Creation • Derivation • Proclamation
Heinrich Kaminski and His »Work«
Introduction to the cpo-Production of Dr. Eckhardt van den Hoogen
1
Falsehood is worse in kings than beggars.
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (III.6)
Eight years ago a European chamber orchestra dedicated to the rediscovery of »a current of hymnic-religious motivation in German music« toured our country. String compositions were performed: the Introduction and Fugue by Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling, who would have been a hundred years old on 9 May 2004, the hymn Vom Unendlichen for soprano and three string quintets by his fellow composer Heinz Schubert, who fell in battle at the age of thirty-seven toward the end of World War II, and a Work for String Orchestra by the man from whom these two had learned their trade: Heinrich Kaminski. This composer of many colors and crossover artist was highly touted during the interwar period, but fate has treated him so cruelly that all later attempts to rehabilitate him have been nipped in the bud, and even the most glowing appeals from the guild of hagiographical penmen have failed to bear fruit.
Even the project »Heinrich Kaminski und sein Kreis« (Heinrich Kaminski and His Circle) of 2004 remained without success. Even though the Ernst von Siemens Foundation offered generous funding and many a fanfare was trumpeted loudly and clearly in the press, the result was what a renowned German daily had prophesied in the anticipatory mode of a journalistic oracle: Kaminski represented, we read, »more than ever the side of the music business turned away from the earth – classical music from another star,« and no niche had been found for this untimely »aesthetic of the timeless. The next years will show whether Kaminski returns or goes down a third time.« (1)
Neither the former nor the latter ensued. The 125th anniversary of the composer’s birth could have been celebrated on 4 July 2011 but passed with complete indifference, and the sixty-fifth anniversary of his death on 21 June of the same year was also left unmentioned. No new recording or rerelease of works such as the colossal Concerto grosso (1923) or the Dorian Music (1934), with which Heinrich Kaminski had risen up into the top echelons of the greatest institutions, no activities of chamber-musical nature worth mentioning – and quite definitely not a single word about his stage works Jürg Jenatsch (1927–29) or King Aphelius, the swan song completed in a state of transport. His a cappella choral oeuvre and his organ works have been available for quite some time, and the String Quartet in F major composed prior to World War I and the Music for Violoncello and Piano can be found in a two-pack that is in part a good match and in part not so good a match. But the timpani beat or the redeeming blow on the copestone that would make the walls of ignorance come crashing down: that has not yet occurred.
And this is not surprising inasmuch as a man whose capacities enabled him to find his way into the Musikblätter des Anbruch, Pult und Taktstock, and other periodicals over the most winding of side paths, who made his way up into the front ranks of German composers when he was hardly more than thirty years old, who despite his chronic money problems did not leave his wife and children to starve to death because there was always somebody around who at the moment had a couple of reichsmarks, francs, or dollars to contribute or a not exactly poorly remunerated post or a commission to assign – this sort of individual so committed to survival is not somebody whom we have to force posthumously to rediscovery like a footsore tortoise to the cooling pond. No, here a little push or pull would be enough, a discreet mention, the ceterum censeo in the firm confidence that what temporarily may have submerged will reemerge someday because of its quality and then remain on the surface for all eternity, undisturbed by fashions, fads, and passing fancies – of course always presuming that it does also indeed involve something that is worth remembering. Mediocre half-talents whose life stories have bequeathed to posterity nothing but a carefully guarded and played victim’s role will not make it, no matter what one may think necessary to invest in the effort. Pathetic declamations such as »The time is ripe!« can only fall on deaf ears; first, because they are empty and untenable; second, because time is not something that might ripen; and third, because every »wake-up call« is accompanied by a charge of criminal neglect – how could others have fallen so »completely asleep« that they missed out on »the ripened time«? The arousing of a guilty conscience, however, contributes just as little to the increasing of the readiness of the accused for artistic reception or even for spiritual experience as the wheel, the stake, or the Inquisitorial barbecue in their time did to the strengthening of faith in a Supreme Being.
Finally, the garnitures often hidden between the bare facts of a life’s course are of no use whatsoever. The minimal shifts of emphasis and falsifications that in the case of a discovery can easily be swept off the negotiating table with a throwaway gesture (»Oh, that isn’t important at all!«) continue to cause the most enduring damage. »Falsehood is worse in kings than beggars.« This is how Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen described the exponential relation between potential, claim, and truth four hundred years ago: even white lies, when they have as their purpose something other than rescue from acute danger, will initially render difficult spiritual insight into the higher worlds, thereafter block it, and finally lead to the complete denial of those regions in which the spirit finds its nourishment because is there that it is at home.
