Authors: Michael Haas
In 1927, Gál's publisher, Universal Edition, produced a special edition of
Musikblätter des Anbruch
on the subject of ‘Opera’ and commissioned Gál to write a contribution on the problems of ‘comic opera’. The article is illuminating: Gál highlights operetta as encroaching on the territory of the traditional German comic opera, and acknowledges that the genre, deriving from its French ancestor of a century earlier, uses far more drastic means to give the public what it wants – namely, unencumbered light-weight musical theatre. For this reason, it has proved a strong adversary against which the traditional German
Spieloper
, or comic opera, stands little chance. He cites Strauss's
Rosenkavalier
as the only recent comic opera to establish itself in the repertoire. Gál goes on to analyse several works that should have been popular but failed, such as Busoni's
Arlecchino
, which he sees as miscalculating its use of parody. He argues strongly for a return to the traditional model of the
Spieloper
, as composed by Nicolai, Lortzing and Flowtow, citing the very lineage in which Paul Nettl saw Gál's own
Sacred Duck
.
28
Surprisingly, Gál does not mention
Die Vögel
,
29
a comic opera by Walter Braunfels based on Aristophanes, also published by Universal Edition, which enjoyed considerable success in 1920 when it was first performed in Munich
under Bruno Walter. Braunfels followed this with another comic opera that, according to Alfred Einstein in
Anbruch
, seemed to fit Gál's directives for the genre to a tee.
30
Entitled
Don Gil von den grünen Hosen
,
31
it had a prestigious and successful premiere in Munich under Hans Knappertsbusch in 1924. Despite an original text by Tirso de Molina (1571–1648),
Don Gil
did not offer the clever amusement of Gál's librettist for
The Sacred Duck
, Karl Levetzow. Thanks to the success of
Die Vögel
, Braunfels was a far more commercial proposition than Gál, and following
Don Gil's
premiere, it was instantly taken up in Stuttgart, Königsberg, Leipzig and Cologne, before slipping permanently from view in 1927. Its disappearance puts the more enduring success of Gál's
Sacred Duck
into sharper relief.
Unlike Schoenberg, Schreker and many other Austrians, Gál did not migrate to Berlin after World War I. He assumed Bruckner's position as harmony teacher at Vienna's University until 1929 when, on the recommendations of Strauss and Furtwängler, he was offered the Directorship of the Music Academy in Mainz. Gál thus landed in the centre of the musical establishment.
The conductor Erich Kleiber was referred to as Gál's ‘twin’: not only did they share a birthday but they were placed next to each other throughout their school years, and it was believed that they even shared a certain physical resemblance. Gál's fellow piano pupils under his teacher Richard Robert included Georg Szell, Clara Haskil and Rudolf Serkin; his champions included Fritz Busch in Dresden, Wilhelm Furtwängler in Berlin, and the Rosé and Kolisch Quartets in Vienna. Gál was a committee member with Alban Berg and Ernst Toch of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, an organisation that was a major platform for contemporary and experimental music. He was an occasional contributor to both
Anbruch
and
Melos
, and during the interwar years he was published by Universal Edition, Simrock and Schott. He won the first Austrian State Prize for music in 1913, a prize he won again in 1958. Gál's other operas were well received, but never enjoyed the success of
The Sacred Duck
. His last opera, a grotesque in the manner of Berthold Goldschmidt's
Der Gewaltige Hahnrei
, successfully premiered in Mannheim in 1932, was
Die beiden Klaas
,
32
scheduled for a double premiere in Hamburg and in Dresden in 1933 under Fritz Busch. Like Goldschmidt's
Hahnrei
, scheduled for performances in Berlin, it too was abruptly cancelled by the Nazi regime.
The
Realpolitik
of Schott & Sons: 1933
After the cancellation of
Die beiden Klaas
, Gál returned to Vienna and attempted to have the opera performed at the Volksoper. At this point, he received a revealing letter from his publisher Schott in Mainz. The proprietor
himself, Dr Ludwig Strecker, wrote to Gál explaining that the cancellation was due to misgivings about the libretto. Strecker goes on to explain: ‘only because of the text, quite apart from the opera's other “compromising moments”. At present, you're simply too far from the firing line to recognise the drastic change in the course our company is presently being forced to take, a point I mention only in passing.‘
33
If we are to believe Strecker's letter, the objections to mounting the work in Hamburg were not due to Gál's Jewishness. He had already been removed from his position as Director of the Music Academy in Mainz for this reason, following the Nazi take-over of the town council in 1933 and a high-profile anti-Semitic campaign in the local press. There was no need for his publisher to be squeamish on this point. The ‘compromising moments’ referred to by Strecker most likely included a scene, shown in a split set, with two couples in bed with each other's spouses. The objections within the ‘new situation in Germany’ were presented as moral rather than racial. Sexual incontinence, however, was a frequent anti-Semitic charge that was probably understood without having to be spelt out. Presumably unknown to Gál, Ludwig Strecker, under the pseudonym of Ludwig Andersen, would soon make a name for himself in Hitler's New Germany as librettist for a remarkable number of stage works and oratorios with obvious nationalist sympathies.
34
Gál's attempts to move the premiere to Vienna's Volksoper were thwarted by financial difficulties, and the work was not performed until after the composer's death when York Opera, a provincial ensemble in the North of England, took it up in 1990.
