Thomas de Hartmann

“Without inner growth, there is no life for me”: Discovering Thomas de Hartmann, by Harlow Robinson

Thomas de Hartmann (1885-1956) is one of those composers who for many years fell between the cracks. A visionary multimedia artist, he spent much of his adult life searching for a safe spiritual and creative home. Repeatedly uprooted by revolution and war, he wandered far beyond his birthplace in Ukraine through Russia, the Caucasus, Turkey, Germany, France, and finally the United States. Most often, he was following a succession of impressive mentors that included artist Wassily Kandinsky, guru Georgi Gurdjieff, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 

De Hartmann’s alternative and nomadic existence (a hippie before his time) surely helps to explain why his large body of well-crafted music remained little known and rarely performed. But due to the efforts of the Thomas de Hartmann Project, founded in 2006 “to reclaim de Hartmann’s legacy and rightful place in the musical world,” that situation has fortunately been changing in recent years. Their work has inspired numerous prominent musicians, including violinist Joshua Bell, to rediscover—or rather discover—de Hartmann’s impressive and accessible music.

The recent campaign has included a concerted attempt to identify him as a “Ukrainian composer.” True, he was born in 1884 in the village of Khoruzhivka on the territory of present-day Ukraine, when Ukraine was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. But his parents (Alexander Fomich de Hartmann and Olga Alexandrovna de Hartmann, née de Kross) were both Russian-speaking aristocrats of German descent. Thomas (in Russian he was known as Foma Aleksandrovich Gartman) left for St. Petersburg at the age of 10 and never returned to live in Ukraine. He received nearly all his formal education in Russia. In this regard he was no more “Ukrainian” than Sergei Prokofiev, who was born in Ukraine to Russian parents six years after de Hartmann, and also studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. 

But like Prokofiev, de Hartmann did retain a keen fondness and nostalgia for his happy Ukrainian childhood. Musical echoes of those formative years resound with intense bittersweet nostalgia in several works, most notably the Violin Concerto, composed in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France and inspired by the devastation of Ukraine at the time. Sadly, Khoruzhivka is again today near the front lines of war, situated in northeastern Ukraine’s Sumy region, which has recently come under fierce attack from Russian forces. 

De Hartmann’s early life on his family’s estate in Khoruzhivka was idyllic and privileged. He loved fairy tales and showed precocious musical talent at a very early age. After his father’s death, he was sent to military academy in St. Petersburg, where the director recognized his gifts and arranged for him to begin study in music. Soon after, he was accepted as a student by the renowned composer Anton Arensky. Later he studied counterpoint with Sergei Taneyev, composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and piano with the legendary Anna Espiova-Leschetizky at the St. Petersburg Imperial Conservatory, graduating with an artist’s diploma in 1904.

Like Stravinsky and Prokofiev, de Hartmann was drawn to the ballet, then at its height in Russia. His 1906 La Fleurette rouge took the stage in St. Petersburg and Moscow, starring Vaclav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, and Michel Fokine. Having been excused from further military service at the personal order of Tsar Nicholas II, de Hartmann soon after left for Munich. 

There, he became infatuated with the world of visual art, forming a close association with the abstract Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who was exploring (like composer Alexander Scriabin) the connection between color and sound. Munich’s avant-garde atmosphere was a revelation to de Hartmann, who wrote, “To my great surprise, I began to realize that all that had attracted me in my youth, all that I had dearly loved in music, no longer satisfied me and was, so to say, outdated.”

For the next few years, de Hartmann collaborated with Kandinsky and others on various multimedia projects, including an ambitious opera joining choreography, music, and lighting called Der gelbe Klang. Due to the unusual production demands—and the outbreak of World War I—it was never produced, like many of de Hartmann’s theatrical projects. In an article entitled “On Anarchy in Music” published in 1912, de Hartmann expressed his new aesthetic credo: “In all the arts, and especially in music, every means that arises from an inner necessity is right…the correspondence of the means of expression with inner necessity is the essence of beauty in a work.”

With his wife Olga Arkadevna Schumacher, whom he had married in 1906 and who became his lifelong companion and amanuensis, de Hartman returned to St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) to rejoin his regiment for World War I. He managed to avoid combat, continued his creative work arranging concerts for the Imperial Russian Musical Society, and completed a marionette opera. In a diary entry from October 3, 1914, Sergei Prokofiev mentions that he often saw de Hartmann at concerts around the city.

In 1916, de Hartmann met a man in a dive cafe who would change the course of his life. 

Born in Armenia when it was part of the Russian Empire of a Greek father and an Armenian mother, Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1872-1949) was a charismatic philosopher, mystic, and composer. He led a spiritual movement called the “Fourth Way” that promised followers they could gain an immortal soul through a program of spiritual work, including “sacred gymnastics” set to music. Thomas and Olga fell completely under Gurdjieff’s Rasputin-like spell.

“After this meeting, my life became a sort of fairy tale,” wrote Thomas. “It became clear to me that to be able to develop in my creative work, something was necessary—something greater or higher that I could not name. Only if I possessed this “something” would I be able to progress further and hope to have any real satisfaction from my own creation.” 

Olga wrote that “Mr. Gurdjieff was an unknown person, a mystery. Nobody knew about his teaching, nobody knew his origin…but whoever came into contact with him wished to follow him.” For the next twelve years, the de Hartmanns devoted themselves completely to Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, joining his cult-like entourage as it moved from the Caucasus on to Constantinople, Berlin, and finally to France. Thomas served as an accompanist for Gurdjieff’s musical exercises, and composed 300 piano works with him intended for listening and meditation. 

Having fled Russia soon after the 1917 revolutions, Thomas and Olga never returned to live there. In 1922, they settled with Gurdjieff at an estate in Fontainebleau, France. Their close relationship lasted until 1929, when the volatile Gurdjieff abruptly expelled his oldest students from the fold. So the de Hartmanns moved again, to the small town of Garches outside Paris. Short of money, de Hartmann in the 1930s wrote more than 50 film scores under the pseudonym Thomas Kross and resumed his interrupted composing career with support from Kandinsky and cellist Pablo Casals.

The Nazi invasion of France again forced the de Hartmanns from their home. They took refuge in an abandoned building in the town of Courbevoie that happened to have a working piano. During this productive period de Hartmann completed a number of new works, including the Violin Concerto. After the War, he had one of his most sustained periods of composition, and his music was frequently performed in concerts and on the radio in France. 

Although the de Hartmanns had been living apart from Gurdjieff, they continued to follow and support his teachings. After Gurdjieff died in 1949, they made the decision to move to America to propagate his work. They lived in New York, but also came to know architect and Gurdjieff disciple Frank Lloyd Wright, who invited Thomas to his architectural commune Taliesin West in Arizona to give lectures on the interconnections among the arts. Occasional concerts of de Hartmann’s music took place in North America, but he remained little-known to the wider musical public.

A major concert of his work was scheduled at New York’s Town Hall for April 15, 1956. De Hartmann died of a heart attack two weeks before. His students held the event anyway. 

This seemed an oddly symbolic end to his career, overshadowed by unfortunate timing, a peripatetic lifestyle, and his personal inclination to subjugate his talent to charismatic mentors. Given the often challenging circumstances of his life, and the vagaries of his fascinating personality, de Hartmann’s varied, original and deeply spiritual body of work—symphonies, operas, ballets, concertos, sonatas, songs and film scores—seems all the more impressive, and richly deserving of rediscovery.

Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography, and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. He has contributed essays and reviews to The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Classical Voice, Symphony, Musical America, and Opera News, and program essays to the Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Aspen Music Festival, and Metropolitan Opera.