Alexander Albrecht’s Musical Output in the Milieu of Interwar Bratislava

Abstract

The subject of this contribution is Alexander/Sándor Albrecht’s musical output from the 1920s in the context of the development of the composer’s musical style, his life and the social and political changes in Bratislava after 1918. Albrecht returned to Pressburg/Pozsony in 1908 after his studies in Budapest and devoted his organisational and artistic activity to the city; in 1921 he became the conductor at the Kirchenmusikverein (until 1952), a traditional music institution of the city. In 1920s Albrecht also achieved the creation of his own musical style. Coming out from a base of late Romanticism, Albrecht applied in that time the modernistic principles to his œuvre. In 1924 he wrote his mature Piano Suite, and in 1926 his Sonatina for 11 Instruments, an interesting piece of well-balanced formal and harmonic innovations, and one of the first pieces for chamber ensemble (after Schoenberg’s Kammersinfonie) in the Central European context. In 1929 Albrecht’s oratorio-like Marienleben: Three Poems after R. M. Rilke for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra was successfully premiered. The present study contains detailed analyses of these three pieces, which are the most outstanding and distinctive works by the composer.