It was shortly before Easter 2000 that Nikolaus Harnoncourt first conducted Franz Schmidt’s oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln with the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance that aroused widespread public interest. Here, after all, is a piece that remains controversial not least on stylistic grounds: its music, which reflects the spiritual upheavals of the interwar years, is open to misinterpretation, with superficial observers claiming that it is reactionary. Written between 1935 and 1937, it was premièred by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at the city’s Musikverein in June 1938, only months after the Anschluß, when Austria was annexed by Hitler’s Germany. So monumental a work naturally attracted the attention of the Nazi regime, as a result of which the composer himself later fell into disrepute, even though he died in February 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Surprising though Harnoncourt's decision may seem to take this work into his repertory, Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln has in fact been familiar to him since his youth. In the late forties the director of music at Graz Cathedral, Anton Lippe, organised a performance with the Graz Cathedral Choir, of which the Harnoncourt farnily were members - all, that is, apart from Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who always preferred his own individual pursuits. Even so, he gained a clear impression of the work from the numerous rehearsals that were held at home: “My mother and brothers and sisters had great difficulty pitching the intervals, and so my father rehearsed it with them at the piano. It was something of a family event. And in the ears of my father and, hence, of the rest of the family, this was the epitome of avant-garde music. Never again did they penetrate as deeply into the world that lies beyond the confines of traditional harmony.”
Later, during his years as cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Harnoncourt himself took part in a number of performances of the work under conductors such as Anton Heiller and Josef Krips. “I never really got to the bottom of the piece. The cello has a lot to play in it, and I can’t say that I ever gained a real overview of either its form or its content. But it‘s one of the pieces that has always moved me. I’ve always seen it in a direct line of succession with the great oratorios that for me begin with Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and include Mozart’s C minor Mass, Haydn’s Harmoniemesse, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Brahms’s German Requiem. All these pieces go beyond the framework of the liturgy and grant us an entirely new insight into sacred music. And Schmidt was the first person to set the words of the Apocalypse in a comprehensive way."
For Harnoncourt, the result is “an incredible setting of an incredible text", the work of a composer whose genius is beyond question. Yet our perception of it is distorted by all manner of prejudices and clichés, with the result that Schmidt’s stature remains to be rediscovered by our own generation today.

a Charismatic personality
“You had only to come into the briefest contact with Schmidt and you were already musical,” one of the composer’s many pupils described his particular charisma. Schmidt was a popular and influential figure on the Viennese musical scene, a gifted teacher who taught a whole generation of young musicisans and also a talented pianist- in spite of his firm convinction that  the piano ruins a musician's ear. As a creative musician he was able to offer impressive accounts of the great works of the piano repertory without any special technical training. Having had lessons as an adolescent with the famous teacher Theodor Leschetizky, he hated five-finger exercises. In this, he offended against the prevailing etiquette in matters of piano technique, yet he was an acclaimed interpreter in the concert hall and radio studio, as well as being lionised in Vienna's salons. In 1914 he took over a piano class at the Vienna Academy of Music and went on to write a number of works for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the First World War.
Schmidt‘s formal training was on the cello. Following his final examination at the Vienna Conservatory in 1896 he even wrote a cadenza for Haydn’s D major Cello Concerto, earning Brahms‘s personal accolade in the process. He went on to join the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra. This was the period when Gustav Mahler was director of the Vienna Opera. A blend of respect and animosity conditioned their mutual dealings and gave rise to frequent conflict. Mahler valued Schmidt as a cellist and regularly used him in preference to the official first cellist, Friedrich Buxbaum, leading to violent tensions within the orchestra, but he refused to stage Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame. For his part, Schmidt admired Mahler as a conductor but found his symphonies “cheap”.
Schmidt resigned from the Vienna Philharmonic in 1911 in order to spend more time composing, and three years later he gave up his post with the Court Opera Orchestra, but remained on the staff of the Academy of Music. From 1922 he also taught composition and in 1927 he even became its director, a position he hoped to use to obtain a teaching post for Arnold Schoenberg. When the idea was turned down by the Ministry of Education, Schmidt organised a concert of Schoenberg‘s works in token of his high regard for his fellow composer. Even though he himself was temperamentally unresponsive to atonality, he admired Schoenberg for what he described as the aural equivalent of far-sightedness and is known to have studied his Harmonielehre.

