance by "literate" amateurs. Thus his "Totentanz" (Dance of Death, based on the medieval frescoes in the Jakobikirche) has the speeches of the victims spoken rather than sung, between the choral passages.
This is not to say that Distler compromised his art for the sake of having it understood. One must expect from him neither the melodic nor the harmonic simplicity of an Orff. His pieces reflect his awareness of both the archaic and the contemporary. His melodies look back to Gregorian chant, his harmonies are reminiscent of Hindemith's or Poulenc's. He has a sure instinct for the meanings of his texts, and in that respect he has been likened to Hugo Wolf, though that is perhaps because he set many of the Morike poems that Wolf also used.
The "Jahrkreis" was written in 1933, two years after Distler came to Lubeck. As the name suggests, it is a cycle for the Church Year, consisting of 52 motets for two and three voices. Wilhelm Ehmann and the Westphalian Kantorei, noted for their recordings of Heinrich Schutz, here present a selection of twenty, interspersed with organ interludes from other Distler opuses.
Note: the brochure supplied with the original German record prominently lists Distler's dates on the cover as 1908-1642, which makes him even more remarkable than P.D.Q. Bach!
