Authors: Michael Haas
In 1938, with more than a hint of nostalgia, Schoenberg wrote the following recommendation of Weigl, who had been forced, like Schoenberg, to flee his homeland: ‘I know Dr Weigl since more than forty years, when we both were quite young. He was at this time studying with Alexander Zemlinsky and graduated both in piano and composition at the renown [
sic
] Vienna Conservatory. I always considered him as one of the best composers of this older generation, one of those who continued the dignified Viennese tradition of the Porporas, Fuxes, Albrechtsbergers and Sechters. He truly preserves this old culture of a musical spirit which is one of the best parts of Viennese culture.‘
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Franz Schreker
Today, revivals of Schreker's music have started to fill out our knowledge of a composer who was marginalised for too long. As his biographer Christopher Hailey points out, the postwar declaration by musical modernists that it was music's destiny to move away from tonality overshadowed alternative views that music was capable of moving forward by other means. Schoenberg's forebodings created such a sense of radical departure that other developments found themselves eclipsed. Schoenberg prophesied a murderous age – as such he was hailed as a musical Messiah: in effect, the messenger became the message. Anyone who represented an alternative aesthetic was seen as detracting from Schoenbergian truth and was, in effect, representing a false gospel.
Judging from the statements of fellow musicians, Schreker must have been a perplexing and infuriating man. Very few of the composers and performers who moved in Vienna and Berlin's progressive musical circles have a good word to say about him. The memoirs of Ernst Krenek, Artur Schnabel, Bruno
Walter and Carl Flesch dismiss him either as a joke or as a nostalgic musical dinosaur; yet the remorseless denunciation of such a major figure demands closer inspection. Reminiscences written long after Schreker's untimely death in 1934 (aged 55) must be viewed in the context of postwar cultural politics. Schreker was, by all accounts, an easy target. From his correspondence, we sense a man who is trustingly naïve and clearly eager to please. He belied the stereotype of the tortured genius and was benevolent and generous to students and colleagues. To some, he appeared ingratiating. One of his star pupils, Ernst Krenek, writes that he was reminded on first meeting him of a suburban Jewish photographer and was surprised to discover ‘that this was in fact what Schreker's father had been’.
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As a budding young composer, Schreker dropped the ‘c’, presumably to avoid the easy critical target of being dismissed as ‘schrecklich’ (‘dreadful’). It was probably a wise move, though the inverse was no great help to the composer Franz Gut (‘Good’), mentioned above. However, only when he developed an infatuation with the attractive Jewish socialite Grete Jonasz did he admit in a letter to her in 1907 that he in fact was half Jewish himself, thus deflecting her accusations of anti-Semitism. Krenek disliked his overbearing friendliness, his unctuous manner and, in short, everything about him that he considered ‘typically Jewish’.
Most of all, however, Schreker's detractors resented his success. Given his professional and personal closeness to Schoenberg, this was perceived by Schoenberg's followers as near treachery. Indeed, Schreker enjoyed the kind of popular recognition that Schoenberg could only dream of, and, to make matters worse, it was thanks to his continued use of a musical language that Schoenberg had abandoned for ethical and artistic reasons. The lifelong mutual admiration of Schreker and Schoenberg is well documented, but Schreker's early death and Schoenberg's eventual stylistic victory left Schreker, one of the most significant figures in early twentieth-century music, forgotten by history.
Reading the reviews by Hanslick and Korngold, it is easy to sense the despair of young artists in Vienna over the city's unwillingness to provide a worthy forum for discussing their work. In his dismissive review of Schreker's opera
Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin
from 18 March 1913, Korngold actually offers a rather acute description of Schreker the composer. As is often the case when re-reading reviews by both critics, we discover that the very characteristics that are now recognised as a composer's unique musical voice were precisely the points that came in for the harshest criticism. It could be argued that Schreker set himself up for a fall by writing, as always, his own libretto for
Das Spielwerk
. Pot-shots abound in Korngold's withering critique of an opera he feels is far too close to Gerhard Hauptmann's play
Und Pippa Tanzt!
