The New Grove

Dictionary of Music
and Musicians

Second Edition

Edited by
Stanley Sadie
Executive Editor
John Tyrrell

VOLUME 13
Jennens to Kuerti

Sigfrid Karg-Elert
Karg-Elert [Karg], Sigdrid (Theodor) (b Oberndorf am Neckar, 21 Nov 1877; d Leipzig, 9 April 1933).

German composer and keyboard player. A devoted advocate of harmonium music, he is best
known for his compositions for that instrument and for his organ work.

1. LIFE
Son of a newspaper editor and publisher and the youngest of 12 children, Karg-Elert moved his
musical studies as a member of the Johanniskirche choir, composing under the guidance of the
cantor, Bruno Röthig, who conducted several of his early choral works. Although his father’s death
in 1889 meant there was no money to spend on music lessons, a Leipzig family provided him with a
piano; he continued to depend on the patronage and support of others throughout his life.

In 1891 the church director decided that Karg-Elert should train in Grimma to become a teacher.
After two years in which he learned to play the flute, oboe and clarinet, he discontinued the course
and moved to Markranstädt where he supported himself as a freelance musician while studying
philosophy and music theory. He returned to Leipzig about 1896 to study at the Conservatory,
where his teachers included Emil Nikolaus von Rezniček, Carl Reinecke, Salomon Jadassohn, Paul
Homoyer and Karl Wendling. In 1900 a performance of his First Piano Concerto with himself as
soloist so impressed Reisenauer that his scholarship was extended and he contemplated a career as
a performer. After a successful tour of Germany, he returned to Leipzig where he engaged in
further composition study with Teichmüller, a decision that caused a breach in his relationship with
Reisenauer. He added his mother’s maiden name [Ehlert] to his original surname [Karg] when his
first published composition, a song, appeared in Musikwoche.

In 1902 Karg-Elert was appointed head of the piano masterclass at the Magdeburg Conservatory.
The following year he met Grieg, who advised him to study the contrapuntal forms and dance
idioms of the 17th and 18th centuries. He took this advice so seriously that he cancelled a proposed
tour of the USA in order to concentrate on composition. Extremely grateful to Grieg for
recommending him to several publishers, he later described the elder composer as “my
unforgettable patron”. Grieg also became an important influence on his musical style. During the
same period, he fell in love with the keyboard player Maria Oelze. When her father insisted that
their relationship end, he returned to Leipzig in a state of mental collapse. In 1904 an illegitimate
son was born to him by Henriete Kretzschmar, whose daughter, Minna, he married in 1910.

By 1903, most likely influenced by August Reinhard, Karg-Elert had begun to compose for the
harmonium. August Robert Forberg’s publication of Sechs Skizzen (1903), numbered as op.10 so
that the pieces would not appear to be the work of an immature composer, unwittingly launched a
tradition of unreliable opus numbers for Karg-Elert’s works. Unprepared to publish any further
harmonium compositions, Forberg recommended Karg-Elert to Carl Simon, who accepted
additional pieces on the condition that the composer become familiar with the Kunstharmonium.
This contingency was to alter the course of Karg-Elert’s subsequent career: “the Kunstharmonium,
with its capacity for expressiveness, its wealth of differentiation of tone and its technical perfection
became the instrument which met my highly strung artistic demands”. For the next ten years the
instrument dominated his musical life, both as composer and a performer., He gave his first
Kunstharmonium concert in March 1906 and his first compositions for the organ were
arrangements of harmonium works; these led him to write original works for the organ, bringing
him to the attention of figures such as Max Reger and Karl Straube.
Virtually all of Karg-Elert’s harmonium music and much of the rest of his output was written before
World War I. In 1915 he enlisted in the 107 th Infantry Regiment, but because of his musical
reputation was not allowed to see active service. After failing to gain the position of organist at
Berlin Cathedral in 1917, he underwent ad artistic crisis. From 1912 he had been strongly
influenced by contemporaries such as Debussy, Schoenberg and Skryabin. His study of orchestral
repertory during the war, however, led him to regard the styles of these composers as “fruitless
artistic self- indulgence”. Embracing “the purity of classical and romantic art” he destroyed about
20 works; as he later told Paul Schenk, he “began again in C major, and prayed to the muse of
melody”. After the war he succeeded Reger at the Leipzig Conservatory, but never gained a
permanent post as organist.

From 1924 Karg-Elert gave weekly radio recitals on the harmonium from his home, not allowing the
instrument to be moved to another location. His 50 th birthday in 1927 was celebrated with concerts
and radio broadcasts, including his own performance of the Second Harmonium Sonata (1909-12).
His growing reputation in England culminated in the Karg-Elert Festival at the church of St Lawrence
Jewry, London, in 1930. English support, however, caused a decline in his popularity in Germany,
particularly as his modernist image collided with the developing political situation there. In 1926 he
wrote to his English friend Godfrey Sceats, “Because some of my works have French or English titles
I am automatically an “Ungermann”, someone to be boycotted… one is immediately dismissed as a
Jew, traitor or Bolshevik”.

