Rudi Stephan

In the context of music and the First World War, and the resulting casualties, it's usually the British losses -- George Butterworth, et al. -- who get acknowledged in recordings and also, more tellingly, in pieces by their colleagues; Butterworth, for example, was memorialized by Ralph Vaughan Williams, in the dedication of his Symphony No. 2 ("London"), in addition to the surviving composer facilitating the preservation, performance, and revival of Butterworth's music. The losses on the Central Powers' side -- specifically among the Germans -- are less well known, perhaps because they were the losing side and beset by turmoil (not to mention political events starting as soon as eight years after the war) that would soon create far bigger difficulties and strife. One of the more gifted musical figures out of Germany to be lost in that war was Rudi Stephan, who barely had a chance to start making his mark as a composer before he was gone, killed in combat during the first few weeks of the second year of the First World War. Stephan was born into a well-to-do family in Worms during 1887, his father the Privy Councilor and later a member of Parliament. He grew up in comfortable circumstances, in a family that had a good deal of personal -- if not professional -- interest in music. Such were his family's social connections that his first teacher was Dr. Karl Kiebitz, the music director of Worms, who not only led the boy to an immersion in music but also into the minds and thinking of the great composers, most notably Beethoven. He studied at the Grabherzagliches Gymnasium, but his deep interest in music and also in art made him into an indifferent student of Latin and Greek, and he was actually left back for two years. Ultimately, he was able to convince his disappointed parents that his future lay in music, and that it made more sense to pursue training in that direction than as a scholar or university student. He moved to Frankfurt and studied with Bernhard Sekles, who would later be the teacher of such renowned musical figures as composer Paul Hindemith and conductor Hans Rosbaud. By age 19, he'd moved to Munich and into the orbit of Ludwig Thuille and Rudolf Louis, two key figures in the development of new German music in the early 20th century. Stephan made his way slowly in music from the completion of his studies in 1908. His work, presented in a self-funded concert (the money put up by his father), initially found poor critical and public acceptance, but eventually one prominent writer, Paul Bekker, reviewing a revised version of a work called Music for Orchestra, gave a critical nod to Stephan, and the piece was later taken up into the repertories of various orchestras in Germany from 1913 onward. During the years 1909 through 1914, Stephan devoted himself principally to the completion of his opera Die Ersten Menschen (The First Men), which was completed in that last year. He was sufficiently established by then that a performance was scheduled for the last weeks of 1915. Sadly, Stephan never lived to see it. The son of a prominent government official in what was essentially a martial society, he had little choice but to fulfill his obligation and volunteer for military service with the outbreak of the First World War in August of 1914. He was posted to the Eastern front in the middle of September 1915, and was killed just a little over two weeks later by a Russian sniper's bullet. Die Ersten Menchen was performed for the first time a few weeks later, and described by critics as a significant advance in German opera, beyond the work of Wagner and comparable to (but also transcending) the musical language of Richard Strauss' Elektra, then a cutting-edge work. Fortunately, Stephan's music lived on in performance, especially the concert hall. The 1912 version of his Music for Orchestra remained his most often performed work, while his Liebeszauber (Magic of Love) entered the repertory of Dietrich Fischer-Diskau and his Music for Violin and Orchestra also received performances and was recorded. Additionally, his vocal works Am Abend and Momento Vivre have been programmed on CD alongside the music of Johannes Brahms and Max Reger. In 2006, the CPO label released a complete recording of Die Ersten Menschen. Along with lingering recognition in Germany, where the school he attended was renamed for him in the 1970s, these recordings have given Stephan and his music more exposure than ever before, and his death has come to be recognized as one of the sadder individual losses among the arts of the entire First World War.
© Bruce Eder /TiVo