2
Come into the park declared dead and see …
Stefan George, Das Jahr der Seele
We must seek out precisely these same regions if we would prefer not to spend all our time resting on the outer facts of biography or to get so lost in their often dreadful displays of pity-me details that we forget the eternal power that even here is at work invisibly in the background – or, as Friedrich Hölderlin so aptly put it in his Ermunterung, »speechlessly reigns and prepares unknown future things.«
This guided tour of Inner- and Uppermost Jinnistan is necessary not only out of mere enthusiasm or because Heinrich Kaminski »always knew that man comes from farther back than from his forefathers, yes, that he harbors a mystery in him that is not derivable from earthly premises.« (2) Very practical reasons are at least just as important: when in the further course of this article we occupy ourselves with the Work for String Orchestra and its chamber-musical original form, the String Quartet in F sharp minor, we will have to do with, among other things, a spiritual exchange that can be explained in all its intensity and far-reaching consequences neither on the basis of topographical nor biographical occurrences.
Before of course we must surmount the barriers, mines, pitfalls, moats, and walls set up or down between the »wėsen« (as »sein« – being – was termed in medieval German) and the rest of the world, together with all the false signposts, distorting mirrors, and inaccurate interpretations that would prevent us from reaching our goal and »mislead« us in the truest sense of the word.
Such a path has never seemed stonier to me than it has during the recent past. Even figures such as the fascinatingly multifaceted Felix von Weingartner, whom one can never believe longer than it takes him to come up with his next excuse, in the end revealed more of themselves than this Heinrich Kaminski, whose innermost being seemed to me to be surrounded by one of the impenetrable thickets of thorns of which fairy tales tell us. This impression began with the secondary literature, which here does full justice to its name: much in it sheds its light from a peculiar angle, reads things into things that are not there, rushes to interpretations and thus to misinterpretations, is burdened from the start by »theories,« quite simply gets the facts wrong, or is distorted by »accidental omissions.« The »thousand-year experiences« starring the new master race and not without their consequences for the subject treated by us here are a frequent topic in such writings. Compared to what which happened to countless others, he is not immediately eligible for casting in a genuine »victim’s role« – unless one knowingly suppresses this or that, forgets partial aspects of the truth, and hopes that posthumous corrections of this sort will produce the »increase in value« described at the beginning. In the case of Heinrich Kaminski, a few minor changes would be enough, for it was always beyond doubt that he was not a Nazi sympathizer, which is why a conductor more in line with the party line was found to replace him as conductor of the Bielefeld Music Society in 1934. After the early death of his predecessor and apologist Wilhelm Lamping, Kaminski had taken over his duties at the end of 1929 and had left behind a very profound impression at least among those whose antennas were attuned to the more spiritual realms of music. That they could not be brought into line with blood, native ground, and other nonsense and thus were no longer wished is obvious. The claim often heard, however, that Kaminski had refused to extend his three-year contract with the Prussian Academy of the Arts on 1 January 1933 and had relinquished his master class there, which Hans Pfitzner had taken over in 1930, as a sign of worldview protest, has no more authority than a hypothesis winding its reiterated way through the secondary literature. It just as much misses the point as does the opposite view spread elsewhere as a rumor, according to which Kaminski had been let go »because in his attitude he did not fit in with the change to be manifested [!] in the political landscape.« (3) The fact is that Kaminski taught remarkably few master pupils in composition during a three-year period, so that the cost-use factor was not an inconsiderable motive behind the decision to get rid of this peculiar patron from Southern Germany, who was interested in regular revenues but always regarded the obligations going along with them as an (understandable) obstacle to his creative work.
