<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    THE NORTHERN SCHUBERT

'In one of the best-known ballads, Sir Oluf, he uses a wide range of textures in the accompaniment, yet also contrives to evoke the various characters -- narrator, child, ghost -- brilliantly. Scapine (der verliebte Schäferin Scapine, see page 4 above) is even more astonishing : it starts off larghetto, grows to an allegro, builds to an almost manic presto, then subsides with a soave diminuendo. At times his ornaments, turns and little vocal cadenzas, coupled with the sheer dramatic power of his word-setting, make certain songs feel almost like opera'. (Loewe composed five or six operas, though witnessed few stagings in his lifetime; aptly for a ballad-composer, two of them (Malek-Adel and Emmy, were to libretti after Sir Walter Scott, based on Scott's novels The Talisman and Kenilworth).

Loewe's other works are just beginning to emerge from the woodwork. Their quality is by no means to be dismissed. His piano sonatas (recorded convincingly by Cord Garben on CPO 999 355 2) demonstrate that even in his twenties (and certainly by the magnificent Grand Sonata in E flat, Op 16, composed in 1829, only just after Beethoven's and Schubert's deaths, he had a command of the grand manner which characterises, in particular, Weber's sonatas -- quite apart from an ability to import fugue into sonata form in a way familiar throughout the period spanning Beethoven's last sonatas and the age of Liszt and Reubke.

The A Major Piano Concerto -- a bold, assertive key for an upbeat and assertive work -- feels staggeringly advanced for a work that was first heard (with the composer as soloist) in 1831. In manner, style and dimensions, its massive and massy opening movement seems to prefigure the great First Concerto of Brahms; after that, the 'Hispanic' grazioso middle movement, in F major, could not be more unexpected. Loewe's Symphony, in D minor, includes a thunderous scherzo which any composer would be glad to have written and a measured finale that bears marked affinities to the serene, chorale-like manner of Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony.

Despite the promise of Rudolph, der deutscher Herr, his youthful grand opera of 1825 which was admired by Spontini but never staged, the only opera of Loewe's to be properly performed in the theatre was Die drei Wünsche (Berlin, 1834), which initially enjoyed great popularity. His most celebrated choral work was Die Siebenschläfer, taking its place (alongside Spohr and Mendelssohn) among the most highly rated oratorios of the 19th century, as did (at the outset) The Destruction of Jerusalem, premièred four years earlier, in 1829. Gutenberg, based on the great German founder of medieval printing, was a foray into the form of historical oratorio. Loewe's last oratorio, The Raising of Lazarus (Capriccio 10 581), manifestly lacks his earlier youthful fire, partly also because both it and The Healing of the Blind Man were composed for semi-amateur performance; the former was only orchestrated (by others) half a century later. But Das Sühnopfer des neuen Bundes (The Atonement of the New Testament), though recorded in a less than ideal acoustic on a German label (FCD 97755), has a distinction and weight to the choral and solo writing that makes it well worth a possible revival.

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