Authors: Michael Haas
Hanslick's review of
Merlin
is equally revealing as he compares it with
Königin von Saba
. He is not impressed by Siegfried von Lipiner's text (credited to ‘Lipiner von Immermann’), and believes that it tends to undermine the opera:
In
Merlin
we encounter, without any shadow of doubt, the composer of
Die Königin von Saba
but discover that his strengths have grown and become clearer. We are particularly delighted to notice the absence of the determining feature of
Die Königin von Saba
, which was its fussy Jewish wailing which frankly threatened to derail this otherwise beautiful work. Nevertheless, the story of
Die Königin von Saba
at least justified the Oriental colouring without making it any more agreeable to listen to. But
could one conceivably claim that this original feature was perhaps more characteristically ‘goldmarkian’ than what we have with
Merlin
? It would be possible to presume so and not without reason: the colourful embers of the Orient, with its restless heaviness and exalted religiosity, were not so much a unique characteristic of
Die Königin von Saba
as they were of its composer who grew up exposed to double doses of Orientalism, namely the Jewish and Hungarian varieties! Our slight preference for
Merlin
, however, does not counter the fact that
Die Königin von Saba
in its second finale reaches a climax […] that offers no equivalent in effectiveness in
Merlin
.
For all of the musical independence that Goldmark has now acquired, it's apparent that in
Merlin
he still stands under the influence of Meyerbeer and even more obviously, Wagner. […] His musical expression is impregnated with Wagnerian essences, though Goldmark captures different perfumes from the ones that have been floating about for the last 30 years. Occasionally, though, he inhales too deeply. King Arthur reminds one with his spongy sentimentality of König Heinrich and the Landgraf Hermann. […] The love-duet is inconceivable without the templates of
Lohengrin
and
Tristan
. One is further reminded of Wagner with his unnatural emphasis on the dramatic, the restless chromatic breaks, and the flooding enharmonic modulations. … Yet the means by which the work is composed is quite different from Wagner. With Goldmark, the sung melody remains at the centre, despite the fact that it doesn't exactly flow in generous quantities, but at least it isn't allowed to dry into stammering declamation, which swings back and forth over a melody being spun out endlessly in the orchestra. Where there is need of a lyrical oasis, Goldmark places these within the architectural forms which became the jewels of opera in the days before Wagner: choruses with knights and elves and women; even strophic songs, marches, and a well-organised ballet are offered.
49
Mahler's admiration for Goldmark becomes understandable. Siegfried von Lipiner, librettist for
Merlin
, was a friend from pre-Alma days, and Goldmark's self-confidence as a Jew would have spoken deeply to Mahler's own creative spirit, as we shall see in the following chapter. He went on to conduct three of Goldmark's operas:
Das Heimchen am Herd
(1896),
Die Kriegsgefangene
(1899) and a new production of
Königin von Saba
. Indeed, Goldmark stayed as a regular feature of Vienna's opera season until Hitler's German henchmen persuaded compliant Austrians to have him removed two years before the Anschluss.
Brahms's death is chronicled by Hanslick, not by an obituary, but by an hour-by-hour account of his last days. A typically Hanslickian touch is recalling Brahms's last visit to a Philharmonic concert in which they performed his Fourth Symphony: ‘The maestro, though ill, was brought from the back of his box at the end of each movement by stormy applause […] and this despite the fact that the E minor symphony is not his most popular – with its utter lack of charm, it never will be.’ It would be another two months before Hanslick could bring himself to write another article for the
Neue Freie Presse
. His reappearance as feuilletonist would consist of thirteen pages of memories and letters devoted to Brahms.
