A "wrist job"
Richard Strauss' second horn concerto was composed in his mature years. There are several rumors about the premiere and the Swiss premiere.
In March 2021, I reviewed the new edition of the first horn concerto op. 11 by Richard Strauss (SMZ 3/2021), and it is a pleasure to now have before me the new edition of the second horn concerto from 1942 in the Urtext and in an equally luxurious edition. According to the publisher, the piano reduction has been simplified, in contrast to the Boosey & Hawkes edition, which is a breakneck ride for accompanists.
Sixty years of rich creativity had passed since the composition of Opus 11, and the second concerto, after the last opera Capriccio belongs together with the oboe concerto, the Metamorphosesand the Four last songs to the works of the last years of the composer's life. The principal horn of the Bavarian State Opera, Josef Suttner, who played the horn parts in the Strauss operas under the composer's direction, had requested a second concerto for his instrument. For the world premiere at the Salzburg Festival under Karl Böhm's direction in August 1943, however, the festival management chose Gottfried von Freiberg, principal horn of the Vienna Philharmonic, to replace the sixty-year-old Suttner.
All these stories, some from the rumor mill of the Festival, about Richard Strauss' premature departure from Salzburg after a rehearsal of the Horn Concerto and the first performance of the work in Switzerland with soloist Hans Will and conductor Hermann Scherchen in Winterthur in 1944, which necessitated an adventurous procurement of sheet music, are told by the editor Hans Pizka in his extremely exciting preface.
Rather as a curiosity, the editor, himself a former student of Gottfried von Freiberg, includes a horn part with the names of the valve fingerings for the double horn commonly used today, comparing it with the Viennese F horn presumably played at the premiere: a Sisyphean task for interested horn players who want to work their way through such hieroglyphics. The second horn concerto, which Richard Strauss himself described as "wrist work", has established itself in the horn world as the central solo work for this instrument.
Richard Strauss: Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat major, edited by Hans Pizka, piano reduction, HN 1255, € 23.00, G. Henle, Munich