It should not be challenged in the least, however, that Heinrich Kaminski by his mere presence (= »wėsen«) was a thorn in the flesh for many an observer of nationalist orientation. Let us not forget that his music after 1933 for a considerable time was conducted by the greatest artists all the way up to Wilhelm Furtwängler and that even in 1938 efforts were undertaken to have Kaminski fill the Berlin gap left by Paul Hindemith’s departure. Precisely this was evidently to be prevented by all possible means, and this was successful: somebody nosing about in the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung documenting racial purity noticed that Kaminski’s father, a former priest from Poland and a cleric who had sided with the Old Catholics after the First Vatican Council, yes, that this Paul Kaminski was possibly one and the same man as the Paul Kamienski of almost the same name who had been born as the illegitimate son of a Jewish servant girl. Now if the (unknown) father of this Kamienski-Wartenberger had also been a Jew, then only one judgment could be passed on the unloved Heinrich Kaminski: a strict performance prohibition. It continues to be frequently overlooked that this ban was lifted on 31 May 1941: according to a new evaluation »of 15 April 1940 concerning the descent of Professor Heinrich Kaminski, [he is] an individual of mixed blood with a full-Jewish grandparent share according to his race. Therefore the Reichsleitung of the Nazi Party has no reservations about the public performance of his works except when concerts of the Party, its divisions, and affiliated organizations are involved.« The fact that more than a year passed between this »expert judgment« and its practical implementation fosters the suspicion expressed above that some cultural-political intrigues might have been at work behind the scenes. Oh, how sweet it is!
Heinrich Kaminski’s rehabilitation removed a heavy burden from his shoulders. But only one heavy burden. His wife had moved to Munich with their five children in 1937 in order to enable their progeny to enjoy a proper secondary education. On 14 September 1939 their eldest daughter Gabriele did not come out of the anesthesia after her appendectomy. Kaminski repeatedly withdrew to Switzerland or to the Oetzal for a time and was welcomed by reliable friends – above all by the intrepid Werner Reinhart in Winterthur and by Princess Hélčne Croy in Habichen. Then the next blow of fate: the submarine on which his son Donatus was doing his military service had been missing since 3 June 1943 after underwater maneuvers. How could one endure all of this? Kaminski did so by working whenever the opportunity afforded itself. The Dance Drama for orchestra (1942), the Ballade for French horn and piano (1943), and above all Das Spiel vom König Aphelius helped. So did his glances of the mind’s eyes toward Munich, which was gradually coming into striking range of the Allies. The family had to find temporary refuge in the meantime, and personal health problems increased. Kaminski took in a refugee from the White Rose movement for a few days, while his most brilliant resistance effort involved the forging of a racially unobjectionable family tree for Dusza von Hakrid, the wife of his friend and pupil Schwarz-Schilling. Then the war was over. The family could make its way back to Munich, where Kaminski’s wife suffered a severe cerebral concussion when she was hit by a piece of falling debris. And in September 1945 his daughter Benita died, presumably as a result of previous deprivations. Vitalis, his younger son, returned home, but Donatus was never found. One should not lose one’s courage. Heinrich Kaminski held out until the end of Aphelius. Then he quite literally suffered a personal collapse. He died on 21 June 1946, not even sixty years old.
3
In every breeze a new becoming was spread out.
Ernst Stadler, Vorfrühling
No matter how tragic and regrettable it always may be when the twisted-wicked sword of physical demise is passionately plunged into being to convince the »wėsen« of its presumed mortality, we will refrain from further mention of all such sad facets. Furthermore, no matter how difficult it may be, we will have to resist all the satirical glosses and marginalia clamoring for attention as soon as we believe that we might have the opportunity to discover a discrepancy between ideal and fulfillment – of course always only in reference to somebody other than ourselves. How our sarcastic spirit does not laugh when we see the likes of Karl May striving toward the realm of silver lions while in »real life« he merely squabbled with a cow by the name of Emma! How pleasurably our evil demon does giggle at the fact that the philanthropist Ludwig van Beethoven quarreled with his household personnel about the number of coffee beans! And, finally, what a delightful marginal note a fellow by the name of Heinrich Kaminski might not offer, the same Kaminski who at the Kassel premiere of his Concerto grosso in June 1923, having reached his declared goal, namely, that of eliminating
»the dictatorship of the baton,« quite completely missed the mark and conducted his spectacular creation into the ground!
What might not be brought out marching into the field to keep the creative spirit by the name of Heinrich Kaminski in his cage! For example, one might call him a calculating egoist: instead of completing a bank training program and thus contributing something to the income of his family, he threatened to commit suicide unless he was allowed to attend a university but then immediately abandoned his studies because an oldish, well-to-do spinster was willing to pay for his instruction in piano and composition. A chapter featuring »the immoral rogue« in him would also be in order: it was only because he made such significant progress in music that the Stern Conservatory in Berlin accepted him that he also did not have to leave the girl with the illegitimate child unwept and unsung in Heidelberg! (4) And he also had no scruples, after he had learned all that his first-class teachers in Berlin had to teach him, with the same generous miss paying for these studies, about setting up shop as an artist in the Bavarian countryside, thanks to another patroness. Is that not indeed a shirker and simulator who observes how the whole world goes marching off to battle while he dodges his first draft notice through the intervention of an influential lady of noble birth and the second time is declared unfit because of a timely bronchial ailment? Is it not also irresponsible to get married while a war is raging and then to bring five children into the world: (5) as an artist!!! To play the role of a patriarch who imposes on his family and pupils the rule of one opinion alone – his own!?