50
Ultimately, Brahms represented the artistic expression of Liberalism, a political environment that would soon produce Jewish composers who were no longer cautiously moving into the glare of daylight, as chronicled by Hanslick, but basking in dazzling brightness. What remained from the years of Liberalism and Brahms's support was the belief in the aesthetic purity of music as part of German cultural identity. The younger generation of Jewish composers from the early twentieth century no longer felt Hanslick's conflicts. Indeed, as Julius Korngold, Hanslick's successor at the
Neue Freie Presse
and a notorious antagonist of atonal music, makes clear at the Hanslick centenary celebrations at the International Society for Contemporary Music in Venice in 1925:
The tonality traitors know well why they're against expression. They have to make a virtue out of necessity. Atonal cacophony negates sensual, melodic, emotional sensibility. We read in Alfred Einstein's
Dictionary of Modern Music
that ‘The atonal melody is fundamentally a purely mechanical product and presents us with a
contradictio in adjecto
– an absurdity, since the comprehending spirit is incapable of finding any coherent relationship between the individual notes. One cannot write music based purely on a negative principal.’ Hence the flight into linear contrapuntal writing that
lucus a non lucendo
– cannot be correctly voiced – causing a flight from all relationships into the tonality death-zone: the Twelve-Tone Row; this in turn results in objective, soulless attempts at messing about with material; the psychological effects of pitch and tone themselves being raised as the postulate of ‘new music’. And on whom do they so desperately call as their spiritual God-father? One hardly can credit it: Eduard Hanslick! This is because the composers of the younger generation, even the ones who still compose tonal music, have taken up Hanslick's arguments against Wagner and attempt to find in them their own aesthetic justification.
51
In his memoirs, Julius Korngold sees Hanslick's aesthetic battles in the more measured tones of his own youthful development: ‘It was not a question of Brahms or Wagner, but rather, Brahms
and
Wagner.‘
52
They evolved an amalgam of values in which both the purity of art and the purity of German musical traditions merged. Few would wish to stray from these particular absolutes, which most, including Schoenberg, felt to be immutable.
Mahler's Jewishness is not to be found within his use of the folkloristic, but rather expresses itself through all conduits as cerebral and restrained, while ultimately remaining tangible in its entirety.
Was jüdisch ist an Mahler, partizipiert nicht unmittelbar an Volkstümlichem, sondern spricht durch alle Vermittlungen hindurch als ein Geistiges, Unsinnliches, gleichwohl an der Totalität Fühlbares sich aus.
Theodor Adorno,
Der lange Blick
, 1963
It is a historic coincidence that Mahler should arrive at the Imperial Opera in Vienna in the same year that Brahms died. The significance of this intersection of musical biographies is highlighted by a lecture and interview given by the Anglo-Austrian composer and musicologist Egon Wellesz. Recordings of the lecture and interview reveal that they were given at two different times and in two different languages: German and English. The English interview is from a 1962 BBC broadcast with Deryck Cooke and comes from Wellesz's period as lecturer (retired) at Lincoln College, Oxford, a position he took up after fleeing Austria in 1938. The German lecture comes from the 100th anniversary of Mahler's birth given at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1960. Both deal with musical life in fin de siècle Vienna. In the English interview, Wellesz mentions the crucial figure that conditioned musical life as Johannes Brahms, whereas in the German lecture, it's Gustav Mahler.
1
Mahler was the musical personality who would provide hundreds of twentieth-century Jewish composers – whether religious or not – with the means to do more than just assimilate into Austro-German musical life. He broke down the barriers that subsequently allowed younger Jewish composers
to surge forward with their own ideas and agendas. They no longer had to accept the conditions tacitly demanded by the unwelcoming environment of the nineteenth century. By the time of his death in 1911, Mahler had demonstrated that he, as a Jewish composer, had not only broken with previous conventions, but had, with his highly individual approach to the Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition, placed himself in the pantheon of German Masters, uniting the disparate ‘old’ and ‘new’ German schools. The significance of this is summarised by the Jewish critic and writer Adolf Weissmann: ‘Mahler lived from the very beginning in a state of high-voltage creativity, though it was racially coloured: he was born a Jew, but as one of the most noble of his race he was elevated to sainthood.‘
2
In Arnold Schoenberg's lecture on Mahler from 1912 (which Dika Newlin translated into English in the early 1940s), he writes: ‘I believe firmly and steadfastly that Gustav Mahler was one of the great men and artists. For there are only two possibilities of convincing someone of an artist's greatness: the first and better way is to perform his work; the second, which I am forced to use, is to transmit my belief in this work to others.‘
3
Schoenberg then proceeds to counter much of the anti-Semitic criticism of Mahler without once referring to the fact that Mahler was Jewish. Schoenberg's translation would have come from a period when he was more than ever aware of his own Jewishness, but this is not allowed to intrude on his original lecture from 1912, in which he takes issue with the usually unspoken but implied anti-Semitic charges of Mahler's banality, emptiness and sentimentality, or his ‘lack of inventiveness’.
4
In 1912, Schoenberg did not need to use the word ‘Jewish’ to make his position clear.
