Ernst von Dohnányi

The Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi was born in 1877, his life overlapping that of Brahms by twenty years. It may seem odd to mention the two men in the same opening sentence, but the elder’s influence on Dohnányi as a composer was considerable and is easy to recognise in much of his music. Indeed, Brahms himself promoted the younger man’s piano quintet, performing it in Vienna – a promising start for an emerging composer’s first published work.

Dohnányi graduated from the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music as a composer and pianist, having also developed skills as a conductor, and quickly established a musical career, including well beyond the borders of his home country. His life was fractured by the two World Wars, and although he was predominantly focused on fighting against Nazism and on protecting Jews, he drew perhaps unfair criticism for disbanding the Budapest Philharmonic and moving to Austria following the German invasion of Hungary in 1944.

Dohnányi's best-known work is the charming Variations on a Nursery Tune, based on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but it is not especially reflective of his wider compositional style. There is no shortage of recordings of this piece, but Howard Shelley’s is especially enjoyable and has the advantage of being paired with two less well-known works by the composer. The Suite for Orchestra includes some particularly lovely writing for woodwind, and the four scenes from the mimed entertainment, The Veil of Pierrette, hints at a capacity for musical drama. This was exercised on a larger scale in a romantic opera, A vajda tornya (1922), which has fallen into obscurity, as has the second of his comic operas, A Tenor (1927). His earlier one-act comic opera, Tante Simona (1912), is mildly interesting but not essential, and is availabile in full to download or stream on the Hungaroton label.

It was in 1902, before these works, when Dohnányi’s first symphony was premiered in Manchester, conducted by Hans Richter, and the skills it demonstrates in drawing together heavyweight influences and handling compositional techniques are startling for an early-career composer. It’s a powerful work deserving of wider attention than it has received, but the recording by Roberto Paternostro on Capriccio pays powerful testament to its qualities. Paternostro has also made recordings of the composer's cello and harp concertos, in which the soloists are the stars.

The second symphony wasn’t completed until 1944 and was then revised again in 1956. It’s a tense and dramatic work with an underlying sense of sorrow, still rooted in late Romanticism but identifiably later in style. In the final movement, Dohnányi truly shows his mettle as a composer, combining craftsmanship and depth of expressivity to great effect, opening with a quotation from Bach’s Come, Sweet Death, followed by five variations and a brilliantly executed triple fugue, before a coda which draws together all that has come before it. The only recording available on CD is a solid one by the Florida State University Symphony Orchestra on Naxos, but Matthias Bamert's gripping interpretation with the BBC Philharmonic is available to download and stream, as part of a valuable treasury of the composer's orchestral works.

Much of Dohnányi’s life was focused on performing and teaching at the piano, and so it’s no surprise that solo music for the instrument forms a substantial part of his compositional output. What is more surprising is that it hasn’t always been so widely played as it deserves. As a young man he studied piano with István Thomán and Eugen d'Albert, both students of Liszt, and his piano music betrays the combination of this pedagogical influence and the compositional influence of Brahms.

Individual pieces appear in a number of recital albums, but it's Martin Roscoe who has done this music the greatest service, initiallly with his 1993 album for ASV, now available as a Presto CD, and much more recently in a highly acclaimed complete survey of the piano works across four albums for Hyperion. The British pianist has been something of a champion of Dohnányi, having made one of the earliest contributions to the Romantic Piano Concerto Series with award-winning accounts of the rhapsodic piano concertos, and having also set down interpretations of the violin sonatas with Tasmin Little, and the piano quintets with the Vanbrugh Quartet, which leave one wondering why these works aren't more widely celebrated. The piano quintets are also available in superb accounts by the Takács Quartet and Marc-André Hamelin, coupled with the second of the composer's three string quartets, composed in 1906 - a work which moves between heart-felt lyricism and punctuated rhythmic writing, with a prayerful opening to the third movement.

Anyone interested in learning more intimately about the composer should explore James Grymes's excellent collection of Ernst von Dohnanyi's Selected Writings and Interviews, and there is also the first English language biography, Ernst Von Dohnányi: A Song of Life, which was written by the composer's widow.