Rathaus: Ballade, Op.40

Karol Rathaus (1895-1954) was a Jewish-Austrian composer, who was successful in Germany on symphonies and instrumental music during the Weimar period. He went into exile with the rise of the Nazis and ended his life in New York.

"Ballad" was composed in 1936 when he was in London and it has a subtitle of "Variations on a Hurdy-Gurdy theme". Hurdy-gurdy is a kind of keyboard bowed string instrument that can produce bagpipe-like continuous sound with a drone string as accompaniment. When Rathaus heard the performance of this instrument on the street, he wrote eight variations on the tune. As a whole it has a ballad-like narrative, and at some places it has remarkable dramatic effects with a sense of urgency and exhilaration. I note that Rathaus was a distinguished composer of movie soundtrack.

The main motive is A-C#-E-D#-C#-B in A major. I like this motive since I met Janacek's "Fairy Tale" for cello+piano when I was 16 years old. Another thing I like about this work is that technically this work sounds as if Debussy and Stravinsy are composing together. Stravinsky's piano writing is too aristocratic or too eager to destroy pianists (cf; piano version of Petrouchka (arr1921)).

The first recording I came upon was that by Donald Pirone. When he made the Carnegie Debut in 1981. He included three variations, i.e., Beethoven's c minor, Copland's, and Rathaus's.

"Karol Rathaus's Ballade proved a lengthy but interesting work, with its variations on a hurdy-gurdy theme." (Edward Rothstein in New York Times)

I understand that the last slow variation might give an impression of "lengthy", but simply it might be too much even for the reviewer to listen to Copland and Rathaus in one sitting. We can access the recording by Pirone in 2011 and the tempo is quite fast (duration = 11:49). Apparently he is too afraid of boring the audience.

Later I found a performance by Jakob Gimpel, a contemporary with the composer and a well-known virtuoso. His imagination and forcefulness was almost scary. Following Gimpel, I allowed myself to add some notes to the original and tried to make it sound more gorgeous. If this version is still ”lengthy”, I am responsible.

I played this in a large hall (same one as I played Vilinsky) in a concert and this turned out to be among my best performances before audience. This studio recording also sounds quite pleasant to me.

My quest of Ballade Variations is coming near to the end.

instrument: Steinway B211