Korngold writes:
It is difficult to understand Schreker the musician without taking a look at his development as a composer. Schreker started off tame – indeed, tamer than tame. His choral and orchestral compositions kept to the models of old masters and travelled the well-worn paths of worthy mediocrity. Any individuality or even an unexpected youthful indiscretion was as inconceivable as any possible element of surprise that might have slipped in – even in the unlikely event that such a surprise might have been a prickly one. But one day, he suddenly decided that prickly surprises and indiscretions were perhaps not such a bad thing after all and he became a
Modernist
, he ‘
secessionised
’ himself; did things ‘differently’, especially in that particular area where mixing and matching musical effects can be placed snuggly against inspiration: creating new musical-sounds. New harmonies and colouristic developments are of course all the rage today; an entire generation of modern composers reach out for new sounds that are, no matter how one looks at such things, only deliberate chord-bending achieved with orchestral experimentation. This being the case, we suddenly find Schreker along with the rest in curious pursuit of as many new sounds as can be worked into his songs and orchestral compositions. It is no coincidence that the title of his first opera is taken from the ideal of the hero-musician […] in search of
A Distant Sound
[
Der ferne Klang
]. All of the strange noises in this opera, in common with [
Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin
] seem not so ‘distant’ if one starts to peer at the composer's obvious models. The mixture of reality and fantasy-Romanticism in
Der ferne Klang
is also found in Charpentier's
Louise
, in which we already encountered the idea that from the noise of daily life, the confusing cacophony of the big city, it is possible to construct a sound-kaleidoscope: [Schreker extracts] noises from the formless, driven to the limits until something similar to music is squeezed out. […] Beyond the obvious Charpentier influence, one finds also the Impressionism of Debussy and Delius; yes, and even the introduction of futuristic principals that dare to offer up a heterophony of shrill, loud, simultaneous and disparate noises, sounds and sequences. Schreker has plunged his hands deep into the modernist filing cabinet and offers up the music of ‘Angst’, the subconscious, while digging into the deeper layers of neurosis in common with
Salome, Elektra
or Mahler's works or Pfitzner's
Rose vom Liebesgarten
, but above all in Dukas's
Ariane et Barbe-bleue
. Indeed, it is the Dukas work, much too little known in Germany and Austria, that holds the most perfect representation of this mysterious ‘Sound-Music’ that the composer of
Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin
seems to love so much.
In addition, we find a bit of not very impressionistic post-Wagnerian phraseology und leitmotifs such as the use of spoken-song. With the above
account, one basically has the elements of Schreker's operatic language rolled up together: style is less important than the creation of something new. The motivic and melodic substance – we wish to say this very clearly – is sparse, with the few promising plastic motifs only lasting over the course of a few bars. All emphasis is placed on the harmonies and orchestral weaving of voices […] passages of sheer beauty, which naturally we were delighted to encounter, are less frequent than the kaleidoscopic secessionist noise-confusion of piercing, shrieking sounds that remind one of seeing a painting that has had the subject removed and is left only with its colours on display.
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Wellesz is far more generous towards Schreker, whom he recalls meeting during a visit at Schoenberg's home in 1908. He recounts Schreker's successes and his early dance works for the Wiesenthal sisters (Grete, Bertha and Else), who brought ‘Ausdruckstanz’ in the manner of Isadora Duncan to Vienna. Grete and Else had made a name for themselves in performances of Gluck's
Iphigenie auf Aulis
under Mahler and his designer Alfred Roller in 1907. Their collaboration with Schreker on
Der Geburtstag der Infantin
,
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a ‘dance-pantomime’ based on Oscar Wilde, was conceived for Klimt's 1908 Kunstschau (Art Show), an event mounted as part of the celebrations for the diamond jubilee of the Emperor Franz Joseph. Wellesz called the Kunstschau a ‘secession from the Secessionists’, referring to the group of younger artists who joined Klimt and Carl Moll in leaving the Secession in 1905.
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Wellesz goes on to give an appreciative description of Schreker, though he takes a jab at the self-written libretti. He recounts that the first thing he noticed when presented with a vocal score of Schreker's opera
Der ferne Klang
in 1911 was that Alban Berg had made the piano reduction.
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Wellesz goes on to write: ‘Today, I'm of the opinion that much of the material from
Wozzeck
and
Lulu
can be explained by [Berg's] intensive work with Schreker's music, indeed it was his work on this extraordinarily passionate opera [
Der ferne Klang
] with its orgiastic climaxes in the second act that preconditioned much of
Lulu
and determined the ultimate formation of Berg as a composer with dramatic genius.‘
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Wellesz goes on to describe Schreker's creation of the Vienna Philharmonic Chorus and his conducting of Schoenberg's
Gurrelieder
in 1913, mentioning that Berg had been commissioned to prepare the piano reduction for this work as well. Wellesz recalls Schoenberg telling him that, with
Wozzeck
, Berg had created something that he himself was ill-equipped for: composing an opera.
