Jon Gallant surmises that Herman Koppel is still alive. Not so, I'm
afraid: he died two years ago. I thought you might be interested in
the obituary I wrote at the time (for _The Independent_ in the UK). I
hear some noise from Denmark about recordings of at least a couple of
symphonies. I'll check out the rumours and report back.
Herman D. Koppel was the last surviving member of the great
triumvirate that took over the helm of Danish music after Carl Nielsen.
Vagn Holmboe died in 1996, at the aged of 86. Finn Hoffding died
last year, aged 97. Now Koppel, too, is dead, a few weeks before
his ninetieth birthday. He was a permanent feature of Danish musical
life from the 1920s until only a year or so ago, when his health
began to falter - with a brief interruption in 1943 when Koppel, a
Jew, took refuge from Hitler's occupying forces in southern Sweden.
He died a national monument, garlanded with honours.
Koppel's parents were Polish immigrants who in 1907 came to Denmark
in their late teens as refugees from Russian occupation. Herman was
born a year later. His parents were not musical - his father was a
tailor, who worked with a dedication that brought the family moderate
comfort - but as a safeguard against poverty they made sure that
their children knew music. And so at the age of five or six Herman
was put to the piano and his younger brother Julius to the violin
(he, too, became a distinguished musician). Herman made rapid
progress and at the age of seventeen was admitted to the Royal Danish
Conservatory, having been rejected earlier simply because he was too
young; his piano teachers there were Rudolf Simonsen, director of
the Conservatory, and Anders Rachlew.
It was through his application for admission to the Conservatory
that, in December 1925, Koppel first met Nielsen himself. Nielsen
examined the scores Koppel had submitted in support of his request,
complimented the young composer on his sense of form and told him
what his own teacher, Niels Gade, born in 1817 and a friend of
Mendelssohn, had told him. Koppel's own teaching career, five
decades long, was later to pass on that sense of continuity.
The contact with Nielsen deepened when Simonsen asked Koppel if he
would like to give Nielsen a hand preparing a cantata he had composed
for the opening of an exhibition, and so Koppel began to study
Nielsen's piano works under the guidance of their composer. He made
his debut as a pianist in 1930 (a year after his debut as a composer)
playing Nielsen's Theme and Variations, and soon afterwards gave a
concert consisting entirely of Nielsen's piano music. He went to
Nielsen's home to play him the programme beforehand; Nielsen professed
himself very happy with Koppel's playing. Koppel in turn found
Nielsen "a very kind person, very quiet" - and far from acting the
great man: "he looked at my compositions and gave me advice - not
instruction, for he accepted it as it was".
After the Nazis occupied Denmark in 1940, they initially left the
Danish Jews alone, and in 1943 Koppel was still able to act as
assistant to the ailing Simonsen. But the outlook was darkening,
and when one of Simonsen's pupils, a daughter of the Danish Minister
of Defence, brought advice from her father that Koppel and his family
should get out, he took it seriously and fled with his family across
the Kattegat.
Koppel had been composing assiduously all this time and continued to
do so throughout his life, eventually amassing a catalogue of impressive
size. The earliest influence on his music was, of course, Nielsen,
but Stravinsky and Bartok soon pushed themselves forward; and Koppel
also took a keen interest in jazz. Koppel synthesised these styles
into a language that may not have been wildly original - he was no
radical - but which always showed complete mastery of his materials.
He wrote generously for his own instrument, the piano: there are
four concertos, a number of chamber works with piano, a sonata,
several sets of variations and some miniatures. More impressively
yet, there is a cycle of seven imposing symphonies, the fifth of
which won the Tivoli symphony competition in 1956. There are several
other orchestral works, including a Concerto for Orchestra that will
test the mettle of any group that attempts it, and the haunting Memory
for strings, written three years ago to commemorate the end of the
Second World War. And in Copenhagen in March 1996 the Welsh conductor
Owain Arwel Hughes rescued Koppel's magisterial oratorio Moses from
three decades of neglect. Moses, a setting of extracts from the Book
of Genesis, is available on CD (Da Capo 8.224046) and will give a
fair indication of how impressive Koppel's music can be: it's a work
of granitic strength and grim, hieratic severity, stylistically
reminiscent of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms but with a sense of
fearsome power that the Russian never achieved.
Yet even in his native Denmark Koppel's music isn't given the respect
- and the performances - it deserves, simply because it isn't known.
A good part of the blame can be ascribed to Koppel himself: he was
notoriously uninterested in his own music and never pushed it. When
I was getting to know him, I wondered if he had written anything
since the dictionary entries I had consulted and asked if his tally
of symphonies still stood at seven. He was genuinely unsure: "Seven,
eight, something like that - I can't remember." He also got wrong
the number of piano concertos he had composed. Trying to get him to
talk about his music was like pulling teeth. How would he characterise
his symphonic style? "It's very difficult to describe one's own music.
I don't know." How had his music evolved over the years? "I cannot
describe it." He was, moreover, completely devoid of bitterness about
his neglect: "I remember from my own youth thinking that there were
a lot of old composers and that it was us, who were young, who should
be played. And maybe young people today feel the same way - it's
quite natural!" I asked one Danish record-producer why so little of
Koppel's music was recorded. "What can you do?" he asked in obvious
frustration, "People offer him grants to get his music recorded and
he sends them off to record his children and grandchildren!"
Koppel's family is indeed one of the best-known features of the Danish
musical landscape. His sons Anders and Thomas are both composers of
"serious" popular music and keyboard players, and his daughters, too,
are practising musicians: Therese is a pianist and Lone an opera
singer - and his grandchildren are carrying on the family tradition.
Koppel's deep involvement with his children's music-making was
demonstrated publicly in 1993 when, at the age of 86, he gave the
first performance of Anders' piano concerto.
The longevity of his career as a pianist means that - until someone
makes a systematic attempt to perform and record his music - it is
as a pianist that Koppel will best be remembered, and one whose
musicianship remained intact for almost eight decades. In his
seventies he celebrated his retirement from teaching by learning
Schoenberg's piano music. In 1991 he marked the 60th anniversary of
Nielsen's death by performing his piano music in New York. I first
met him, in 1995, when he was 86; he had just returned from performing
in Gdansk. A volume of Szymanowski's piano music he had picked up
there was lying on his piano, and I asked him if he knew one of the
works in it. No, let's see, he said, opened the music and gave it
a phenomenal performance at sight.
But the true legacy of Herman D. Koppel (he always used the "D.",
which stood for David) is the music. Perhaps the fact that he has
died without seeing it pass into the repertoire will prick a few
Danish consciences into dusting it down and letting the world hear
it at last.
Herman D. Koppel, composer, pianist and teacher. Born Copenhagen,
1 October 1908. Married (1) 1935 Edel-Vibeke Clausen-Bruhn, 2s, 2d,
(2) 1976 Inge Vibeke Kabel (nee Raunkjaer) . Died Copenhagen, 14 July
1998.
Martin Anderson
Toccata Press
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http://www.classical.net/music/books/toccata/
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