Peter Huebner - Germany's New Classical Composer

Fate saw it otherwise and this future-orientated master of the symphony died before he could fulfil his ambition.

And fate has also seen to it that, until today, not one of the succeeding musical experts has recognised Beethoven’s high aspiration toward the entire unity of the symphony, and also not one of the succeeding symphonists has carried through Beethoven’s great legacy in a new symphony.

There have even been experts who – possibly only for purposes of showing off their supposed musical knowledge – have described Brahms’ first symphony as Beethoven’s tenth.

But indeed, neither Brahms’ first, nor his subsequent symphonies meet the requirements.

Thus Brahms’ symphonies do not take this development further, but back again and, being an honest man, Brahms’ faced up to the consequences and did not write any more symphonies after his fourth. I do not wish to get into the endeavours of other symphonists up to the present day, since it was not from the outset the declared intention of any one of them to proceed with Beethoven’s symphonic work – in the way that he had continued Mozart’s work and Mozart had continued Haydn’s and so on –, in order to realise the desire of the inspired musical pioneer, Beethoven, for the unity of the symphony as he saw it.

It was then my understandable endeavour to take up the great symphonic tradition again and continue Beethoven’s symphonic creativity in the manner he described.

Like Bach and Mozart, Beethoven was also a great master of the counterpoint, and thus it is clear that Beethoven would have composed his tenth symphony integrally polyphonically, if not also integrally polyrhythmically.

For my symphonic creation I drew from Beethoven’s work, in particular from his ninth symphony and his requirements set out within it, the following conclusions:

In the tradition of our great classical symphonists, I wanted to aim towards the unity of the symphony as expressed by Beethoven, in each of my symphonies and realise it both polyphonically and polyrhythmically.

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