The fact that Kaminski’s musical creations were by now enjoying increasing popularity, that a conductor of the caliber of Bruno Walter, for example, premiered his Psalm 69 for chorus, children’s chorus, tenor, and orchestra, a work begun in Berlin and completed in Bavarian Ried, scoring a mighty triumph with it, that the abovementioned patron Werner Reinhart, after he had heard a performance of the String Quintet in Switzerland, out of pure enthusiasm became Kaminski’s lifelong sponsor, that Wilhelm Lamping of Bielefeld organized a collection on his own initiative in the music society because the choral works that they thus far had been privileged to hear had been received as a revelation for which one simply wanted to express one’s gratitude – that so many people who came into contact with Kaminski’s personality and oeuvre felt a strange radiance, a fresh breeze, a new, unused becoming, an inkling of something at the end of those landscapes or beyond them that long ago a schoolboy’s wisdom had hoped to exorcise from our hearts and minds – all these »credits« must nolens volens be mentioned and weighed out against the list of »debits.«
In any case, there must have also been good reasons for the stenographs in which the members of the Bielefeld Music Society transmitted to posterity the wisdom of their conductor Heinrich Kaminski. A clear renunciation of the emptiness of the present reads, »Whether we come to life depends first on ourselves. One can, you know, not become gone. One can only go. We thus must now get up on our feet and set out on the way.« And he also mentions a little teaching from the pen of Meister Eckhart, »People today are intoxicated by mere ‘doing.’ According to Meister Eckhart, however, things depend first and foremost not on ‘doing’ but on ‘being.’ The right form of action flows from the right form of existence.« (6) In his Vom Nutzen des Lassens this great medieval mystic wrote, »Those who are not of great being, no matter what deeds they may do, nothing will come of them. Learn from this that one should apply all one’s effort to be good, not so very much to what one should do or to what kind of deeds they are, but how the foundation of these works is.« (7)
People must have felt what was special about Kaminski even if they perhaps could not explain it. As one ear- and eyewitness reports, »The mystery of music had already begun when he stepped up on the podium«; and again we are called on to imagine what today has become completely impossible: he not only knew his Meister Eckhart, his Zarathustra, and his Gautama Buddha but also that he too was a mystic with all the consequences that this untimely personal classification brings with it. The genuine mystic is defined not by his doing, but it is instead his being (»wėsen«) that determines his doing, »whether it is eating, sleeping, waking, or whatever it may be.« (9) He is surrounded by the timelessness of a child at play, so completely absorbed in this activity that he forgets everything around him and thus displays a divine seriousness forbidding any sort of mockery (which anyway would merely be a byproduct generated by lack of comprehension) and always reminds one of the serenity with which the old Music Master instructed his pupil Josef Knecht in the art of the Glass-Bead Game. Largely removed from the earthly sphere of time, the mystic sees that »man comes from farther back than from his forefathers.« He communes with others of his species over long stretches of time because he also does not allow »the dictatorship of the baton« to apply to epochs. The elemental foundation from which he is to derive the material for his proclamations is never far away. Dance and word, rhythm and melody, for this reason join forces as sources of inspiration leading all the way to Jürg Jenatsch, an experiment based on the assumption that drama once originated »out of the cultic representation of the original laws lying at the basis of all being» (Kaminski). This is also the reason, however, why one mystic never tolerates another like him in his immediate environment. The distance maintained between Kaminski and Rudolf Steiner or that in another case developed between him and one of his supposed artist friends in the autumn of 1914 may have »good reasons« by the plenty to justify it on the outside – but in the end, as incredible as it may seem to us enlightened minds, it is both an inevitability and a necessity.
4
Music must stream! Is there anything finer than coming into its stream?
