Arts and Letters

In trying to assess Ernst Toch's place in the music of our century, the usual method of pigeonholing a composer by linking him to one or another of the prevailing aesthetic movements would not do. Toch was by nature an individualist, a loner who stayed aloof from artistic trends and organized artistic pressure groups and who went quietly his own way. This was his strength and this also partly accounts for the undeserved neglect of his music in the post-Second World War period, a period when his creativity worked at a high pitch and when some of his most significant music was written.

Toch once referred to himself in an interview as "the most forgotten composer of the twentieth century." Sadly, there is some truth to this statement, particularly considering the position of extraordinary eminence which he held during the decade from the early twenties to the early thirties, when he emerged next to Hindemith as the most significant, most performed and talked-about composer in central Europe. The political upheavals and cataclysms which forced him to leave Europe and eventually brought him to these shores in the middle thirties failed to dampen his creative powers. But the adjustments to a new environment, to life in a new country and particularly to a new musico-political situation, had their effect on the dissemination of his music. Like so many other uprooted European artists, he had in a way to start building his reputation anew, a process which was to him painful, distasteful and at times disheartening.

Toch was born in Vienna and traces of his Viennese heritage can be discerned in much of his music. His musical gifts became evident at an early age and early successes as a composer persuaded him to abandon his studies of medicine and philosophy.

A retrospective analysis of Toch's development as a composer is no easy task. His strong personality manifested itself early, but a clear stylistic cleavage distinctly appears between the music written before the First World War, with its subtle Brahmsian flavor, and the first major work of 1919, the Ninth String Quartet, Opus 26. This work, together with the Tenth Quartet, Opus 28, which followed in rapid succession, seems to have been a milestone marking the turning point which led him to an idiom reflecting the more adventuresome voice and atmosphere of the twenties.

The first works after the break with the past were the beginning of a series of significant compositions of marked individuality. Among them is the Eleventh String Quartet, Opus 34, which together with the later Piano Quintet, Opus 64 (commissioned by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge) must be ranked with the outstanding chamber music of this century. During this period of the twenties, Toch wrote two instrumental concertos which proved instant successes: the Concerto for Violoncello and Chamber Orchestra and the Piano Concerto, which was introduced by Gieseking. This concerto, when performed at the International Music Festival in Frankfurt, 1927, eclipsed most of the other works on the Festival programs and led to an invitation by Koussevitzky to play the Concerto with the Boston Symphony. This in turn led to a tour of the United States under the auspices of the now-defunct "Pro Musica," during which the composer, an accomplished pianist, performed many of his chamber works with piano.

A few years later he was to return to America for good. A period of adjustment followed, during which he assumed teaching duties, first at the New School for Social Research in New York and later at the University of Southern California, where he decided to make his home.

The last phase of Toch's life was one of his most productive, and disclosed an entirely new facet of his creative personality. At the age of sixty-three, he wrote his First Symphony, whose imposing symphonic scope astonished the Toch cognoscenti. Five more symphonies followed, of which the Third won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Space limitations do not permit a closer examination of these works, and for the same reason Toch's works for the stage can only be mentioned. They include the operas The Fan, The Princess and the Pea, Egon und Emilie, and the posthumous The Last Tale. Nor do space limitations permit an exploration of Toch's excursions into experimental fields, such as his Three Pieces for Mechanical Piano or his widely noted "Geographical Fugue" for spoken chorus.

Though covering a span of roughly half a century, Toch's music, regardless of the time when it was written, strikes one immediately with features distinctly Tochian: a highly original inventiveness, a fastidious feeling for form, the presence of a very personal chromaticism, an abundance of sharp biting rhythms and an extraordinary gift for finely chiseled melodic lines.

Can a composer with such an important and rich legacy remain for long in the background? It is hardly likely. One has only to think of Bartók, whose star rose after his death, of Janacek, whose rediscovery took a little longer, or of Busoni's recent re-emergence on the musical scene.

Ernst Toch may have to wait, but his reappearance seems assured.