Editing Karl Amadeus Hartmann (section)

==Output and style==
Hartmann completed a number of works, most notably eight symphonies. The first of these, and perhaps emblematic of the difficult genesis of many of his works, is Symphony No. 1, ''Essay for a Requiem'' (''Versuch eines Requiems''). It began in 1936 as a [[cantata]] for alto solo and orchestra loosely based on a few poems by [[Walt Whitman]]. It soon became known as ''Our Life: Symphonic Fragment'' (''Unser Leben: Symphonisches Fragment'') and was intended as a comment on the generally miserable conditions for artists and liberal-minded people under the early Nazi regime. After the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II, the regime's real victims had become clear, and the cantata's title was changed to ''Symphonic Fragment: Attempt at a Requiem'' to honor the millions killed in the [[Holocaust]]. Hartmann revised the work in 1954–55 as his Symphony No. 1, and published it in 1956. As this example indicates, he was a highly self-critical composer and many of his works went through successive stages of revision. He also suppressed most of his substantial orchestral works of the late 1930s and the war years, either allowing them to remain unpublished or, in several cases, reworking them – or portions of them – into the series of numbered symphonies that he produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Perhaps the most frequently performed of his symphonies are No. 4, for strings, and No. 6; probably his most widely known work, through performances and recordings, is his [[Concerto funebre]] for violin and strings, composed at the beginning of World War II and making use of a [[Hussite]] chorale and a Russian revolutionary song of 1905.

Hartmann attempted a synthesis of many different idioms, including [[Expressionist music|musical expressionism]] and [[jazz]] stylization, into organic symphonic forms in the tradition of [[Bruckner]] and [[Mahler]]. His early works are both satirical and politically engaged. But he admired the polyphonic mastery of [[Johann Sebastian Bach|J.S. Bach]], the profound expressive irony of Mahler, and the [[Neoclassicism (music)|neoclassicism]] of [[Igor Stravinsky]] and [[Paul Hindemith]]. In the 1930s he developed close ties with [[Béla Bartók]] and [[Zoltán Kodály]] in [[Hungary]], and this is reflected in his music to some extent. In the 1940s, he began to take an interest in Schoenbergian [[twelve-tone technique]]; though he studied with Webern his own idiom was closer to [[Alban Berg]]. In the 1950s, Hartmann started to explore the metrical techniques pioneered by [[Boris Blacher]] and [[Elliott Carter]]. Among his most-used forms are three-part [[Tempo#Basic tempo markings|adagio]] slow movements, [[fugue]]s, variations and [[toccata]]s.