Ignatz Waghalter - Biography

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Waghalter’s Music: The Defense of Melodicism

These events were the first indications of renewed interest in Waghalter’s music after decades of oblivion. And there are signs that the musical and intellectual climate is becoming more hospitable for composers who worked in a lyrical idiom. For decades after the end of World War II, music composition and criticism were dominated by an anti-melodic aesthetic, whose principle champion was the influential German theorist, Theodore Adorno. His authoritative Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) denounced melodicism as illegitimate, banal and unacceptable as a mode of serious musical expression. Only that music which denied “the illusion of beauty” merited attention. The task of music, and art in general, was to give expression to the utter hopelessness of the human condition. “Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal,” wrote Adorno. “It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.”

At long last, this demoralized rejection of melodicism is being subjected to critical scrutiny. But the new halting efforts in the direction of a rebirth of melodicism confront immense cultural and even technical obstacles. After more than a half-century of scorn and neglect, the art and skill of expressing essential emotional truths in melodic form are not easily revived. It is in this situation that Waghalter’s music assumes new significance. His compositions speak directly to the listener, with a captivating beauty of the type that penetrates and embeds itself in the mind and heart.

Waghalter’s musical lineage passed, on one side of the Polish-German border, through his mentor Joachim to Brahms and Schumann. On the other side of that border, Waghalter’s musical personality was shaped by the heritage of Chopin, Dvorak and, still further east, Tchaikovsky. Moreover, especially in his earliest music, the influence of Jewish liturgical themes is apparent. But whatever the source of his inspiration, Ignatz Waghalter possessed an uncompromising melodic gift of the highest caliber. In remaining true to his musical voice, Waghalter’s work expressed artistic and emotional authenticity. For decades it may have seemed that Waghalter belonged to an old school of intense melodicism that was of little relevance to the helter-skelter world that emerged from the ashes and upheavals of two World Wars. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a musician whose work is so antithetical to the precepts of Adorno than Ignatz Waghalter. But this is itself a reason for a new consideration of Waghalter as the representative of a musical aesthetic that was lost for too long.