top of page
BC-Bulb-2.gif
Kientzl.gif

Portrait of another good musician who backed the wrong horse

View Score

Wilhelm Kienzl (17 January 1857 – 3 October 1941)

Here's another composer you've probably never heard of - unless you're a student of either 20th Century German opera that isn't Wagner, or failed post-WWI attempts at writing an Austrian national anthem.

​

Born in a small Styrian village, and introduced to music by his amateur flutist/guitarist attorney father, Wilhem Kiezl began composing at age twelve. After some traveling, playing, lecturing, and studying (notably, under Franz Liszt) he ended up where a lot of composers did, in Vienna. Literally the president of the Wagner fan club, he eventually wrote his operatic meal ticket, Der Evangelimann, in 1894. Subsequent efforts were less successful. One of them (a folk opera called Das Testament) is considered by many to be his most musically accomplished, but it flopped because the libretto relied heavily on a very regional Austrian dialect.

 

Being unable to embrace the growing popularity of atonality - he was a staunch supporter of the Nazi regime, who considered it degenerate, and "Bolshevik" - Kienzl, now long disowned by his beloved Wagnerites and increasingly musically isolated, abandoned composition in 1936 due to poor health, and died in Vienna in 1941.

​

Auf, auf ihr Hirten

​

Once again, we peel away layers of politic, ambition and idolatry to find, simply, a gifted musician from a small village scoring a beloved Christmas song. Up! up! You shepherds in the field! Get ready for your journey now, to be filled with joy!" A simple, bouncy, spirited Austrian folk waltz, it is sung, with gusto, in the same kind of back country dialect that sunk Kienzl's greatest opera.

​

 

 

​

bottom of page