BLACK OR BROWN? HEINRICH SUTERMEISTER IN APARTHEID'S WEB

Autor: Chris Walton
Rok vydání: 2007
Předmět:
Zdroj: Tempo. 61:41-51
ISSN: 1478-2286
0040-2982
DOI: 10.1017/s0040298207000046
Popis: When the Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister (!910-1995) celebrated his 80th birthday in 1990, a discordant note was sounded by Antje Miiller in the main Swiss tiiusicological Journal Dissonanz. Sutermeister had enjoyed his first major successes in Nazi Germany, and Miiller now subjected this fact to more intensive scrutiny than had anyone before her, questioning how 'neutral' a creative artist can be in his dealings with a totalitarian state. While acknowledging that Sutermeister had written no overtly political music, she pointed out that his compositional style of the time a mixture of Romanticism and the moderately Modernist with a dash of Orff was bound to appeal to the proponents of a Nazi aesthetic. Furthermore, his acceptance of commissions from Nazi Germany contrasted uneasily with his later claims to have remained an 'unpolitical artist'.' Miiller's article prompted an outcry amongst those well-disposed to the composer, who felt that an inopportune moment had been chosen to hunt for skeletons in the closet. Others, however, felt that a hitherto little-explored chapter of Swiss music history was at last being opened. The issue was particularly sensitive, because the position of Sutermeister had borne no small resemblance to that of Switzerland itself during the Second World War. The question posed in each case was: at what point does economic cooperation with a morally bankrupt regime turn from being arguably necessary to indisputably inexcusable? Heinrich Sutermeister was born in Feuerthalen in Canton Zurich in 1910, the son of a Protestant vicar. He attended grammar school in Basle, then enrolled at the local university to study French and German. His interest in music proved the stronger, however, and so he moved to Munich in 1931 in order to study composition at the Music Academy with Walter Courvoisier (an old friend of Sutermeister's father). While in Munich, Sutermeister became acquainted with Carl Orff and Werner Egk. He took several private lessons with the former, and they struck up a friendship that was to last until Orff's death in 1982. Sutermeister returned to Switzerland in 1934, where he worked as a repetiteur at the Berne City Theatre. His first opera was a radio opera, written to a commission from Berne Radio in 1935-6 and first broadcast on 15 October 1936 (it did not receive its first stage performance until 1949). It was an adaptation of Jeremias Gotthelf's novella novella Die schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider), the libretto being by the composer's fnend Albert Rosier Sutermeister's next opera was a setting of Shakespeare's Romeo andjuliet, in German, to a libretto that the composer compiled himself It was accepted by Karl Bohm in early 1939 for the Dresden State Opera, and first performed on 13 April 1940. It was an immediate, immense success, and was in the ensuing months taken up by dozens of opera houses
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