I’m thinking about renaming this weekly feature, in order to make it into a more broad focus on classical music, but more on that later when I’ve thought of a name that I like. Meanwhile, today I have a piece of chamber music by Marcel Tyberg.
Tyberg was an Austrian composer, born in 1893. He was not highly prolific, but he left behind several symphonies, some songs, and a few chamber and sacred works that survived when Tyberg gave his manuscripts to a friend while he was living in Northern Italy in 1943. How prescient he was: his mother, abiding by Nazi law, registered that she did, in fact, have Jewish blood. On that basis, Marcel Tyberg was deported to the camps. He died in Auschwitz, December 31, 1944.
His scores remained with a family who later settled in Buffalo, NY, where decades later a descendant found the music and brought it to Buffalo Philharmonic music director JoAnn Falletta. She describes what happened:
One day, maybe a couple of years after I became music director; I remember it was a terribly rainy day in Buffalo, and I got off the stage after rehearsal and standing at the door of my dressing room was this older gentleman, just drenched, wearing a raincoat, dripping water, carrying a shopping bag. I had never met him before.
It was Dr. Enrico Mihich [the son of Milan Mihich, the friend to whom Tyberg entrusted his scores]. He said, “I have to speak to you. It’s very important.” He was the kind of person, when he said it was very important, you listened to him.
We went into my dressing room. He told me that story. He said, I know this is wonderful music. It’s great music. It needs to be played. I’ve tried with every music director and they haven’t been able to do it.
I looked at the music and I knew why they said no. It was almost illegible. The score had been handwritten, the pages were frayed, pieces were missing. It was almost impossible to read this European handwriting.
I realized this was going to be a daunting project but there was something about his urgency. He said to me, “I’m not going to live much longer. This is my life’s mission to bring this music to life.”
And I thought, how could you not be moved by the belief in this composer that this man had?
Marcel Tyberg is a musical voice that maybe would have flourished in the 20th century had other impulses not included his in the millions of voices that were marked for silence. Listening to music from artists like this is important, I think, for a number of reasons. First, those voices should never have been silenced and if we can hear them now, even many decades later, I think that’s a worthy thing. And second? It’s just plain good music.
This is Tyberg’s Piano Trio in F major. A piano trio typically involves a piano, a violin, and a cello, and that’s the case here. The work is energetic and lyrical with a middle movement that puts me in mind of Borodin, with its songful introspection and its insistent drive. And it can only be heard now because a man took his friend’s music and fled Europe with it.