Willem Pijper (1894-1947)

Sonata No. 2 : violino e pianoforte (1922)

1. Molto tranquillo - 00:00
2. Andantino leggiero - 08:10
3. Molto moderato - 11:38

Philippe Graffin, violin
Jelger Blanken, piano

dedicated to Hendrik Rijnbergen


Willem Pijper was, with Vermeulen, the most important composer in the Netherlands in the first half of the 20th century; his teaching and writing also made a significant impact. He grew up in a working-class Calvinist milieu in a village outside Utrecht. Due to recurring bronchitis and asthma, he was educated at home until the age of 14 but then attended Gymnasium in Utrecht. Already studying the organ, he left school in 1911 to enroll in the Utrecht Toonkunst Muziekschool, where he studied composition with Johan Wagenaar and the piano with Helena van Lunteren-Hansen. His final examination, in 1915, was in theory, and he continued composition lessons privately for three more years.
The family of his first wife, Annie Werker (they married in 1918), brought him social and musical opportunities in Utrecht, and he came under the influence of two older, Francophile colleagues: Diepenbrock and the critic J.S. Brandts Buys. It was Mengelbergs Concertgebouw première (April 1918) of the Mahler-like First Symphony which brought him national recognition. During 1918-1921 he taught theory at the Amsterdam Muziek lyceum and from 1917 to 1923 he wrote for the Utrechtsch Dagblad. His long, pithy reviews crusaded against complacency and amateurishess; one victim was the conductor Jan van Gilse, who resigned his post with the Utrecht orchestra in 1922 as a result of Pijpers criticisms. This incident created a nationwide furore, and his reputation as a musical essayist was assured.
A radical new compositional style, confirmed in 1920 with Heer Halewijn and the Septet, made Pijper leader of the Dutch musical avant garde. He represented the Netherlands at the founding of the ISCM in Salzburg, 1922; soon after, backed by Sem Dresden, he established the Dutch ISCM section. In 1923 he met the playwright Balthazar Verhagen, and new co-productions of Greek dramas resulted, beginning with De bacchanten. Otherwise this was a difficult period. An anticipated critics post in Amsterdam failed, and he was left almost without work. An affair with his student Iet Stants ended unhappily in spring 1925, and in July he attempted suicide. He then separated from his wife and moved to Amsterdam. His prospects improved when, in September of that year, Dresden appointed him head of composition and orchestration at the Amsterdam Conservatory. In 1926 he became co-editor (with Sanders) of De Muziek, an outstanding professional journal which they ran for seven years. In the meantime he began a relationship with the author Emmy van Lokhorst; they married in 1927.
Following an earlier, unsuccessful attempt, Pijper in 1930 became head of the Rotterdam Conservatory, a position he held until his death. Pijper joined a masonic lodge in 1938 and simultaneously began to practise astrology. From then and throughout World War II, he was preoccupied with gematris (a kind of numerological thinking in music which dates back to the Netherlandish polyphonists and also to Bach) and other symbolic thought. In May 1940, following the German bombardment of Rotterdam, fire destroyed his house and most of his possessions; yet copies of nearly all his compositions survived in safekeeping. He kept his conservatory alive during wartime, under very meagre conditions, and served briefly on artistic reconstruction panels after liberation in 1945. Falling ill in the summer of 1946, after the London ISCM Festival, he was diagnosed with cancer in November and died four months later.
His students, including Karel Mengelberg, Stants, van Lier, van Hemel, Bosmans, Guillaume Landré, Piet Ketting, Badings, Henkemans, van Baaren, Escher, Jan van Dijk and Masséus, were prominent in Dutch musical life throughout the 1960s. For a time younger composers attacked this Pijper group (de Leeuw, 1966), but in the mid-1980s a counter-reaction occurred, and since then there have been numerous performances, and recordings, of the orchestral and chamber works and the operas Halewijn and Merlijn.

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