Joseph Willem Mengelberg (28
March 1871 – 21 March 1951) was a Dutch
conductor.
Biography
Mengelberg
was born 4th of 15 children to German-born parents in Utrecht
, Netherlands. He studied in the Cologne conservatory,
including piano and composition. He was chosen as General Music
Director of the city of Lucerne Switzerland at age 21. where he was
conductor of an orchestra and a choir, directed a music school,
taught piano lessons and continued to compose.
Mengelberg is highly renowned for his work as the principal
conductor of the
Concertgebouw Orchestra from
1895 to 1945. In addition, Mengelberg founded the long-standing
Mahler tradition of Concertgebouw. In 1902 he met
Gustav Mahler and became friends with him.
Mengelberg was instrumental in introducing most of Mahler's work to
The Netherlands, and Mahler regularly visited The Netherlands to
introduce his work to Dutch audiences. In fact, he edited some of
his symphonies while in the Netherlands, making them sound better
for the
acoustics of Concertgebouw. This
is perhaps one reason that this concert hall and its orchestra is
renowned for its Mahler tradition.
Nevertheless, Mengelberg's importance as a conductor was not only
due to his Mahler interpretations. He was also, for example, an
exceptionally gifted performer of
Richard Strauss; and even today his
recordings of Strauss's tone poem
Ein Heldenleben, which had been
dedicated to him and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, are widely
regarded by critics as among the best — if not the very best — of
this piece ever made.
One criticism of Mengelberg's influence over Dutch musical life,
most clearly articulated by the composer
Willem Pijper, was that Mengelberg did not
particularly champion Dutch composers during his Concertgebouw
tenure, especially after 1920.
Mengelberg with
The New York
Times
Mengelberg was music director of the
New York Philharmonic
Orchestra from 1922 to 1928. Beginning in January 1926, he
shared the podium with
Arturo
Toscanini; Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs has documented
that Mengelberg and Toscanini clashed over interpretations of music
and even rehearsal techniques, creating division among the
musicians that eventually resulted in Mengelberg leaving the
orchestra. However, the maestro did make a series of recordings
with the Philharmonic for both the
Victor Talking Machine
Company and
Brunswick Records,
including a 1928 electrical recording of Richard Strauss'
Ein
Heldenleben that was later reissued on LP and CD. One of his
first electrical recordings, for Victor, was a two-disc set devoted
to
A Victory Ball by
Ernest
Schelling.
The most controversial aspect of Mengelberg's biography centers
around his actions and behavior during the years of the Nazi
occupation of Holland between 1940 and 1945. Some newspaper
articles of the time gave the appearance that he acquiesced to the
presence of the Nazi's ideological restrictions on particular
composers. Explanations have ranged from political naiveté in
general, to a general "blind spot" of criticism of anything German,
given his own ancestry. Because of Mengelberg's co-operation with
the occupying regime in The Netherlands during
World War II, he was banned from conducting in
the country by the Dutch government after the war in 1945. He was
stripped of his honours and his passport. The original judgment was
that Mengelberg would be banned from conducting in the Netherlands
for the remainder of his life. Appeals by his attorneys led to a
reduction in the sentence to a banning of six years from
conducting, retroactively applied to start from 1945. This
notwithstanding, he continued to draw a pension from the orchestra
until 1949 when cut off by the city council of Amsterdam.
Mengelberg
retreated in exile to Zuort, Sent
, Switzerland
, where he remained until his death in 1951, just
two months before the expiration of his exile order.
Willem Mengelberg was the uncle of the musicologist and composer
Rudolf Mengelberg and of the
conductor, composer and critic
Karel
Mengelberg, who was himself the father of the prominent
improvising pianist and composer
Misha
Mengelberg.
Recorded Legacy
In addition to his acclaimed recordings of
Richard Strauss'
Ein Heldenleben,
Mengelberg left valuable discs of symphonies by
Beethoven and
Brahms, not to mention a wildly
controversial but gripping reading of
Bach's
St. Matthew Passion.
His most characteristic performances are marked by a tremendous
expressiveness and freedom of tempo, perhaps most remarkable in his
recording of Mahler's fourth Symphony but certainly present in the
aforementioned
St Matthew Passion and other performances
as well. These qualities, shared (perhaps to a lesser extent) by
only a handful of other conductors of the era of sound recording,
such as
Wilhelm Furtwängler
and
Leonard Bernstein, make much
of his work unusually controversial among classical music
listeners; recordings that more mainstream listeners consider
unlistenable will be hailed by others as among the greatest
recordings ever made.
Many of his recorded performances, including some live concerts in
Amsterdam during World War II, have been reissued on LP and CD.
While he
was known for his recordings of the German repertoire, Capitol Records
issued a powerful, nearly high fidelity recording
of Cesar Franck's Symphony in D
minor, recorded in the 1940s by Telefunken with the Concertgebouw
Orchestra.
Due to the Dutch government's six-year ban on Mengelberg's
conducting activities, he made no more recordings after 1945. Some
of his performances in Amsterdam were recorded on the innovative
German tape recorder, the
Magnetophon,
resulting in unusually high fidelity for the time.
Sound films of Mengelberg conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra,
during live concerts in Amsterdam, have survived. Among these are a
1931 performance of
Karl Maria von
Weber's
Oberon overture and a
1939 performance of Bach's
St. Matthew Passion.
References
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