Early in his career, Hartmann wrote two suites and two sonatas for solo violin. These pieces from the 1920s have only recently entered circulation. They don’t entirely suggest Hartmann’s later style, but they are recital-worthy and show Hartmann was an assured composer almost from the beginning.

Hartmann was born in Munich in 1905. He studied at the music academy there with a former pupil of Max Reger, but an equally strong educational influence came from conductor and modern-music champion Hermann Scherchen, who turned Hartmann on to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Hartmann never fully embraced their 12-tone methods, but he did respect their theories enough to study privately with Webern, from whom he learned, if nothing else, a perfectionist’s attention to detail.

The young Hartmann’s political ideology was formed in the aftermath of the collapse of the German monarchy at the end of World War I and the unsuccessful workers’ revolution that followed. Hartmann became a socialist, and through his life he wrote essays advocating the interconnectedness of the arts and their social and political environments.

“The categorization of art as political or non-political, engaged or disengaged, seems to be somewhat superfluous,” he once wrote, “for no artist, unless wishing himself written off to nihilism, can sidestep his commitment to humanity.”

Fortunately, Hartmann’s sociopolitical commitment did not result, as it so often does, in poor music. Not for him was the banality of Shostakovich’s tub-thumpingly patriotic cantatas (which Shostakovich didn’t really believe in anyway), nor the propagandistic, sometimes overly simple, socially “useful” music of his German colleague Hanns Eisler.

Initially, Hartmann employed an ironic, satiric, sometimes jazzy style akin to early Hindemith or Erwin Schulhoff. Once the Nazis came to power, Hartmann’s works turned dark.

From then on, his music, when it had a social subject, was about protest, not propaganda.

METRIC COMPLEXITY

Hartmann remained in Germany during the Nazi period. His music was generally not performed in Germany from the mid-1930s to the end of the war, but he composed assiduously through these years of “internal exile.”

The first version of his Concerto funèbre dates from this period; it’s a lament upon, among other things, the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, and employs the same old patriotic Hussite Chorale that Smetana used in Mà Vlast. Other angry, mournful works from this time bear such titles as Miserae and Sinfonia Tragica, and he wrote an opera ostensibly about the horrors of the 30 Years War, but whose subject was actually the brutal Third Reich.

Because of the limited circulation of his scores, Hartmann’s protests were essentially private, and because he kept his head down he survived the war. During the postwar years he established a concert series with modern-art exhibitions in Munich, revised many of the works he’d written during his “muted” period or mined them for material in new works, and began winning a string of German music prizes.

In the 1950s, Hartmann began experimenting with techniques involving metric complexity and a sort of mirror-image polyphony he’d long found interesting—pitting a theme against its own retrograde or inversion. This was something borrowed from Webern’s tool kit, but it didn’t involve 12-tone writing. From beginning to end, Hartmann’s music suggests an intimate familiarity with the works of Hindemith, Mahler, Bartók, Berg, and Stravinsky.

Hartmann succumbed to cancer in 1963, only 58 years old. He was politically committed to the end; just before he died, Hartmann was working on an extended vocal work decrying the world’s economic disparity, pollution, technology obsession, and general soullessness.

Like Brahms, Hartmann apparently destroyed his earliest compositions. Among the earliest that survive are four works for solo violin, self-assured music, even if it sounds less like the Hartmann to come than like a melding of Reger and Hindemith.

IN DEBT TO BACH

These two suites and two sonatas all date from 1927, when Hartmann was apparently trying to master his string-writing technique while also paying tribute to the sonatas and partitas of Bach, and taking a few cues from the then-recent solo string works of Hindemith.

Apparently, none were performed until the mid 1980s. Ingolf Turban and Alina Ibragimova each have recorded the whole set, while most recently Viviane Hagner made an impeccable recording of the first suite, placed in the company of Bartók’s solo sonata and Bach’s second partita.

Hagner had been searching for 20th-century solo violin works that referred in one way or another to Bach when she came upon the Hartmann suite. She already knew his Concerto funèbre, which from the beginning she had found “emotionally extremely captivating.”

The suite, she says, struck her as “a really strong piece. Even in this early piece, the mournful character is already evident, which becomes a key element for his later works.

“I do think, violinistically, it’s very, very challenging,” she says. “Maybe it’s comparable to Bach in some ways because of the polyphonic sections that are quite persistent. There are lots of double-stops, lots of chords; just getting the melodies, the line through, is very difficult. This piece is at least as hard as it sounds.”

The suite falls into a movement pattern Bach would have recognized: a sinuous two-voice canon, followed by a cheerful fugue, a jagged rondo, then what Hartmann calls a “three-part songform,” and finally a ciaccona, or chaconne.

“The first and second movements are particularly challenging,” Hagner says. “Hartmann’s writing for the violin is an introverted virtuosity. It’s difficult, but it never shows off. The slow movement is a beautiful cantilena, where it’s important to find the long line through this kind of a lied.”

Hagner takes a similar approach to the chaconne. “For me, it was very important to structure the theme of the chaconne first and always try to bring out this line, and at the same time try to show the other voices,” she says, “but differentiate them, and show which is more important at certain places.

“Something else that strikes me,” she adds, “is that it’s very sincere, very honest music. It reflects his personality. He has never been a composer in the front row; maybe part of the reason was his always being true to his own beliefs.”

Hagner has had difficulty fitting the suite onto recital programs, partly because solo concerts are rare, and it would need to be carefully placed in context in a duo recital. “Another major work including a chaconne, I think, would make a lot of sense with it,” she says.

“Even putting it next to the Bartók solo sonata would be quite interesting, even though those pieces were written within a short period of time. But with all their similarities and references to Bach, they are quite different and it would be interesting for an audience.

“But that asks for lots of stamina from the violinist and also from the audience. Catching their attention would be a huge achievement. Putting them through such an intense journey is quite an experience, but I think it would be very rewarding.”