Not a thing, autoh!

Where was he from then?

I wonder how he managed to avoid deportation as a non-citizen of the Reich?  Most slavs were "repatriated" during WW2 or before it.

Jonathan Powell is repeating some of that program here in Moscow next week, although not the Petyrek.  We get the Strauss/Sorabji, though

Many thanks to Mr. Autoharp for drawing our attention to the music of Petyrek, of whom we must admit we had never before heard. If his music is of the same kind as the Reger Variations, and the Szymanowski, and Schreker's, (and even Marx's), then we are greatly interested. What a fine expression that "fearlessly preposterous" of Mr. Autoharp's is! We looked up Petyrek in the admirable Mr. Lebrecht's book; he has only three lines and they give a somewhat different impression: "Atonalist who in 1923 turned a Hans Christian Anderson fairy-tale into a Sprechgesang chamber opera, The Poor Mother and Death." It all led us to wonder whether Petyrek was really "atonal" or not - certainly Reger Szymanowski and Schreker were not. So we looked him up in Grove, which gives rather more detail, describing him as having "bitonal tendencies" and being "the Viennese Stravinsky." Apparently he - a pupil of Schreker - was never an out and out twelve-noter, but passed from "free atonality" and extreme chromaticism back to a renewed adherence to tonality towards the end of his life (rather like Schoenberg and Webern themselves in a funny sort of way this last dare we say). Anyway what an interesting discovery!

Thanks for that, Sydney. Calum MacDonald's review goes some way towards offering some clarification on the issue and it's worth quoting an extract, especially since the link I've posted will be denied to many.

"Felix Petyrek . . . was a familiar name in Austro-German music of the 1920s, an up-and-coming modernist mentioned in the same breath as such contemporaries as Weill, Schulhoff and his fellow Schreker-pupil and lifelong friend Ernst Krenek. But his career was dogged by misfortune and bad decisions, and though he became a popular teacher in Stuttgart (previous to that he taught for four years in Athens) his works gradually dropped out of the repertoire. After the war, the fact that Petyrek had joined the National Socialist Party certainly didn't help re-establish them, although Kolja Lessing's fascinating liner notes make clear this was the only means at Petyrek's disposal to avoid persecution and possible death. Not a Jew, he was - like Victor Ullman, who died in the gas chamber - an adherent of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophic brand of esoteric theosophical Christianity, which was not only anathema to the Nazis, but probably, subsequently, hindered any critical understanding of where he was coming from - just as, no doubt, did the wide range of styles of which he was evidently a master.

This fascinating conspectus of Petyrek's piano music from a 13-year period shows some of the contradictions, but also the extraordinary gifts, of a composer who seems painfully symbolic of his times. The 1915 Variations and Fugue is a splendid achievement for a young man in his early 20s, a substantial work in the tradition of of Bach, Brahms and Reger and yet with a modern slant evident from the whole-tone harmonies of the the main theme's first bars. The three numbers from a set of six Grotesque piano pieces (1919-20), written shortly after a major psychological crisis, nevertheless come as a severe stylistic shock. Bizarre and bitter studies in jazz and satirical onomatopoiea which emanate from a completely different aesthetic, they excited the lively admiration of Erwin Schulhoff, a master practioner in that genre.

Elements of this satirical jazz style are to be found in the other three works - most notably the Irrelohe Foxtrot, a deliberate vulgarisation of themes from  Franz Schreker's eponymous opera, sparked by Petyrek's quarrels with his celebrated teacher. The Suite on the name Szegoe (the doctor who treated Petyrek in a Swiss sanotorium after his most severe breakdown) from 1924 is trimly neo-baroque with the odd jazz inflection: a description which gives no idea of its sheer technical brilliance and rather irascible intensity of expression. Finally the formidable Third Sonata (1928), composed in Athens after Greek folk-music studies and unpublished in Petyrek's lifetime, is the most percussive of the works here, full of 1920s machine rhythms - but also some Haydnesque phraseology that is given a strange oriental harmonic spin. The work as a whole is based on an octatonic mode identical with one of Tcherepnin's and with Messiaen's Mode 2, which Petyrek handles in a very different, quasi-orchestral manner. Somehow he manages to pull its stylistic contrasts together in a convincing unity."

All of which sounds rather appetising, so efforts will be made to get hold of the CD. Of particular interest is that the Third Sonata (and other works?) seems to mark him out as a serious Mode 2 merchant, in common with several fascinating composers of that time or just before/after it. I'm thinking not only of such as Ravel and Stravinsky (not Debussy, despite Allan Forte's attempts to convince the world otherwise), but also Lili Boulanger, Protopopov, Ornstein, Frank Martin, Bloch (of the 1st violin sonata), Schulhoff (e.g., piano concerto), Pijper - let alone Scriabin (if one can ignore Dernova's theories for the moment) and various Russian followers - and no doubt a few others whom I've forgotten. I seem to remember a reference to this scale in Nicolas Slonimsky's Music since 1900 where he mentions Pijper, Petyrek and Ludomir Rogowski - not heard a note of this last composer: has anyone else?

That's a nice phrase, a/hp.