Authors: Michael Haas
Pfitzner would appear to speak to a small group which had preserved the instinct to recognise melodic quality – a group of which Berg happily counted himself a member. Pfitzner is quoted as making the ‘German demand’ which he sets forth as: ‘Those of us who still have this sense of quality must be brave enough to romanticise!‘
15
Berg responds:
For my own part, I'll choose to leave the romanticising to that much larger group from whom the sense of melody has not yet been driven. Instead, I'll preserve my own, if not nobler, at least more objective relationship with music. In any case, I suddenly realised that the tiny group he believed he was addressing may not be that tiny after all. He addresses this question of innate musical quality by picking up that most difficult of nuts to crack, Schumann's ‘Träumerei’ from his
Scenes from Childhood
… a work that to my knowledge, even during Schumann's lifetime, was in no particular [aesthetic] danger.
Berg then turns his attention to some of the most fatuous of Pfitzner's generalisations regarding the intrinsic perfection of
Träumerei
and deconstructs them bar by bar. Berg is annoyed that Pfitzner's attack on modern music is vague and offers no concrete examples. He provides counter-evidence of innate melodic quality in contemporary music by proffering ‘Ach Knabe, du mußt nicht traurig sein’, taken from Mahler's Wunderhorn song,
Der Schildwache Nachtlied
. For good measure, he throws in the second subject of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony as an alternative example.
16
Julius Korngold finds much to agree with in Pfitzner's essay and would certainly have welcomed any attack on Bekker (the only major critic who would disparage Erich Korngold's opera
Die tote Stadt
later in 1920). But his brief summary is revealing:
Readers who know our point of view in such questions will find immediate conviction in a polemic that Hans Pfitzner has recently published entitled
The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence: A Sign of Decay?
Pfitzner, in response to what he sees as a dubious understanding of Beethoven, peevishly
defends the uniquely and specifically musical. Nothing that Hanslick would have said could have been more clearly stated. The determining factor for Pfitzner is musical ‘potency’, which is the result of the imagination and expressed in individual thematic and melodic creativity. Like a high-strung fighting-rooster with his cocks-comb inflated to full fury, he attacks any and all who dispute this perspective. He's savage with any belief that music may be able to express extra-musical content, and he's against all attempts to impose new-fangled sound-experiments or decadent tonal systems that potentially discredit the supremacy of melody. He is equally savage with anyone and anything that may try to reverse the fundamentals of thematic and melodic structures, thereby undermining the foundations of musical architecture. Behind any attempt to do things differently, Pfitzner finds mere incompetence while hammering away at perceived ‘impotence’. Alarmingly, he had the misfortune while wielding his mighty sword of German music to raise it against a composer who, if fact be known, is in possession of considerable musical potency: Gustav Mahler, who cannot reasonably be held responsible for all of the crazy ideas that have lined up in his name after his death. Mahler, to whom the plasticity of harmony and melody were fundamental to everything he composed, would have been bemused at such accusations. All of the pan-German excesses and excursions within this book dull the ringing purity of Pfitzner's battle cry. The Wagner who composed
Meistersinger
is a happier example to cite than the Wagner who addressed matters regarding [the Jewish] race. If we simply ignore the nonsense and follow his basic reasoning, we can find much to recommend.
17
Reading Korngold's appraisal, along with Berg's counter-attack, we sense a shift within the musical landscape of Jewish assimilation and its many detractors. The positions of Wagner, the German superiorist who heaped function upon function onto opera until he had created a
Gesamtkunstwerk
, and his opposite pole, the aesthete Hanslick (who was of Jewish descent, and therefore, according to Wagner, not German), had now been reversed. Pfitzner, in his attempt to rescue Wagner from ‘non-German’ Jewish Wagnerians such as Mahler, Schoenberg and their followers, had unwittingly resorted to representing the composer Wagner in the purist aesthetic image of his arch-enemy Eduard Hanslick.
Korngold goes on to say that in Vienna, the issues that Pfitzner addresses are in any case irrelevant, as younger Viennese composers have abandoned the experimental ‘impotency’ that Pfitzner derides. He cites as examples the Schreker pupils Felix Petyrek, Egon Kornauth and above all, Wilhelm Grosz,
who have exemplary skills in all disciplines and show great creativity. Korngold is particularly fulsome in his praise of another young Viennese composer, Hans Gál, and congratulates him on the success of his recent opera
Der Arzt der Sobeide
(
Sobeide's Doctor
) in Breslau.
