Max Butting

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Max Butting (born October 6, 1888 in Berlin ; † July 13, 1976 there ) was a German composer .

Life

Max Butting's birthplace at Brunnenstrasse 148
Memorial plaque on the house at Brunnenstrasse 148, in Berlin-Mitte

Max Butting was the son of an iron merchant and a piano teacher. He received his first music lessons from his mother and later from the organist Arnold Dreyer. After attending the secondary school, he studied from 1908 to 1914 at the Academy of Music in Munich . There he took composition lessons with Friedrich Klose , conducting with Felix Mottl and Paul Prill , and singing with Karl Erler . For a time he attended lectures in psychology , philosophy , art and literary history at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . Alexander Pfänder , Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Specht were among his professors . Butting's training as a composer took place largely in private lessons with Walter Courvoisier , something Klose had suggested to him after a falling out.

During the First World War Butting was not called up for military service because of his poor health. When he returned to Berlin in 1919, at the insistence of his father, he joined his father's shop as an assistant, where he worked until 1923. For his compositional activity, however, he was given sufficient freedom. He made contact with other young artists and made friends with Walter Ruttmann and Philipp Jarnach , among others . In 1921 Butting was accepted into the left-wing November group, whose musical events he directed until 1927. In 1925 he worked as a music journalist in the “Sozialistische Monatshefte”. His works became better known through performances at the music festivals of the Society for New Music , in whose German section Butting worked as a board member between 1925 and 1933. In this context, he also took part in the Donaueschinger Musiktage . In 1929 Hermann Scherchen conducted Butting's Third Symphony in Geneva , which also earned him recognition on an international level. In the same year the composer became deputy chairman of the Cooperative of German Tonkünstler.

Max Butting was one of the first composers to deal intensively with the radio medium . Between 1926 and 1933 he was a member of the cultural advisory board of Funkstunde and from 1928 to 1933 head of a studio for radio interpretation at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory . In addition, he held master classes for radio play composition at the radio test center of the Berlin University of Music . One of his students there was Ernst Hermann Meyer .

In January 1933 Butting was appointed a member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts . However, soon after Hitler “came to power” it became clear that the National Socialists did not want him to be a “music Bolshevik”, “because he was one of the musicians who played a leading role in the disintegration of German musical life in the years of decline.” Still Until 1938 Butting was able to work in the copyright company STAGMA as director of the mediation department. From 1939 he had to exist again from his father's hardware store, which he had initially left to a partner after his death in 1932. In order to secure the continuation of the business he had now taken over and thus his only livelihood, he was forced to join the NSDAP in 1940 (membership number 7.623.597).

After the Second World War, Butting gave up this commercial activity, lived again in East Berlin as a freelance composer and participated in the reconstruction of STAGMA / GEMA and the Association of German Composers (IDK). In 1948 he was accepted into the Kulturbund and appointed chief editor in the State Broadcasting Committee of the GDR . In 1950 he was one of the founding members of the German Academy of the Arts , as its vice-president from 1956 to 1959. From 1951 he was a board member of the Association of German Composers and Tonsetzer (VdK of the GDR), as well as chairman of the advisory board of the establishment for the protection of the performance and reproduction rights in the field of music (AWA).

Butting received numerous honors in the GDR:

Max Butting found his final resting place in the Pankow III cemetery .

Audio language

Butting's music initially tied in stylistically with Anton Bruckner and Max Reger . In the 1920s he approached more modern trends. So he gradually managed to develop a distinct personal style. Primarily characterized by contrapuntal work, this is close to musical neoclassicism and expressionism . The metric-rhythmic design is usually very differentiated and often includes changes in time signature. The harmony moves within an often dissonant sharpened tonality. Occasionally there are also twelve-tone themes, for example in Symphony No. 9. However, Butting never used this material to develop a real dodecaphony in the sense of Arnold Schönberg, whom he admired critically . Formally, the composer oriented himself on traditional models, such as the sonata movement , but often varied them or abandoned them in quite a few works in favor of well-composed forms of development. He always tried to find an individual form solution for each work. His symphonic work can be seen here as exemplary, in which all the possibilities of cyclical design are represented, from one movement to five movement.

While he was rather moderately productive before 1945 and almost completely silent during the Nazi era , Butting experienced a new creative surge after the end of the war. The fact that by far the largest number of his works was written in the GDR can be explained by the fact that the composer now made it one of his tasks to write “utility music”, which the state demand for a popular, easily understandable one Art should meet. He thus followed up on some of the works he had written especially for radio in the late 1920s, which are stylistically close to upscale popular music.

At the center of Butting's work are his ten symphonies, which identify him as one of the most important German symphonists of his generation. There is also a chamber symphony for thirteen solo instruments, two symphonies and a triptych for large orchestra.

