I've posted this in Another Place as well, so if you've replied there , no need to do so here,unless,of course,you wish to .

I'm getting to know the symphonies of Hartmann and like them very much,though I have found they take a little getting used to. I was especially moved by the Second this morning,the second time I've heard it,I think.

Hartmann seems to met be unusual in that he virtually 'began again' as a composer after 1945,re-composing his earlier works as new ones. This seems to apply to his first six symphonies,the last two beieg completely new works.

Does anyone know them and who can confirm that what I have said is correct,and maybe add to it?

Hartmann is a fantastic composer, just didn't have much luck fitting into history. Deserves a second look, or a third, depending how many he's already had.

I particularly recommend the Sonata "27. April 1945" and his Poeme Symphonique entitled "Miserae" -- not very uplifting works, by any means, but something more than just a product of their time.

I wish to know more about KAH too, thanks for starting this thread.

Indeed all Hartmann's symphonies are tremendously good and enjoyable. Nor should we forget his excellent 1963 Gesangszene (or Sodom and Gomorrah), which he described as a "work of Art with a message - it should be understood in its spiritual content." Among other things it warns of the consequences of a division of rich and poor "nations," the exploitation of science, the abuse of technology, and the pollution of the physical and spiritual environment. It is a synthesis of his earlier symphonic achievements and an exploration of a new formal and gestural rhetoric.

We find Yun's symphonies (to which we have been listening this week) rather like Hartmann's - we suppose Yun can by now be regarded as an honorary German can he not?

Hartmann's work was extensively performed in Munich on the occasion of his centenary in 2005, in the context of the "Musica Viva" concert series which he founded and directed after the war. I don't think his relative neglect is in any way confined to Germany: such excellent composers as Humphrey Searle and Roberto Gerhard similarly failed to make the impact they deserved to on musical life in the UK. What's common to these composers is that they were too "advanced" for the conservatives in the respective musical establishments of their countries and at the same time too "reactionary" for the avant-garde. Maybe that's another thread though.

It might be as well to remember that Hartmann, despite having made an "inner emigration" as a response to the Third Reich, during which none of his music was (or, in view of its consistent theme of resistance, could possibly have been) performed in Germany and hardly any elsewhere, as the director of the "Musica Viva" programmes after 1945 promoted the work of composers like Carl Orff and Werner Egk, whose relationship with the régime had been compromised to say the least, and whose music was successfully performed in the Reich while Hartmann sat at home in Munich waiting for the nightmare to end. In other words Hartmann, despite everything, felt that the most important thing at that time was to bring some generosity into musical life. This I find at least as impressive as any of the music he wrote.

Indeed, my point having been that the health and inclusiveness of musical life in Munich was more important to him than his own "career".

This is all very fascinating. Looks like my own investigations of KAH are way overdue.

I've never heard Zimmermann put down as too reactionary for any avant-garde! But yes, the general point is true enough and we should indeed have a thread on the subject ...

High time I revisited Hartmann, especially as Telarc recordings of 1 and 6 and the EMI Metzmacher cycle have been sitting on my shelves since a splurge last year.

Bearing in mind what others have already said, aren't the first words sung in No. 1 very striking: "Ich sitze und schaue aus auf alle Plagen der Welt" ("I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world") ? It's almost as if Hartmann is stating his manifesto at the very start of his first symphony. He's using his own adaptation of the words of Walt Whitman , by the way, thus incidentally making this the second first symphony I'm aware of with Whitman words, the other being RVW's Sea Symphony. The second movement, Frühling, uses part of When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed: a poem also used by Hindemith and Roger Sessions.

 Other early impressions of No 1; very segregated orchestration - often just one family used with no blending, and the strings used most sparingly of all....

The Telarc disc also includes Miserae (1933/4), first performed 2 ix 35 at the IGNM Festival in Prague. This was the original "first symphony", but the 1935/6 work originally entitled Unser Leben, Symphonishes Fragment, planned to have been premièred at the 1937 IGNM in Paris (but not accepted due to its allegedly enormous size) and finally performed in Frankfurt as late as 1948 or 49 (my sources differ on this point) was eventually given a new première in Vienna in 1955, after revision and renaming as the official Symphony No 1 with the subtitle Versuch eines Requiems, by which time Miserae had been withdrawn.

As if that isn't complicated enough, by the time Unser Leben was being revised in the early 1950s, (i.e. before it became Symphony No 1) the new Symphony No 2 (1945/6) had already had its première, in 1950.