Jewish Vienna at the Time of Mahler
By 1897, Mahler's call to the Imperial Opera in Vienna may have required him to convert to Catholicism, but by this time, anti-Semitism was less the domain of the aristocrats making the appointment than of the aspiring non-Jewish middle classes. Indeed, Karl Goldmark was already an established grandee by this time and is likely to have been involved in discussions with Chancellery Director Eduard Wlassack, who was responsible for Mahler's appointment.
By the turn of the century, the scene was firmly set. Assimilation had guaranteed a wealthy, culturally hungry Jewish bourgeoisie that enriched Viennese life not only by supporting local musical life, but also by commissioning paintings from Klimt's Secessionists and filling their homes with objects designed by Joseph Hoffmann's handicraft counterpart, the Wiener Werkstätte.
Their cultural forum became the quintessentially Jewish phenomenon of the ‘Salon’, with its origins in the early nineteenth century when wealthy Jews reacted to their exclusion from aristocratic houses by holding alternative ‘courts’, reserved for the intellectual aristocracy of artists, writers and anyone who was stimulating and open to intelligent debate and conversation.
Berta Zuckerkandl was the most prominent of Vienna's many salonnières, and it was her close relationship to Klimt and his relationship to the artist Carl Moll – step-father of Alma Schindler – which eventually resulted in Gustav Mahler meeting his future wife at one of Zuckerkandl's weekly ‘at homes’. The visual arts were one of the few cultural fields that allowed social interaction between Jews and non-Jews. Almost all of the important Viennese artists from the end of the nineteenth century were not Jewish, whereas most of their patrons and supporters were. Berta Zuckerkandl, in addition to being one of Vienna's best-known hostesses, was also a prominent art critic and journalist. It was in her salon that the Secessionist movement was founded, as indeed, she would later be midwife to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt's idea of a performing arts festival in Salzburg. Alma Schindler's immediate family was notoriously fraught with contradictions regarding the Jews and non-Jews within the Zuckerkandl circle. Alma was an unreformed anti-Semite who seemed to display a near fetish-like preference for Jewish men, while her step-father Carl Moll, whose gallery and patrons were nearly all Jewish, would become a passionate follower of National Socialism and committed suicide in 1945 when it became apparent that Hitler would not triumph.
The result of bourgeois Jewish enthusiasm for the arts was that wealthy non-Jews appeared to lose interest, meaning that cultural events nearly ceased being the common meeting ground between well-off Jews and non-Jews. Alma Mahler, in her journals, hints at the distaste felt by non-Jewish Viennese towards the city's Jewish public by describing important premieres and openings disparagingly as having ‘all of Israel in attendance’, an expression that is repeated word-for-word by other chroniclers of the time.
5
No matter how wealthy and important they were, Jews would discover that even conversion to Christianity was not sufficient to offer easy entrance into mainstream society. The journals kept by the daughters of the wealthy Viennese Gallia family, patrons of the Secessionists and of the architect Josef Hoffmann as well as commissioners of one of Klimt's best portraits, indicate how rarely members of even the minor aristocracy moved within their circles. Former Jews whose parents or even grandparents had converted (as in the case with the Gallias) appeared unable to move outside the circles of other wealthy converts and Jewish professionals, academics and industrialists.
6
It was therefore no surprise that Jews and former Jews were bound by circumstance to keep to their own clubs, cafés and circles. The limitations imposed by Viennese society were more than compensated for by their presence within the media: newspapers from across the political spectrum such as
Das neue Wiener Tagblatt
,
Die Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung
and
Die Arbeiter Zeitung
were all Jewish-owned and run. But as we have already seen, it was the powerful
Neue Freie Presse
that ultimately dominated. It represented a paper with balanced, objective and fair reportage that was produced, published and largely written by secular Jews and read by nearly everyone within the educated classes and the highest reaches of government. The
Neue Freie Presse
predictably became a target not only for anti-Semites, but also for ultra-conservatives on the right and for Social Democrats and Communists on the left. It was respectful of the monarchy, but unsentimental as soon as it was replaced by a republic. During the years that Theodor Herzl was editor of its cultural pages, it never once allowed any coverage of Zionism. With Julius Korngold its primary music critic from 1904, it became Mahler's most important supporter and the voice of a younger, self-confident, Jewish musical élite.