Musicologica Austriaca (Dec 2022)
Fine-Tuning Ferdinand Rebay’s Second Sonata in E major for Guitar
Abstract
Composed in 1941 and dedicated to his guitarist niece, Gerta Hammerschmid, Ferdinand Rebay’s Second Sonata in E major for Guitar remained unperformed during his life, only gaining its premiere recording after my performance film was released in 2022. One of the reasons for this deferral is that the piece needed a thorough revision to fit the guitar’s idiom and, for reasons that can only be speculated about, this was not done by Hammerschmid at the time. This article examines my solutions to score-based issues encountered during the preparation of the sonata for performance, many of which demanded intervention in the musical text—a process I call “posthumous collaboration.” First, however, I investigate the relationship between Rebay and his Viennese guitar environment, explaining his motivations for writing over thirty sonatas or sonata-structured works for the guitar and then focusing on the group of seven solo guitar sonatas that he wrote between 1925 and 1944. The article is written from the perspective of an artist-scholar who looks critically at the repertoire and engages with it with the kind of authority that can only emerge from integrating scholarly studies with artistic experience.
