Suite

Born in Prague in 1901, Hans, or rather Hanuš Winterberg, had found his style around the mid-1930s, to which he would remain faithful until the end of his life, representing a unique but not untypical symbiosis of different influences for Czech modernism: the Second Viennese School, mediated by his teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, French Impressionism and, becoming more and more prominent over time, the folk-inspired, rhythmically dominated music of Leoš Janáček. Winterberg did not have much time to build a career, because from March 1939 at the latest, after the annexation of the so-called „Resttschechechei“ by Nazi Germany, he, as a Jew, was forbidden any professional activity. Exploited as a forced laborer from 1941, he probably only escaped deportation to Theresienstadt and death in Auschwitz through the protection of his marriage to the respected Sudeten German pianist Maria Maschat. The handwriting of the few compositions written during the war bears witness to the existential hardship in which they were written, but also to the immense spiritual resistance of their creator. The Suite for clarinet and piano from 1944, published here for the first time, is not only a substantial contribution to the clarinet literature, but also a unique document of artistic self-assertion.