Felix Draeseke - Grand March "Germania" w/oOp. 3c

T h e scandalous piece of 1861 is heard again for the first time!
Printed director's score and parts available from Taxus publishers - for inquiries (item DraesW3cD), please, use the business email in the channel description.
Felix Draeseke as a composer was, in his mature years, highly valued by experts and worked influently as a music professor. In his early age he was enthusiastic about the music of Liszt and Wagner, exponents of the "New German School", whom he also got to know personally.
Significantly, however, his hitherto successful endeavors to make a name for himself in the music world got, at the age of 26, a proper ticking-off.
In the concerts during the 1861 Musical Artists Gathering in Weimar, the young composer presented three pieces under the overarching theme of "Germania", last of them the Great March for symphony orchestra.
The march was violently rejected by audience and experts alike, and there must have been tumultuous scenes at the end of the performance. According to Richard Wagner a "really miserable composition by the otherwise so talented person, which looked as if it had been composed in mockery".
Draeseke later writes in his memoirs: "Through this play I was portrayed as the terror of mankind throughout Germany, while all the newspapers rushed to make a big sentence of condemnation en bloc about the school [Liszt's], but to mark myself as the most dangerous beast.” Draeseke was now regarded as the “extreme leftist” in music.
Later he himself believed that he had overstepped the mark: "The fear of becoming trivial had more or less led us to hyperwittyness and unnaturalness - but while most of the others expressed this in a soft, sometimes weak, but therefore less repulsive way, my music was thoroughly male, robust, proud, but also harsh, even stubborn, bizarre and bombastic exaggerated.”
There is no conclusive evidence as to whether the Great March was ever performed again after the events of 1861, nor is it clear if the noted "reworking" ("Umarbeitung" on the autograph) is a step done in the run-up to the Weimar meeting or a subsequent rescue attempt by the composer.
The immediate proximity to the noted performance dates and the lack of an opus number speak more in favor of the first option.
Deeply disappointed, the composer left for Switzerland. It was to be more than a decade of in-depth reflection on his musical ideas.
In the years after, Draeseke achieved respect and great recognition for his compositions from Dresden, even if the great success with the public often came to nothing.
Consequently the Great March holds a key role in Draeseke's further development and in his influence on the work of later artists.
Certainly we see the national coloring of the "Germania" subject with different eyes today. But the great biographical and, as a result, the musico-historical significance of the piece justifies that its musical qualities, after 161 years, are viewed in a "dedusted" manner and be classified in a modern way.

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This is an Interesting Discovery my Musical Ears are simply waiting to hear! Felix Draeseke is very Underrated.