Personal and financial circumstances led him to undertake a recital tour in the USA in 1932, but
already in poor health the result was a musical disaster, variously described as “utterly impossible”
and “total chaos”. He declined a post in Pittsburgh a year before his death.

2. WORKS
Karg-Elert was most successful as a composer when he was working within clear limitations. He
tended to avoid sonata form and fugue in favour of an emphasis on timbre, and his large-scale
structures have a tendency to sprawl, as in the first piano (1904) and Kunstharmonium (1905)
sonatas. He was particularly successful in extended variation forms such as the passacaglia and
chaconne. Though he experimented with atonality, a warmly chromatic musical language featuring
lush harmonies and complex key relationships is more characteristic of his output.

Karg-ELert’s most substantial body of works are his pieces for the harmonium and the organ. The
harmonium offered a range of colours, the possibility for kaleidoscopic changes of registration, and
“expression” (see HARMONIUM) achieved by subtle variations in the amount of pressure applied to
the instrument’s pedals, qualities that appealed to his musical sensibility. Unlike French theorists
such as René Vierne who believed that “expression” should be used selectively, Karg-Elert identified
the device as the “soul” of the instrument. His earliest harmonium works, written for the four-rank
instrument used by French composers, include the Passacaglia (1903-5), one of his most successful
musical structures, the Partita (1905) and the Phantasie and Fugue (1905).

The Kunstharmonium provided Karg-Elert with a much greater range of colors and mechanical
devices, and he exploited these to an extent not attempted by any other composer. Between 1905
and 1914 he produced numerous extended works as well as sets of shorter pieces. The Second
Sonata (1909-12) is on an immense scale and can be considered his masterpiece for the instrument.
The Third Sonatina (1906) and the second of the Orchestrale Konzertstudien (1907) are also
notable. Of the shorter pieces, the eight Konzerstücke (1905-6) deploy all the possibilities of the
instrument: the central section of no.6 “Capricietto” features 17 changes of registration in 29 bars.
The seven Idyllen (c1914) contain some of his most daring experiments with Expressionism and
atonality.

Though he continued to play the harmonium and to advocate its use, Karg-Elert only published two
sets of short pieces and a second book of Portraits for the instrument after World War I. With the
exception of those pieces arranged for the organ, his music for the harmonium fell into obscurity
until the revival of interest in the instrument as part of the performing practice movement in the
late 20th century. In contrast, his organ music – which can be divided into three main periods: up to
1914, 1921-4, and from 1930 onwards - continued to hold a prominent place in the repertory.

Although encouraged and influenced by Reger, Karg-Elert’s earliest works for the organ reflect the
inspiration of J.S Bach. He was proud to assert that each piece of op.65 (66 Choral-Improvisationen)
had “its own appropriate type of form – Trio, Sarabande, Ciacona, Canon… etc”. The best-known,
Nun danket alle Gott, is a triumphal march and trio, while O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig is a strict
canon at the 7th. Pastels from the Lake of Constance and Cathedral Windows, Impressionistic works
based on Gregorian chant melodies, were composed in the 1920s. Later he became interested in
“Werkprinzip” organs and his music became more abstract. The most significant pieces form his last
compositional phase are the Symphony (1930) and the Music for Organ (1931). His final completed
work, the Passacaglia and Fugue on BACH (1931), is based largely on the first movement of the
Second Harmonium Sonata.

Although he began his career as a pianist, Karg-Elert piano music has not established a place in the
repertory. Much of it is technically demanding, although the Sonatinas (1909) and Mosaik (1933)
are in a lighter, more accessible style. The Third Sonata (1914-20) is a single movement that
generates its momentum through repeated rhythmic figures, unlike anything else in his output, it
echoes the sonatas of Skryabin. His transcriptions of Elgar and Dvorak (1908.14) are impressive in
transferring a great deal of orchestral detail to the piano, but their tremendous technical difficulty
places them out of the reach of most performers.

Unfortunately, much of the remainder of Karg-Elert output, particularly his chamber music has
been neglected. The works for wind instrument largely date from his years of military service. His
interest in Schoenberg is apparent in the Suite pointillistique (1919) in which the second movement
is entitled “De kranke Mond”, of the poems set in Pierrot lunaire. During the 1920s he apparently
worked on a number of chamber works, but they were not published and may be lost. His songs
owe much to the style of Robert Schumann and Robert Franz.

WORKS

(selective list)

Containing clarinet:

Chamber: Jugend, op.139, fl, cl, hn, pf, 1919, arr. Cl/va, pf as Sonata no.2, op.139b;

Solo: Sonata c#, op.110, cl, 1924