revered and reviled
Franz Schmidt was born in Preßburg (now Bratislava) in 1874. At that date the kings of Hungary were still crowned in the city’s cathedral. His father was a shipping agent of German-Hungarian extraction. His mother was Hungarian. It was she who gave him his first piano lessons. As a child, he is said to have heard Liszt play. He studied harmony and the organ with a Franciscan friar in Preßburg - “on the side and completely effortlessly”. He was fourteen when he and his family moved to Vienna. His training at the Conservatory began two years later, in 1890. He even signed up to Bruckner‘s class, but in the event the class did not take place. Alongside Bruckner, it is Brahms and Dvořák who are generally regarded as his compositional models.
Schmidt was a thoroughbred musician of the old Austrian school who came to maturity at a time of radical upheaval that brought fundamental changes with it. Contemporaries report that Alban Berg thought very highly of Schmidt’s music. Yet today’s commentators often dismiss him as a traditionalist, deriding his musical language as reactionary and eclectic, a preconceived opinion that probably derives from the disparaging views of the contemporary critic (and Mahlerian advocate) Richard Specht. And a number of leading performers of a later age have been taken in by this view, with Herbert von Karaian, for example, refusing to conduct Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln on the grounds that it is an example of “late Romanticism".
For Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Franz Schmidt is one of the few figures in the history of music whose gifts he would describe as exceptional: Schmidt developed his own completely independent musical idiom and in this way was entirely abreast of his times. “It’s an absolutely unmistakable personal style, and for me there is no question that Schmidt helped to shape the course of 20th-century music. I do not feel qualified to tell such great artists how they should develop. If an individual chooses not to follow Schoenberg, he can in all honesty still be a magnificent composer. And it is not just Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln that I consider so fascinating, but his other works as well.”
Schmidt’s work-list includes two operas (Notre Dame, 1902-4, and Fredigundis, 1916-21), four symphonies that  were written at considerable intervals in time between 1896 and 1933 and a whole series of organ works and chamber pieces. But only Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln has found a lasting place for itself in the repertory, a position it owes not least to its dedication to the  Gesellschaft der Musikikfrunde in Vienna, whose Singverein has ensured a seamless performing tradition at least within Austria itself. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was happy to avail himself of the Singverein`s experience in performing this complex work. It was the first time that he had worked with this famous Viennese chorus, which is made up entirely of amateurs.
The role of the Evangelist is regarded as one of the most challenging in the tenor repertory on account of its range and the fiendish difficulties that it involves. Schmidt wrote it for a Heldentenor, but lyric tenors such as Julius Patzak were later considered ideal for the part, “Schmidt‘s intimates - in other words, Josef Krips, Anton Heiller and Anton Lippe - regarded his original casting as a mistake,” says Harnoncourt. “The Saint John of the première was a failure as a Heldentenor. Schmidt would certainly have changed it. Perhaps he did so, and it is only the printed score that remains uncorrected.” A light, lyric voice, as in the present recording, will not be a problem if the vast orchestral forces are appropriately handled, and it is also preferable in bringing out the expressive nuances in the score.

between two world Wars
“As far as I know," wrote Schmidt in his foreword to his oratorio, “mine is the first attempt at a comprehensive setting of the Apocalypse. When I first approached this enormous task, it immediately became clear that I could do so only if I found a form for the text that retained its essential wording, while reducing the literally unmanageable dimensions of the work to a size that could be grasped by the average human brain.”
Schmidt achieved this end in a remarkable way, Harnoncourt argues. “I find it really unusual for a composer to change so little - especially with so vast a subiect - in order to impose his own particular form on it. The words are largely taken from Luther‘s translation of the Bible and edited by Schmidt. Of course, he omitted certain things, changed the order of others and added some of his own. But these additions are really quite minimal. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that he stuck very close to his source.”
On completing his Fourth Symphony, Schmidt began to cast around for a libretto for his next work. But why did he choose the Book of Revelation, with its tremendous images of the destruction of humankind, rather than the text that his friend, the Philharmonic oboist Alexander Wunderer, had written for him? Was it mere chance, or did Schmidt feel a need in the mid-1930s to respond to this particular section of the Bible and to do so - as he himself puts it in his foreword - “from the standpoint of a profoundly religious man and also as an artist”?
During his career as a cellist, Harnoncourt remembers meeting a number of musicians who knew Schmidt personally. As a result, he is in no doubt about the depth of the composer‘s religious feelings. Given the passage of time, it is scarcely possible to say any longer who drew his attention to the Apocalypse and why he used Martin Luther‘s translation. His pupils and friends knew only that he was looking for a dramatic subject.
Harnoncourt believes that a decisive factor in Schmidt’s choice was the archaic power of the text: "There‘s a tremendous fascination to this world of images. And as someone who lived through the first third of the century and experienced it with peculiar intensity, Schmidt undoubtedly saw how the political situation was worsening. There really was the feeling that a boil was about to burst at this time, people felt they were living on a volcano. But it was in the air: he was writing between two world wars and composing a work that reflects what it is like to live on the edge of a volcano. He described its contents as a "fight against evil". It reminds one of Freud‘s oneiric visions. I think he meant the evil ,within us all."
“Of all the books in the New Testament, the Apocalypse is for me the one most like a book from the Old Testament. With our European logic we’re simply not able to relate to the world of oriental imagery. But I don’t interpret it literally. When it says in the Old Testament that Abraham is prepared to kill his own son, the idea it expresses is that an extreme measure must be taken. And when the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear in the Book of Revelation, I take that to mean that we have a world at our disposal and that we’re doing something terrible with this wonderful opportunity. The events of the apocalypse can also be interpreted to mean the individual's struggle with himself."
At this point it may be instructive to recall Schmidt's own personal situation. In 1932 he suffered a severe blow with the death of his daughter Emma. He himself was seriously ill for some considerable time and he was in an extremely poor physical state when, following an operation, he set to work on Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln. Even at that date he must have been aware that time was running out for him. Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln was to be the culmination of his lite’s work.

