Alphons Diepenbroek was born in Amsterdam on 2 September 1862. He grew up in a well-to-do Catholic family, which had a fervent interest in literature and music. Music lessons formed a natural part of his upbringing, and as a child Diepenbroek was already a skilled player of the piano, organ and violin. His early ambition was to become a conductor and composer. However, his parents were wary of an uncertain future, and in 1880 he therefore opted to study classical languages, his other great passion, at the University of Amsterdam. In the meantime he acquired an understanding of the theory of music on his own initiative, and with a small choir of students performed works by Palestrina and Sweelinck, his favourite masters of polyphony. He added to his knowledge by making an intensive study of Wagner from piano reductions. During this period he also composed an Academic Festive March for wind orchestra (1882), various choral works and songs. After he was awarded his doctorate with distinction (1888) for a thesis on Seneca, he became a teacher of classics at the grammar school in ’s-Hertogenbosch. While there, he wrote a number of spiritual pieces for voice and organ, and the Missa in die festo for tenor solo, double male choir and organ (1891–94), a monumental work which represents a milestone in the history of Catholic church musie in the Netherlands.

Diepenbroek married in 1895 and returned to Amsterdam, where he supported himself by giving private tuition in Latin and Greek and by writing articles on music, painting, literature, philology and cultural history. These inspired essays bear witness to wide reading and great erudition (he was one of the first people in the Netherlands to have an in-depth knowledge of Nietzsche); they also show Diepenbrock’s substantial literary talent. With his writings he pitched himself into the midst of the debate on the direction in which art should follow in the coming century. He was filled with ideals, widely cherished at the time, of community life centred around a mystical religiosity, in which the arts would together provoke higher thoughts in the people. Such a work to bear these ideals out was the Missa, published in 1896 with accompanying multi-coloured vignettes, following a medieval example, by Antoon Der Kinderen, who shared Diepenbrock’s aims. However, though the publication focussed attention on the composer, the piece was not heard until 20 years later. Instead, the major breakthrough came with the first performance, by Willem Mengelberg and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1900, of the two Hymnen an die Nacht for voice and orchestra. Following the première two years later of the grandiose Te Deum (1897), Diepenbrock came to be recognized as the leading Dutch composer of his time. His work was highly regarded by Mahler, who became friends with him during his first period as a guest conductor in Amsterdam (1903). This admiration was mutual: when the Concertgebouw Orchestra invited Diepenbrock to conduct a few concerts of his own compositions, he also took the opportunity to perform Mahler and Debussy, in his view the most significant innovators among his contemporaries.

In addition to many instrumentations of songs and revisions of earlier works, with regard to the clarification of orchestral sonorities, the years after 1905 brought forth a constant stream of new compositions, such as the impressive Im grossen Schweigen for baritone and orchestra (1906) based on an aphorism of Nietzsche, and the marvellous incidental music for the ‘mythical comedy’ Marsyas of De betooverde bron (Marsyas or The enchanted well) (1909–10). However, with the outbreak of World War I, Diepenbrock became so preoccupied that he did not feel able to begin a major work during its course. His commitment to the Allies (he was active in the Ligue des Pays Neutres) is expressed in a number of anti-German articles and songs such as Belges, debout! and Les poilus de l’Argonne. During the last few years of his life he composed incidental music to plays which mattered greatly to him: Aristophanes’ The Birds, Goethe’s Faust and Sophocles’ Electra. Diepenbrock died on 5 April 1921.

Diepenbrock was inspired chiefly by poetry, and his output is dominated by vocal works, which are particularly fine in atmospheric evocation. His sources cover many centuries: classical antiquity, religious texts from the Middle Ages, old Dutch poems and choruses by Vondel, Goethe and the German Romantics, Verlaine and Baudelaire, to contemporary writers such as Gide and the young Dutch poets Jacques Perk, Lodewijk van Deyssel and Albert Verwey. His choice of text reflects his penchant for mysticism and spiritual rapture. Little satisfied with mundane reality and the development of society, he found himself peculiarly attracted to poems which exalted the night and her mysteries, e.g. Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht and Hölderlin’s Die Nacht; or which give an impression of the evening mood in which passion and grief are stilled and inner peace enters, e.g. Nietzsche’s Im grossen Schweigen and Baudelaire’s Recueillement. The melancholy of Verlaine and Caroline von Günderode is strikingly reproduced by Diepenbrock, but humour and brilliance, for instance in the overture to The Birds, are also displayed in his music. Various works show, too, a close attachment to historical Amsterdam (Gijsbrecht van Aemstel).

Diepenbrock’s music is both passionate and sensitive, without falling into the excesses of late Romanticism. Most of his compositions end just as gently and modestly as they begin, with few major dynamic contrasts between, and a subtle andante tempo, which requires a flexible rubato on the part of the performer, predominating. Two elements are significant in his early works: the vocal polyphony of the Palestrina style and the chromatic harmony of Wagner. The quotation of the Tristan chord at the beginning of Mignon is one indication of the Wagnerian intoxication which Diepenbrock experienced as a young artist. In many early song accompaniments, the consistent four-voiced textures are also striking, perhaps related to Diepenbrock’s love of Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Clavier. During the course of the 1890s Diepenbrock’s personal style developed, a characteristic feature being the construction of the melodies which could be considered ‘Mediterranean’ in their southern cantabile and natural diction. The predominance of seconds ensures a flowing line, and the continual alternation between quavers and triplets provides a rhythmic flexibility tailored as much to the rhythm of the sentences as to the meaning of the words. Previous Wagnerian turns of phrase in the melody gradually disappeared, as did the ornateness of the harmony, while modality came to play a significant role. However, the independent voice-leading, resulting in true polymelody, remained.

About 1910, as a result of extensive study of the works of Debussy (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Pelléas et Mélisande in particular), a clear stylistic change occurred. In Die Nacht for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (1910–11), Diepenbrock achieved in masterly fashion his aim of transparency, which was coupled with greater differentiation of orchestral colour. This work belongs to his ‘symphonic songs’, which differ substantially from the orchestrated piano songs in that it is the orchestra — in particular in the extensive, purely instrumentay preludes, interludes and postludes — which carries in sound most of the text’s psychological and emotional weight. Diepenbrock had already tested this innovative musical form in the two Hymnen an die Nacht of 1899, thus anticipating the comparable conception of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

With the sombre, doom-laden music which he wrote for the classical drama Electra (1919–20) Diepenbrock added an extra colour to his palette at the end of his life.

(Copyright © Ton Braas — Published with permission on the Classical Composers Database.)