18
The point that Korngold makes is that there were a number of composers for whom the de-sensitised New Objectivity was irrelevant. However, it was equally valid that these young composers did not see themselves as slavish adherents to the Wagnerian Romanticism of the previous century. They saw their own music as a reflection of their individual personalities and their singular melodic and harmonic ideas which were all that was needed to view themselves as ‘new’ and ‘modern’.
As we have seen in Krenek's conversation with Josef Lechthaler in the previous chapter, this was particularly the case among Jewish composers. With the exception of Schoenberg, Austro-German Jewish composers still saw themselves as vulnerable to accusations of not being sufficiently ‘German’. They did not want to risk new-found, albeit cautious, successes for the uncertain glories bestowed by future generations potentially more able to comprehend what contemporary audiences found alienating. This was simply not the case with the more self-assured children of the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, many of whom congregated at the more extreme margins of the avant-garde such as Webern, Krenek and Berg. If Jewish composers were to count for anything, they needed to write music, even ‘modern’ music, which appealed to the public of the day in all of its many permutations. On the other hand, many of the brightest and most talented of them recognised that continuing with Austro-German Romanticism in the manner of Wagner and Liszt was not a viable long-term solution either, despite its undoubted appeal amongst the largest section of the concert- and opera-attending public. A group of young composers, predominantly Viennese and predominantly pupils of Guido Adler, decided that the solution was to write new music by reaching back to models provided by a previous era. As such, they intellectually, if not always aesthetically embraced the values of Mendelssohn's ‘old German School’.
Anti-Romanticism
Hans Gál was one of the most successful of these musicians who had studied with Brahms's friend and musical executor, Eusebius Mandyczewski. Together, Gál and Mandyczewski edited the complete works of Brahms, a feat that was highly regarded by all musical factions. With Mandyczewski editing only Brahms's vocal works, it was left to Gál to provide critical editions of everything else, drawing him more deeply into Brahms's world than any other composer of the time. When Hanns Eisler was asked what the hardest part of
exile was, his reply was abandoning his treasured set of the complete Brahms edition in Berlin.
19
Gál was very conscious that he needed to be vigilant against Brahms influencing his own work as a composer, especially as work on the edition took place at a time when Robert Fuchs as Vienna's principal composition professor was also promoting a strict Brahmsian line at the music academy. With the North German's musical spirit guiding so many of the city's young composers, in later life Gál withdrew pieces he felt were unoriginal or, worse, derivative.
As Julius Korngold relates, Gál was a master of his craft. There are no flaws to be found in his harmony or counterpoint unless they are intentional. He was an accomplished pianist and a fine cellist and, as with many other Adler students, he was also a musical polymath: his doctoral dissertation had been on the stylistic characteristics of the young Beethoven, a subject that would have been close to Pfitzner's heart. In 1925 and 1928, he edited volumes of Strauss waltzes, marches and polkas for Adler's
Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich
. Gál was, in many ways, the archetypal composer of his day and he could potentially stand as a representative of musical creativity during the years of the Weimar Republic. Certainly, he was more regularly performed in mainstream venues than the likes of Eisler, Weill, Toch and even Hindemith, though with the press feasting on their controversies, they attracted more discussion, generating often scurrilous publicity.
Gál, in comparison with these
enfants terribles
, was conventional without being derivative, and he could never be accused of banality or empty sentimentality – he was no nostalgic Romantic. Nevertheless, he may have had some sympathy for Pfitzner's music and even his ideas, while avoiding any allegiance to his wilder polemics. Gál took the more considered view that modern music should grow organically out of the nineteenth century while retaining its classical integrity, with roots in Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. In this respect, it could be inferred that he shared some of the neo-classical tendencies of Stravinsky. Gál, however, was both too individual and too conventional, too firmly rooted in the German school to travel down the paths of Constructivist neo-classicism favoured by Russian, Italian, French and Spanish composers, along with the likes of Hindemith, Weill and Krenek. For Gál, unresolved dissonance remained a means, never an end.