thrilling imagess in sound
Schmidt’s oratorio falls into two sections, with a framing prologue and epilogue. Formally and stylistically, it is an extremely complex work. Even though the orchestra “does not play a dominating role” (to quote Schmidt himself), the tremendous choral writing is complemented in a decisive way, with the instrumental writing underscoring the message ofthe text. “Schmidt is a real man of the orchestra,” says Harnoncourt. “You can tell this from the ways in which he adds dynamics to the individual voices. If he had regarded the orchestral writing as no more than an accompaniment for the chorus, this complexity would not be necessary. After all, there is also the organ, which at several points provides a solo commentary on the action. I actually think that the resources are perfectly balanced.”
In the musical account of the forces of nature at the opening of the sixth seal, for example, in the raging storm and the fugue that depicts the oppressively rising floodwaters, contrapuntal mastery and a real feeling for tone colour combine to create thrilling images in sound.
A key scene that Schmidt entrusted to the orchestra is Michael’s fight with the dragon at the start of the second section, following the scene depicting the Redeemer‘s birth, which is characterised by echoes of Christmas. Harnoncourt‘s working notes are worth quoting here: “The orchestral writing gradually becomes more independent and describes a wild and complex struggle. Various groups of instruments and rhythmic structures embody the different combatants. The harmony dissolves. The defeated dragon continues its fight with the woman’s remaining progeny. The battle between good and evil is now fought out on earth. Complicatedly vivid orchestral writing in which the struggle is expressed in inversions and strettos that grow increasingly dense, gaining in speed and intensity and leading to the victoriously radiant Vivace in 4/4-time. The C or D major that is expected here is not reached, instead the B flat major fanfare casts something of a pall over the victory celebrations.”

stylistic complexity in a period of change
Within itself, the piece is characterised by extreme contrasts. “Schmidt offsets the threefold entry of the Voice of the Lord with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the natural disasters and the seven trombones,” says Harnoncourt in his analysis of the work. “The seven trombones proclaim the seven sorrows. It is all interconnected, held together by a trombone theme.” (Luther’s translation refers to “trombones” at this point and Schmidt duly writes for trombones, but the Authorised Version of the Bible describes these instruments as trumpets.)
The fact that this trombone episode begins in C minor and ends in C major is no doubt a musical topos, Harnoncourt admits, but he refuses to see it as a superficial effect and leaps to Schmidt’s defence, energetically rejecting the oft-repeated charge that the composer used a whole number of stylistic devices in an eclectic manner. The piece undoubtedly uses a lot of different stylistic devices, but at this point in the history of music composers simply had at their disposal a palette extending over several centuries. They also used others - think, for example, of the various directions taken by Stravinsky. It‘s simply there. In his German Requiem, Brahms likewise offers a recapitulation of all that existed in his own day, lust as Beethoven did in his Missa solemnis.
“You also have to remember that there‘s a dialogue between what happens in the concert hall and what is written into the score. When Schoenberg or Bartók wrote music, they did so for listeners who listened to the programmes current at that time. Schmidt was still rooted in the pre-war period. But this was an age when first performances were gradually becoming less interestingthan revivals. The first performance of a Bruckner symphony was still far more important than a repeat performance of something else. This changed only duringthe first decades ofthe 20th century - except for Richard Strauss and Puccini.”
The theory that, consciously or otherwise, Schmidt produced a great synthesis of the entire German music tradition from Bach to Wagner and, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, created a vision of the decline of that tradition is one that Harnoncourt accepts only with reservations: “There may be something to this view,” he says, “but from Bach to Wagner strikes me as too narrow. In terms of its content, the work’s stylistic position is very clearly defined. Schmidt operates within various stylistic spheres depending on the ideas that have to be depicted. This also includes the Second Viennese School, with whose representatives he was, after all, in very close contact.
“Naturally I see this work in the tradition of late Romanticism. I have the feeling that some people are hysterically pro-Schmidt, while others are equally hysterically against him, I really can't understand why he produces such a violent reaction. If it’s not based on the quality of his work... If it were really eclectic and backward-looking, people wouldn't get so worked up over it. My view is that Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln is a masterpiece. This is what counts for me.”