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Aus dem Vorwort / Preface:


Reinhold Imanuel Beck was born in Hanover on January 10, 1881. Conducting was the family trade: grandfather Imanuel had been a respected Music Director in Hanover, and father Paul was a ballet conductor. But the latter died when Reinhold was twelve years of age and it was decided that after his basic schooling the boy must quickly earn a living wage. Beck trained as a pharmacist and began working as such before suddenly giving it up in favor of the arts. From 1900 to 1903 he studied drama at the Hamburg Conservatory, and soon afterwards made his performing debut as an actor at the theater in Essen. In 1905 he returned to the family trade as Kapellmeister at the municipal theater in Kiel. He married Anna Rode the following year and in 1908 the couple returned to Beck’s hometown of Hanover, where he was offered secure employment as chorus master.

The First World War intervened. In 1916 Beck was sent east to conduct at the German Theater in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. On his discharge in 1919 he headed for Berlin to finalize his musical studies, which included lessons with the Leipzig Conservatory trained concert singer Willi Kewitsch. The following year Beck qualified as a state-approved teacher in voice, piano and musicology. In the early 1920s he lectured in the latter at the Herder Conservatory and Berlin-Harmsdorf Volkshochschule. He also composed an explosion of works, nearly fifty within four years, which included orchestral pieces, two operettas, a ballet, choruses, Lieder and a wealth of chamber music. Walter Gieseking premiered a number of Beck’s piano works, Beck rose to leadership in composer’s organizations and he was profiled in the leading music lexicons of the decade. The Leipzig premiere of Acht Gedichte, Op. 45 in 1927 was perhaps his high water mark, as afterwards seven years of focus on composition came to an end. His family required more security than a portfolio of largely unpublished compositions could provide, especially during the uncertainty of the Weimar Republic years. In 1927 the decision was made and the Beck family moved to the little town of Thale, tucked away in the Harz mountains of Saxony-Anhalt, where they benefited from the lower cost of living and Beck had secure posts as teacher and church organist, duties which gradually eclipsed composition. Beck lived in Thale for the next four decades, through the Depression, the National Socialist dictatorship, the Second World War, the Russian occupation and finally the establishment of yet another dictatorship, the German Democratic Republic. Throughout, Beck remained the organist of the Lutheran St. Petri-Kirche, appearing faithfully at the console of the splendid 1906 Wilhelm Rühlmann organ until his death on July 11, 1968.

The Quartet for Four Horns, Op. 1 (Hanover: Gries & Schornagel, 1909; plate no. 192), is an unusual work in a number of ways. Horn quartets of the age were typically short lyrical or hunting horn pieces for light entertainment whose modest demands bore little resemblance to the extremes in register and chromaticism that were being composed for horn in tone poem, symphony and opera. Reinhold Beck was in this a spiritual pupil of Richard Strauss, the most famous living composer of the time, who commended “the enormous versatility and highly-developed technique…the true protean nature of the valved horn.” Beck took this Straussian horn swagger of extremes in register and palette of myriad keys and applied it to a carefully plotted, complex chamber work of three movements. Composing such a sophisticated piece for a quartet of horns, with the instrument’s inherent limitations (and confusing transpositions), would have been a difficult task for any composer. As a first opus it was an astonishing feat.

However the late-blooming Beck had benefited from his conducting experience and knew hornists and their instruments firsthand (he would continue to write chamber works for the instrument, including the ambitious Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Horn in D minor, Op. 18). The dedicatees of the Quartet, Op. 1 were collectively known as the Hannoversches Künstler-Waldhornquartett. Separately they were the Thuringians Emil Klöpfel (1864-1930) and Hermann Wider (1874-1938), Austrian Heinrich Kellner (1870-1949) and Saxon Richard Unger (1859-1934). All four had earned the title of Kammermusiker (Klöpfel was additionally a Kammervirtuos) and all were veterans of the hand-picked Bayreuth festival orchestra. Their ensemble play was particularly prized; appearances together as the Bayreuth Wagner tuba quartet began in 1896/97 for Hans Richter’s celebrated revival of the Ring, and ended together in 1925.

The work Beck crafted for these musicians in 1909 was unique in both demands and scale, and was composed decades in advance of similarly ambitious quartets by Carlos Chavez, Paul Hindemith and Sir Michael Tippet. Beck’s first movement, Moderato molto in E flat, is a nine minute essay in closely-argued sonata form. The Andante that follows is in the darker key of D flat.* Three utterances of the straightforward song theme are divided by two contrasting episodes, the second of which (poco più agitato, letter B) embraces a high level of chromaticism and lunges into a modulatory B flat minor. After four and a quarter minutes the Andante ends in a muted pianissimo, ganz verhallend. The third movement Allegro di molto in E flat (c. 7:20) begins with a rollicking 6/8 hunting rondo theme, extending the material by development and even employing it in a fugue (letter H). There is also a surprising but deeply satisfying cyclical return: the Andante is reprised muted and far afield in B major (written in B [natural] basso). The first movement opening then reappears in E flat, pausing on a fermata-held dominant chord (marked pianissimo decrescendo, with a saturnine pedal B flat in fourth horn). Then the rondo theme returns in a codetta (quasi presto), and the composer piles crescendo and schmetternd on top of fortissimo as the quartet careens into the last, triumphant sforzando cadence.

This publication reintroduces one of a handful of extant compositions by a craftsman who vanished with hardly a trace, whose many manuscripts are lost and whose grave no longer exists. Still, in performances of his pioneering horn quartet, Reinhold Beck’s creativity endures.


William Melton



*The key of D is suggested by the composer as an alternative for novices for whom the thorny transposition of D flat would prove too difficult. However the internal architecture that benefits from the shift to the darker key for the more relaxed Andante would be negated by the brighter D tonality.





Presse / Reviews:


"As the exemplary preface tells us, the composer was very aware of the superlative horn writing by the then most famous living composer of the time Richard Strauss, and like Strauss and Wagner, Reinhold Beck writes idiomatically for the valve horn ... Beck writes very expressively, with intense dynamics and the work demands a beautiful legato and homogenous sound from the whole quartet. This is a piece to really work on a true 'quartet' sound."   The Horn Player, Spring 2008 (British Horn Society)

"This quartet was his first published work (1909), and, as Melton points out, is an amazing piece for its time. Clearly, the music is inspired by the late Romantic music of Richard Strauss, tonal but chromatic, technically demanding yet idiomatic for the instrument …... this is a gem waiting for a champion quartet to program and then record it."   The Horn Call, February 2009 (International Horn Society)