At home, with books, paintings and drawings, the edelweiss picked by oneself on the table and beside it a skull — that is the right setting for an artist, said Hans Erich Apostel. Rainer Bischof reads the two objects as a legacy of his teachers: the edelweiss in the tradition of Alban Berg, who also kept a flower on his desk, the skull in the tradition of Arnold Schönberg as an emblem of transience. Those who know Apostel mostly know him as a pupil of Schönberg and later of Berg, as a member of the Schönberg circle and perhaps as the most gifted lyric voice among Schönberg’s pupils — one who later moved towards pure instrumental writing.
The DoelenKwartet, with Frank de Groot, Maartje Kraan, Karin Dolman and Hans Woudenberg, plays all five works for string quartet, four of which appear on disc for the first time: the 18 Variations on a Theme of his own of 1925, the String Quartet in D minor of 1926, the four-movement String Quartet Op. 7 of 1935, the String Quartet in One Movement Op. 26 of 1956 with its passacaglia split into two parts, and the Six Epigrams Op. 33 of 1962.
The historical sound documents show Apostel speaking. In a film made by ORF school television on 15 October 1968 he receives visitors; he talks about the string quartet, about the new listening and the twelve-note row and about the survival of music. With the guitarist Karl Scheit he discusses his Six Pieces for guitar, with the writer Elias Canetti and the sculptor Fritz Wotruba the work of the artist. In the spring of 1966 he gave a laudatory address in the baroque hall of the Doblinger publishing house in Vienna for the fiftieth birthday of his composer friend Karl Schiske — recorded privately by Ivan Eröd.
Rainer Bischof, Apostel’s pupil, recalls characteristic anecdotes in conversation with Mirjam Wiesemann, describes his teacher’s artistic and personal development and portrays him as the man between Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg: the contradictory one, the inward, solitary man, the lyric voice who took new paths.
The string quartets were recorded in January 2009 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, the conversation with Rainer Bischof on 5 January 2010 at the Cybele Studios in Düsseldorf. The edition received the 2011 Deutscher Hörbuchpreis for the best publishing achievement, was nominated for the International Classical Music Awards and was awarded five stars by MUSICA. The three hybrid SACDs together run to 199:29; the booklet has 72 pages in German and English.