Hermann Scherchen

In the central decades of the twentieth century Scherchen ranked among the foremost conductors, above all for his trailblazing advocacy of the era’s newest scores. Largely self-taught, he took a viola post with both the Blüthner Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic at sixteen. During 1911 he assisted Arnold Schoenberg in readying Pierrot Lunaire for its first hearing; after the Berlin premiere he led the subsequent tour. Appointed conductor of the Riga Symphony Orchestra in 1914, he was soon detained by Russian authorities as an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War I. Once Russia withdrew from the conflict he returned to Germany, where he established the Neue Musikgesellschaft and the Scherchen Quartet; in 1919 he also launched the combative journal Melos. Succeeding Furtwängler at the helm of Frankfurt’s Museum Concerts in 1922, he simultaneously began a lengthy association with the Winterthur Musikollegium in Switzerland. Between 1928 and 1933 he served as Generalmusikdirektor in Königsberg. He regularly directed festivals devoted to contemporary music, maintaining ties with the International Society for Contemporary Music from its 1923 founding onward. Premieres under his baton in the 1920s and 1930s included Berg’s Three Fragments from Wozzeck and Alois Hába’s quarter-tone opera Mother. Upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 he departed Germany at once and settled in Switzerland, becoming music director of the Zurich Radio Orchestra while also offering conducting courses that evolved into a regular summer school in 1939; that same year he formed the Ars Viva Orchestra. He married the Chinese composer Hsia Shu-sien, and their daughter Tona Scherchen (later Tona Scherchen-Hsiao) was born in 1937; she accompanied her mother back to China in 1949 and later gained recognition as a composer, especially after relocating to France in 1972. Following the end of World War II he resumed extensive European engagements, retaining leadership of the Zurich Radio Orchestra until 1950. In 1954, backed by UNESCO, he inaugurated an electro-acoustical research studio in the Swiss village of Gravesano where he resided, and continued to publish on new music in the Gravesano Blätter. Unlike many contemporaries, the “new music” he championed extended well beyond the works of his youth into ongoing developments; during the 1950s he led first performances of Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero, Dessau’s Das Verhör des Lukullus, and Henze’s König Hirsch. In 1951 he presented the initial excerpts from Schoenberg’s Aron und Moses heard at Darmstadt, prepared the score for its world premiere under Hans Rosbaud, and conducted its Berlin debut. His first American appearance came only in 1964, when he directed the Philadelphia Orchestra. He wrote a standard treatise on conducting together with numerous essays championing modern repertoire. While leading Malipiero’s Orfeide in Florence he suffered a fatal heart attack and died four days afterward.