Paul Kletzki (1900-1973)

[Scion7]

Born in Lodz as Paweł Klecki (later adapted his name), educated at the Warsaw and Berlin Academies, lived in Germany, Italy, the USSR, Switzerland, the USA, died in Liverpool.
Known mostly as a conductor, he was a composer who unfortunately suffers from a great deal of his works being lost or destroyed during WWII.
After 1942, he stopped composing, stating that National Socialism had killed the spirit of composition in him.
A Jew, many of his family were exterminated in the camps during the war.

Naxos and Dux have each released a CD of his music.

There are four symphonies, a violin concerto, four string quartets and other works in manuscript housed in Zurich, awaiting publication and recording.

His music is Romantic in tone.

[Scion7]

[aligreto]

Interesting subject for a thread; I admire him as a conductor but I do not know his music at all.

[pjme]

]

Must find that cd somewhere and listen again. !!

https://www.musiques-suisses.ch/en/Paul-Kletzki/Orchestervariationen-op--30-Symphonie-Nr--3-op--31/id/471


Orchestervariationen op. 30 / Symphonie Nr. 3 op. 31
Tracks
Orchestervariationen op. 20; Symphonie Nr. 3 op. 31

Description

When he left Poland in 1921 to settle in Berlin, Pawel Klecki changed his name to Paul Kletzki. From today's perspective this decision seems oddly prescient of what was to come, for Kletzki was a man who would soon enough have to reinvent himself more than once. Paul Kletzki died in 1973, well before the CD era, but since the 1990s more and more of his recordings have appeared in that medium and  have served to confirm his erstwhile reputation as one of the world's leading conductors. He was chief conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Bern City Orchestra, and even of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (the last of these as the successor preferred by Ernest Ansermet himself). But this travelling maestro was essentially a self-invention of the post-war period. The earlier Klecki/Kletzki is more difficult to grasp, for there are few biographical sources that are not contradicted by others. What is certain is that the pre-war period Kletzki saw himself  primarily as a composer. His early works - piano music, chamber works, songs, soon orchestral works too - were taken on by the leading publishing houses of Simrock and Breitkopf & Härtel. In 1925, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted his Overture to a Tragedy with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, and soon afterward invited Kletzki to the Berlin Philharmonic as a guest conductor. Already in 1928 he had written of Kletzki as "an unusually good musician, possessing not just talent, but also warmth and energy", and in late 1932 he appointed Kletzki as permanent guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But Hitler's ascent to power just weeks later thwarted all their plans. As a Polish Jew, Kletzki had little choice but to leave Germany. The manner of it all left him feeling betrayed by Furtwängler, and even after the Second World War he refused the man's attempts at reconciliation. In 1942 this composer fell silent. He thereafter ignored his own oeuvre, and so did everyone else.

Composer
Paul Kletzki (1900-1973)

Artists
Bamberger Symphoniker - Bayerische Staatsphilharmonie, Thomas Rösner, Leitung.

CD order number
MGB 6272

[Scion7]

Interesting subject for a thread; I admire him as a conductor but I do not know his music at all.

Start with the Dux disc.
All the pieces from it are on YouTube if you wish to sample.
I think the Violin Sonata is the best of the five pieces of his that I've heard.
An interesting, minor composer.  Shame he stopped in '42.

[aligreto]

Start with the Dux disc.
All the pieces from it are on YouTube if you wish to sample.
I think the Violin Sonata is the best of the five pieces of his that I've heard.
An interesting, minor composer.  Shame he stopped in '42.

Thank you for that.

[Daverz]

I recall finding this CD to be very good, but I'll have to re-acquaint myself with it:

[asin]B0002ABTAI[/asin]

Not sure why the Amazon price is so high.  Probably better to get it somewhere else:

http://www.mdt.co.uk/kletzki-paul-symphony-no-3-symphony-orchestra-thomas-sanderling-bis.html
http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/BIS/BISCD1399
http://www.eclassical.com/conductors/sanderling-thomas/paul-kletzki-symphony-no3-in-memoriam.html

[Scion7]

from the booklet to the BIS disc:

It was in the course of his sojourn in Milan that Kletzki buried his published scores in a large wooden chest in the basement of the apartment building near La Scala in which he had been living. During World War II, the building was bombed. Thus, Kletzki believed that the chest had been destroyed, and with it his entire pre-1933 output. (In a newspaper interview published in Australia in 1948, Kletzki complained bitterly that his publishers had destroyed his music: 'even the copperplates from which my music was lithographed in Germany were melted down'.) In 1965, however, during some excavations, it was discovered. The chest was returned to Kletzki's residence in Berne, where it suddenly appeared one day on his front step. At this time, Kletzki was afraid to open it, believing that his scores had turned to dust. He told his second wife Yvonne that, having lost his music once, he could not bear to lose it again. So the chest remained unopened in their basement. Not until long after Kletzki's death in 1973 did Yvonne open the chest; while the books had indeed rotted away, she found the music to be perfectly preserved.

This is the source of the manuscripts, I presume - would love to have the entire works list of what's in there.