Heinrich Kaminski
In February 1914 the absolutely penniless Heinrich Kaminski arrived in Munich. His entire »personal assets« consisted of a Prussian postage stamp, which was worthless in Bavaria. His patroness Martha Warburg, who had financed his instruction in piano and composition in Heidelberg and his Berlin education, had reduced her contributions to the rent for his little apartment following his teacher Paul Juon’s declaration that he had learned all that he could teach him and insisted their her protégé forthwith earn his other means of support on his own. This demand, as correct as it may generally have been, led to genuine feats of glory on the part of the hunger artist but not to the really desired results. The imperial capital was a hard place to survive, hardly fertile ground for the young mystic, who thus was grateful to accept an offer from a student friend from Munich and initially found temporary lodgings there with his parents. The same fellow student’s former piano teacher, a certain Frau Hirzel-Langenhan, in collaboration with Fräulein Warburg, who continued to be true to her Kaminski, saw to it that more suitable terrain was found for him: in Ried, near Benediktbeuren, she rented an empty »Ausgedinge« (a farmer’s retirement property), and soon Kaminski had a cozy little place where he could finish his Psalm 69 begun in Berlin and found room for the piano that he still had in Berlin-Zehlendorf.
The little cottage of the husband and wife Franz and Maria Marc was nearby. It is hard to say when this couple first became acquainted with Heinrich Kaminski. The frequently repeated claim that an artistic friendship between the composer and the painter six years his senior was formed already at this time, sometime in the spring of 1914, is definitely nothing more than idle chatter. They soon must have become acquainted (an inevitability in a village setting), but closer contact first came about when Marc volunteered for military service against his wife’s will and was stationed on the western front. In the future Kaminski would give piano lessons to Maria Marc. She would send reports about her progress and the artistic deliberations connected with these lessons out to the battlefield. The »Letters from the Battlefield« from 1 September 1914 to the idiotic 4 March 1916, the day on which Marc was killed by a shell splinter during a reconnaissance mission, sometimes shed light on what was said and done during these hours of instruction. And it very much seems to be that a communication took place between the two mystics (by way of Maria Marc’s relay service) that »a friendship,« a term often applied so broadly, first would have filled with life.
Franz Marc had home leave twice, in July and November 1915. He mentions the name »Kaminsky« [sic!] about two dozen times in his letters. The sketchy personal portrait traced by him at the time of Kaminski, who was not yet thirty years old, attests to a remarkable intuition that seems to confirm all the previously so flippantly proposed conjectures about »the higher worlds« of the mystics. »That Kaminsky is really a composer is something that I did not at all know. Then I of course understand that he cannot be brought into the mood for performance. […] I yearn for nothing more than once to hear a composer playing« (27 March 1915) »Do write to me: K. is productive? Does he really create, or does he live and nothing else?« (29 March 1915). »Kaminsky does seem to be quite a genuine human being; but I must first hear something of his own music, about which I am in awful suspense« (13 April 1915). »What is the good Kaminsky doing? Tell me more about him, what he says and thinks and does« (21 July 1915).
Heinrich Kaminski was working on his String Quintet in F sharp minor – and thinking and doing rather much the opposite of what was occupying his complementary counterpart at the time. While Marc was looking for »pure form,« Kaminski was seeking the organic growth that becomes form – and each of them, considering the medium of each one’s proclamation, was right in his own way. The painter continued to live in the absolute certainty that »victory« was possible. The composer loathed the war, which his »pen pal« at least during its first year continued to regard as something mystical: »I feel the spirit soaring behind the battles, behind every bullet, so strongly that the realistic, material dimension vanishes completely […]« (12 September 1914). But there was agreement about some more substantial points: that the »Spiritual Realm« would abide whatever might happen, that purity of thought and action had priority over all considerations of content. On 30 May 1915 Marc wrote to a »Female Sender of Love Gifts,« who evidently had asked him for a sketch, »I never draw and paint from nature but purely from memory or, more precisely: from the imagination, form compositions, similarly no doubt to how a musician creates.« And when Heinrich Kaminski later stated that it was »not the concern of art to express feelings. Music exists in order to sound and to be lively. It does not represent anything. It is life in itself […],« two and a half decades may have passed, but his principal stance toward creation had merely deepened and not changed.
While as a consequence the String Quintet completed in the autumn of 1916 and premiered in Munich on 12 March 1917 was not a memorial piece for Franz Marc, despite opinions to the contrary (Kaminski dedicated it to Bruno Walter), many agreements in thought and seeming discrepancies
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