In addition, he has mainly written chamber music works, among which ten string quartets deserve special mention. Furthermore, a piano and a flute concerto , numerous shorter orchestral pieces and mostly small-format piano works are part of his oeuvre.

Butting's most important vocal compositions are the oratorio Das Memorandum , the opera Plautus im Nonnenkloster by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and several cantatas .

Works (selection)

Orchestral works

  • Funeral music op.12 (1916)
  • Symphony No. 1 op.21 for 16 instruments (1922)
  • Chamber Symphony op.25 for 13 instruments (1923)
  • Symphony No. 2 op.29 (1926)
  • Symphony No. 3, Op. 34 (1928)
  • Sinfonietta with Banjo op.37 (1929)
  • Cheerful Music op.38 (1929)
  • Symphony No. 4 Op. 42 (1942)
  • Symphony No. 5 op.43 (1943)
  • Symphony No. 6 op.44 (1953, first version 1945)
  • Dance of Death Passacaglia op.51 (1947)
  • Symphony No. 7 op.67 (1949)
  • Sonatina for string orchestra op.68 (1949)
  • Concerto for flute and orchestra op.72 (1950)
  • Symphony No. 8 The Holiday Journey op.84 (1952)
  • Symphonic Variations op.89 (1953)
  • Five serious pieces after Dürer op.92 (1955)
  • Symphony No. 9 op.94 (1956)
  • Sinfonietta op.100 (1960)
  • Symphony No. 10 op.108 (1963)
  • Concerto for piano and orchestra op.110 (1964)
  • Triptych op.112 (1967)
  • Stations, op.117 (1970)
  • Ghosts visited me, op.120 (1972)

Chamber music

  • String Quartet No. 1 in A major op.8 (1914)
  • String Quintet in C minor op.10 (1915)
  • String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 16 (1917)
  • String Quartet No. 3 in F minor, Op. 18 (1918)
  • String Quartet No. 4 in C sharp minor op.20 (1919)
  • Quintet for violin, viola, violoncello, oboe and clarinet op.22 (1922)
  • Little Pieces for String Quartet op.26 (1923)
  • String Quartet No. 5 op.53 (1947)
  • Piano trio op.54 (1947)
  • String Quartet No. 6 Op.90 (1953)
  • String Quartet No. 7 Op. 95 (1956)
  • String Quartet No. 8 The Afterbirth op.96 (1957)
  • String Quartet No. 9, Op. 97 (1957)
  • String Quartet No. 10 op.118 (1971)
  • Three pieces for violin solo op.11 (1915)

Piano music

  • Sonata op.82 (1951)
  • Sonatina for Gretl op.87 (1952)
  • Two toccatas op.88 (1953)

Vocal music

  • Das Memorandum op.52, Oratorio (1949; Text: Max Butting)
  • An den Frühling op.59, cantata (1948; text: Max Butting)
  • Der Sommer op.61, cantata (1948; text: Max Butting)
  • Der Herbst op.62, cantata (1948; text: Max Butting)
  • Der Winter op.63, cantata (1948; text: Max Butting)
  • The story of lies about the black horse op.71, cantata (1949; text: Alex Eckener)
  • Plautus im Nonnenkloster op.98, opera (1958; text: Hedda Zinner )
  • In October , on the 100th birthday of Lenin

Fonts

  • Music history that I witnessed . Henschel, Berlin 1955.

literature

  • Dietrich Brennecke: Max Butting's life's work . German publishing house for music, Leipzig 1973.
  • Dietrich Brennecke: Max Butting . In: Dietrich Brennecke, Hannelore Gerlach, Mathias Hansen (eds.): Musicians in our time. Members of the music section of the GDR Academy of the Arts . Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1979, p. 22 ff.
  • Vera Grützner: Max Butting . In: Contemporary Composers (KDG). Edition Text & Criticism, Munich 1996, ISBN 978-3-86916-164-8 .
  • Torsten Musial, Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Butting, Max . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

Commons : Max Butting  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Office for Art Preservation , Circular No. 6 of July 26, 1935, Federal Archives NS 15/87; quoted from: Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 . Kiel 2004, CD-ROM Lexicon, p. 860.
  2. ^ Office Reichsleiter Rosenberg , Main Office Music at Office Feierabend, September 22, 1939, Federal Archives NS 15/87; quoted from: Fred K. Prieberg: Handbook German Musicians 1933–1945 . Kiel 2004, CD-ROM Lexicon, p. 860.
  3. ^ Fred K. Prieberg: Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 . Kiel 2004, CD-ROM Lexicon, p. 860.
  4. ↑ Albrecht Dümling: Music has its value. 100 years of musical collecting society in Germany. Regensburg 2003, p. 248.
personal data
SURNAME Butting, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1976
Place of death Berlin