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By putting this comment in his chapter on Schreker, Wellesz implies an acknowledgment by Schoenberg of Schreker's influence on Berg.
Wellesz singles out Schreker's
Die Gezeichneten
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as his greatest achievement, with its dramatic power and brilliant orchestration. Composed in 1913–15, it demonstrated that the diatonic language Schoenberg believed to be exhausted could be given an impressive new lease of life by Schreker. However, to most of the earnest young revolutionaries who followed Schoenberg, Schreker seemed a good-natured buffoon and an easy target, despite Schoenberg's enduring respect for him. But like Wagner before him, Schoenberg could not control the damage that his disciples might inflict.
It's easy to sense Wellesz's slight discomfort in defending a composer who would be so reviled by the Nazis and then by his own former colleagues and pupils. It is fascinating to read how the Nazi definition of Schreker as ‘the Magnus Hirschfeld of Music for whom no sexual perversion could not be set to music‘
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chimes with the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who referred to Schreker as a musical pornographer.
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Adorno's extensive essay on Schreker in
Quasi una fantasia
(1963) recalls Julius Korngold in elaborating the very elements of Schreker's originality in order to denigrate him. Yet
Quasi una fantasia
remains one of the most revealing of all postwar essays on Schreker, as Adorno's ultimate condemnation follows a fair analysis which underlines Schreker's influence within the Schoenberg circle. Adorno even praises such works as Schreker's
Chamber Symphony
and the prelude to
Die Gezeichneten
. It is in his magisterial but malevolent summary of Schreker as a composer of music ‘still stuck in puberty’ where Adorno succeeds in perpetuating the Nazi denigration of this scintillating musical personality.
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What Schoenberg's young revolutionaries could not know was that the apocalypse had not been fulfilled by the collapse of Europe's decrepit old order in 1918. ‘The war to end all wars’ was followed by what General Foch called ‘an armistice of twenty years’. The earthquake of World War I would be followed by Hitler's equally destructive tsunami. The cautious mood at the end of the war in 1918 would start to produce new creative drives towards what a younger generation hoped might become a musical utopia that would rise from the ashes of the old-world order. But the ‘twenty-year armistice’ was frequently jolted by aftershocks. The epicentre of this ‘Dance on the Volcano’ was no longer post-imperial Vienna, but dynamic and
modern
Berlin.
How much must Austrian tedium weigh for Austria itself to emigrate! Can the body survive if its blood is simply rechanneled? […] That the Danube now flows via Passau towards Berlin and spills into the North Sea is a situation that must be of no small concern to the Danube itself.
Wie groß muß der Überdruß am Österreichischen sein, wenn auch schon Österreich auswandert! Lebt der Körper noch, der die Umzapfung seines Blutes klaglos erträgt? [….] Daß die Donau jetzt über Passau nach Berlin fließt und in die Nordsee mündet, ist eine Angelegenheit, die der Donau nahegehen müßte.
Karl Kraus,
The Wall of China
, 1910, republished 1918
World War I
In 1900, Germany, the United States and Austria-Hungary had populations of around 40 million each. By 1919, Austria was reduced to just 6,420,000, including hundreds of thousands of immigrants from former Habsburg territories who flooded into the remaining ‘rump-state’ of Austria. This now consisted of Vienna – the sixth largest city in the world as recently as 1910
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– a few German-speaking holdings, and a narrow neck of mountains running to Switzerland which prevented Germany from having a border with Italy. The disappearance of the Austrian Empire as a geographical entity was unprecedented in modern European history, with the possible exception of the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The removal of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary from the European map left the imperial capital of Vienna and a staggeringly well-equipped civil service with no empire to run. Worse still, the assassination of the heir to the throne at Sarajevo, which triggered the
war, was an act of such audacity that the Habsburgs were seen by nearly everyone as being justified in declaring war on the terrorists’ training ground of Serbia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated at the end of June 1914, but already by 21 July newspaper articles were asking how to prevent an impending ‘World War’, clearly seeing the dangers of an entirely new type of conflict.
2
The satirist Karl Kraus, upon hearing the news of Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo, speculated that Austria-Hungary had become the ‘testing-station for the Apocalypse’.
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