The critical praise heaped upon the premiere of Gál's second comic opera,
Die heilige Ente
,
20
first conducted by Georg Szell (a colleague of Gál's from his student days) at Düsseldorf in 1923, is revealing. According to the critic Paul Nettl, with Gál one had found a worthy successor to Lortzing, Nicolai, Cornelius and Goetz.
21
Such praise needs to be understood in the context of the growing reaction against Wagnerian Romanticism at the time, and, with a
few notable exceptions, the lack of comic opera since the end of the war. By 1925, Julius Korngold was irritated that
Die heilige Ente
had yet to be heard in Vienna.
22
He would have to wait until a radio broadcast in 1929, which Josef Reitler reviewed as follows:
Hans Gál's opera
The Sacred Duck
has been a long-established success in Germany, and finally, thanks to RAVAG's broadcast, we too have been able to hear it in Austria. […] Chinese gods swap the brain of a Mandarin official and a coolie, a bigwig and a ne'er-do-well, which leads to much exotic confusion. The music is also exotic, though never forcibly so. The composer has successfully created a lyricism of lovely, melodic warmth with a consistently appealing orchestration. Opportunities for many amusing turns are plentiful and are readily taken advantage of.
23
Most intriguing about this peculiar opera – with its Chinese opium dens, bored gods, and a farcical duck – is that from its premiere until the arrival of the Third Reich in 1933 it remained in the repertoire of a number of opera houses, including Berlin's Städtische Oper, where the soprano role of Li was sung by Franz Schreker's wife Maria in one of her rare ventures away from the music of her husband. From 1923 to 1933,
Die heilige Ente
made the rounds of most of Germany's important provincial houses, including Breslau, Weimar, Aachen, Kassel (under the Bekker–Krenek regime), Königsberg, Karlsruhe and Cherznowitz. It also enjoyed a successful run in Prague in 1926. The 1929 Viennese broadcast was the first twentieth-century opera to be recorded by the recently-established RAVAG. The critic Karl Heinzen, reviewing the premiere in Düsseldorf, was fascinated by Gál's use of ‘oriental colours’, though stylised
chinoiserie
was much in vogue at the time: Toch had enjoyed a considerable success with his
Chinese Flute
songs of 1922, and other composers such as Egon Wellesz and Julius Bittner had also composed songs on texts lovingly orientalised by the German poet Hans Bethge, who had provided the texts on which Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde
was based. Heinzen's review confirms that the Düsseldorf audience was enthusiastic and demanded that Gál should acknowledge an ocean of applause.
24
Following its premiere, further productions of
The Sacred Duck
were mounted in Breslau and Berlin by the director Heinz Tietjen, who later under Hitler would be Artistic Director in Bayreuth. Hanns Gutman, reviewing the Berlin performances for
Anbruch
, wrote ‘the score of this opera demonstrates how the orchestra has developed throughout the nineteenth century and is handled with the same virtuosity as Mahler and Strauss’.
25
Gutman goes on to admire the exotic nature of Gál's music with its use of fourths, fifths and whole
tones.
26
He singles out Maria Schreker, to whom he pays a back-handed compliment by saying that though she is far and away the most enchanting creature on ‘any opera stage today’, she is vocally unable to surmount the acoustical difficulties of [the newly renovated auditorium of] Berlin's Charlottenburg Opera.
27
This small niggle aside, a resounding success is reported by all.
In his memoirs, Krenek recounts the flood of new operas from this period that were not revived after their premieres, a statement confirmed by a glance at the schedules of any German opera house. Even those works from the interwar years now seen as seminal, such as Krenek's own
Jonny spielt auf
, Max Brand's
Maschinist Hopkins
, Paul Hindemith's
Neues vom Tage
and Kurt Weill's
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
, only had runs of a few seasons, though some took place outside of Germany.
Jonny spielt auf
, for instance, even made it to the Metropolitan Opera in 1929, where it was received by a perplexed local audience who had no idea that Krenek's gently syncopated beer-tent music was actually supposed to represent American jazz. Some works such as Berg's
Wozzeck
and Korngold's
Die tote Stadt
, along with Schreker's three most successful operas and Strauss's
Der Rosenkavalier
, continued successful, though not unbroken runs in Germany's many opera houses. However, with the exception of
Wozzeck
, all of these operas had been composed before 1920. The list of one-season wonders composed after 1920 makes the tenacious hold of Gál's Chinese fairy-tale opera all the more remarkable.