Hausegger the conductor

Hausegger’s first conducting stint came in his teens, when he directed a performance of his youthful Mass for chorus and orchestra. This debut came after some, no doubt crammed, conducting lessons from his father. The performance was a success and helped launch the young maestro, He continued his studies more systematically with Erich Degner, quickly becoming a virtuosic score-reader.

During 1895 and 96, he was a guest conductor at the Graz Opera, where he directed Rousseau’s Le Devin du Village and Grétry’s L’Epreuve Villageoise. An early landmark in his reputation as a conductor was a performance in Graz of the complete Wagner Ring with local artists, Hausegger both conducting and accompanying the entire cycle on the piano. Its success led to his full-time employment at the opera, where he conducted local premiers of operas by Goldmark, Kienzl and Rezniček, as well as being summoned to assist at the 1898 Bayreuth Festival.

In 1899, he conducted the Kaim Orchestra in Munich, where, in addition to the Bruckner Seventh Symphony, he also led the world premier of his own Dionysian Fantasia. Hausegger led that orchestra from 1899 till 1902, first as Weingartner’s assistant, then as principle director. Especially successful were his Modern Evenings, concerts exposing local audiences to the more progressive works by contemporary German musicians.

From 1903 till 1906, he conducted the Museum Concerts in Frankfurt and from 1910 to 1920, the Hamburg Philharmonic. From 1910 to 1915, he also led the Bluthner Orchestra concerts in Berlin. In 1920, he took over the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he was most closely associated, remaining there till he retired in 1938. He guest-conducted throughout Austria and Germany, as well as all the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, France, Holland, Scotland (the National Orchestra) and Switzerland. He also declined offers from Russia, South America and Stockholm, as he was by then too fond of Munich (who can blame him?).

Despite being one of the New German School as a youth, Hausegger’s repertoire as a conductor gradually grew more conservative, emphasizing among traditional composers Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner and among his contemporaries, Pfitzner, Reger, Richard Strauss and the underrated Swiss composer, Hermann Suter. Though he did conduct music by Delius and Cyril Scott, he had little regard for French Impressionists like Debussy and none for the 12-tone idiom.

At the same time, it must be noted that his Munich audience was possibly even more conservative. After he’d conducted Wolfgang Graeser’s orchestral transcription of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, for a Bach birthday concert on March 21^st, 1928, his son recalled that afterward, even musicians argued that, though they respected his effort, the work had been written as a mere academic exercise, not meant for performance.

Richard Strauss, helpful in so many other areas, also advised him on conducting. His warning “No wet noodles, Hausegger!” was in line with Strauss’ maxim that the audience, not the conductor, should sweat from a performance. Hausegger’s son remarked that he often had trouble following this counsel and frequently saw his father emotionally exhausted after a particularly successful reading.

We have an impression of his conducting early in his career (1904) from the French-American composer Charles Martin Loeffler, who found him “…irregular and jerky and does not care whether the brass drowns the melodies or themes by holding fundamental harmonies.” Regarding Hausegger and Strauss, Loeffler further noted “…these Germans are a noisy lot.” Of course, in addition to reacting to the excesses of a young conductor’s bravado, Loeffler’s observation may also reflect the French viewpoint, with its aversion to the grandiose and rhetorical, versus the Germanic. From Virgil Thomson down to Ned Rorem in our own day, this rift has been the oil and water of 20th Century American musical opinion.

Impressions of the mature conductor form a worthier picture. The painter, Willy von Beckerath, wrote in 1924 “What is particularly original in Hausegger’s Bruckner interpretations is his unqualifiedly convincing working out of their immense breadth of span. Hausegger works purely through his artistic temperament and the greatness of his aesthetic conception, thereby evoking the deepest and most powerful reaction from both the orchestra and the public .”

His pupil, Eugen Jochum, wrote that Hausegger had “…above all, an incomparable sense of the construction of large forms…” Luckily, as Exhibit A for the defense, we have tangible evidence of his maturity in his 1938 RCA recording with the Munich Philharmonic of the original version of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony (now on CD, Preiser 90148). Aside from the remarkable amount of detail the recording captures, his reading has always struck me as one of unusual purity and clarity, combined with a constant sense of forward momentum. Perhaps Hausegger also pioneered the notion that you needn’t drag out Bruckner’s music to show its depth. And the orchestral balances are, pace Loeffler, well in hand.