German composer and music teacher
Karl Julius Marx (12 November 1897 – 8 May 1985) was a German composer and music teacher.
Life
Karl Marx was born in Munich, the son of Josef Marx and his wife Emilie, née Eheberg.[1] After early violin and piano lessons, Marx first studied natural sciences at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 1916. His encounter with Carl Orff, with whom he took private composition lessons after World War I, was decisive in determining his choice to turn to music professionally. From 1920 to 1922, Marx studied composition with Anton Beer-Walbrunn and conducting with Eberhard Schwickerath [de] and Siegmund von Hausegger at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich. From 1924 to 1935, Marx was solo repetiteur in Felix von Kraus's singing class. From 1935 to 1939, he led his own interpretation class for lieder and oratorio singers at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich, where he also taught harmony and form theory from 1929 to 1939. From 1928 to 1939, he conducted the choir of the Munich Bachverein (until 1931 together with Edwin Fischer and until 1933 with Carl Orff). During this time, his first settings of texts by Rainer Maria Rilke were composed, and Marx had his first great success with Rilke's motet Werkleute sind wir, Op. 6 at the Tonkünstlerfest 1928 in Schwerin and at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music 1929 in Geneva. Subsequently, his works were performed by leading interpreters, including the Piano Concerto, Op. 9 by Edwin Fischer under Eugen Jochum, the Viola Concerto, Op. 10 in Berlin under Hermann Scherchen, and the Passacaglia, Op. 19 by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Wilhelm Furtwängler.
In 1932, Marx was awarded the music prize of the city of Munich. After 1933, he was exposed to defamation by the Nazi press and his name gradually disappeared from concert programs. Since he did not belong to the Nazi Party, he had no further professional future to expect at the Academy of Music. He accepted a call to the newly founded Hochschule für Musikerziehung (music education) in Graz, where he taught theory of form and composition from 1940 to 1945.
The compositional focus increasingly shifted to choir and lay music, including the Rilke cantata to words from the Stundenbuch, Op. 43, 1942. One of Marx's most famous songs is Jeden Morgen geht die Sonne auf to the words of Hermann Claudius [de].
The assertions made by Michael Hans Kater in his controversial book The Twisted Muse[2] about Marx's alleged Nazi past are disputed by others.[3]
From 1946 to 1966, Marx taught harmony, counterpoint and composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart and from 1955 as head of the department for school music. The cantata Und endet doch alles mit Frieden to words from the novel Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin for soloists, choir and orchestra, Op. 52, was premiered in 1953. Marx was appointed to the German Music Council in 1954 (honorary council in 1977). In 1963, he was guest of honour of the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome for three months. In 1966, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class. Marx died in 1985 in Stuttgart at the age of 87.
Marx names two traits that characterise his music: thrift in the use of means and constructive thinking, and continues: "Next to this is the commitment to melody, which is influenced by the handling of the folk song as well as by the encounter with pre-classical polyphony". This characterizes a style which, always based on vocal line, conveys a very independent sound image through its high transparency. This in turn corresponds to the texts that Marx chooses for his vocal compositions. He prefers poets such as Rilke and Hölderlin, who possess a high level of linguistic musicality which he sensitively traces on the one hand and whose expressiveness is redesigned with musical means on the other.[citation needed]
