Berthold Goldschmidt: Orchestral Music

Abstract

With his major work, the opera Beatrice Cenci, unperformed apart from extracts, his other opera Der gewaltige Hahnrei not revived professionally since its highly successful première more than 50 years ago, the Second Quartet having to wait 17 years for its première, the remarkably original Kästner settings of 1931 still awaiting a performance, it is clear that it is not only Berthold Goldschmidt's orchestral works that have been ‘undeservedly neglected’.But of these orchestral works only one can in any sense be said to have entered the repertoire, and that, ironically, is one of Goldschmidt's very earliest works—the Comedy of Errors Overture of 1925. It is his only orchestral score in print. The three concertos—the Cello Concerto (1953), Clarinet Concerto (1954), and Violin Concerto (1951–5)—received a fair number of performances during the 1950'5 (not all of them under Goldschmidt's baton), but have virtually disappeared, along with the inventive Sinfonietta of 1945. Perhaps the least deserving of the obscurity into which they have temporarily fallen are the Ciaconna Sinfonica (1936) and the Mediterranean Songs (1958)—both of them works of real power and substance, and immediately approachable.