As confirmation that Schott was not reticent in discussing racial issues, a letter sent to Erich Korngold from Willi Strecker, Ludwig's brother, dated 11 October 1933 (nearly a year before the letter to Gál regarding
Die beiden Klaas
) confirms that the proposed operatic treatment of something called
The Marriage of Ariane
was unacceptable because of its explicit ‘racial content’. He mentions that he's relieved that Korngold has removed some provocative material and tells him that had he not done so, he would have landed without question on the blacklist. Interestingly, Strecker confirms that, ‘thank heavens’, Korngold's name has not yet come up in discussions of composers to be banned from performance. Strecker goes on to explain that non-Aryan authors are treated more severely, and the merest hint of questionable material could lead to difficulties: ‘Even if the tone coming out of Berlin on the Jewish question appears more conciliatory with matters of artistic merit being placed above all other factors, the mood in the provincial Leagues for German Culture is at present so aggressive that no theatre director or even orchestra conductor dares to perform a work of Jewish authorship without danger of public demonstrations. You can't imagine the difficulties our publishing house faces with constant charges of “cultural Bolshevism” and “international
Jewish tendencies”. It would be fuel to the fire to all of those who have had their rejected manuscripts returned from us.‘
35
In February 1933, only weeks after Hitler's appointment as Federal Chancellor, Gál enjoyed his last interwar premiere in Germany with his Violin Concerto played by Georg Kulenkampff with Fritz Busch conducting the Dresden Staatskapelle. Gál was a popular teacher, performer and administrator. If his music was thought emotionally contained, it was nearly always melodically engaging and harmonically intriguing. He had become so established in German musical life that he simply couldn't comprehend the reality of the anti-Semitic press campaign waged against him, and his dismissal as director of the Mainz Academy in 1933. Efforts by the local mayor, along with pleas from Furtwängler, were to no avail. Local Nazis eventually succeeded in removing the mayor as well. Uncomprehending, and convinced that such madness would only be temporary, Gál took his family to the Black Forest, where he composed a beautiful and poignant violin sonata. Unusually for a work from this period, he did not give it an opus number, perhaps because, in spite of even the loss of home and livelihood, its unapologetic expressiveness was something he viewed as atypical.
As such, Gál stands emblematically as the ‘typical’ Jewish composer of the Weimar Constitution years, though he was only one of many composers such as Walter Braunfels, Max Ettinger, Wilhelm Rettich, Ignaz Waghalter and Egon Wellesz, who in their different ways maintained a cautious distance from the various trends of New Objectivity. Gál certainly enjoyed more commercial success than the followers of Schoenberg, or modernists such as Ernst Toch or Wladimir Vogel, and stood squarely in the middle of where social and cultural assimilation had landed him. By the time he was awarded the 1958 Austrian State prize, headed by a committee consisting of Egon Kornauth and Joseph Marx, it was tacitly acknowledged that Jewish cultural assimilation had produced in Gál a composer who represented the most deeply-held values of the Austro-German traditions.
Egon Wellesz
Egon Wellesz, another Guido Adler pupil, also felt that music could find new means of expressing itself by emulating older models while avoiding the excesses of nineteenth-century Romanticism. If Gál saw the traditional forms of quartets, sonatas and suites as perfect vehicles for new musical ideas, Wellesz believed that musical theatre could reinvent itself by returning to the formal pageantry of the French Baroque. However, Wellesz was harmonically and tonally far more adventurous than Gál and the largest difference between
them was that Wellesz was inclined to greater expressive extremes than his more restrained colleague. As both had completed doctorates in music history under Adler, they appeared to lend weight to Wagner's accusation that Jews returned to the past because they ostensively lacked the soul of the native German that would give them the confidence to shape the present. What Wagner – wilfully blind to the intentions of his own setting of Teutonic mythology – did not take into account was that composers such as Gál and Wellesz saw the past as offering the means of shaping the present. It was a view that was shared by that most revolutionary of Jewish composers, Arnold Schoenberg, who like many of his contemporaries saw Wagner himself as the key-stone within German music's recent past.
Wellesz was a far more complex individual than his younger colleague Gál. In many ways assimilation could explain his artistic development, and his conversion (with his wife Emmy) to Catholicism in 1917. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that their conversion was made not for reasons of social convenience, but from religious conviction. This did not stop fellow modernist (and devout Catholic) Ernst Krenek from voicing doubts: ‘[Within the ISCM] Egon Wellesz was ideologically a bit of the odd man out, though I was told that he had studied for a period with Schoenberg. […] He composed along the lines of what I would call “measured Modernism”, hustling and bustling about while musically pursuing a cautious middle path. He had converted to Catholicism, something he continually fussed about, but managed to gain access to high social and political circles.‘
36
What Krenek referred to as ‘gemäßigt Moderner’ (‘measured modernist’) was, in Wellesz's case, an attempt to create a contemporary idiom that, like Gál's, was the result of new works emerging through a prism of the past.
Viewed superficially, Gál and Wellesz had much in common: both had completed their doctorates under Adler and contributed to
Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich
; both were Jewish Austrians of Hungarian extraction. But whereas Gál was grounded in the very bedrock of the Austro-Germanic tradition as represented by Bach, Mendelssohn, Schumann and especially Brahms, Wellesz was one of the first to explore the early Austro-Italian Baroque, which he referred to as ‘the bridge to Haydn’. His dissertation was on Giuseppe Bonno (1711–88), the Viennese-born Italian who was predecessor to Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) at the Court in Vienna. From 1905, along with Berg and Webern, Wellesz was one of Schoenberg's first pupils at Vienna's Schwarzwald School. He was also one of the founding members of the ISCM, many of whom were musicians from Schoenberg's circle.
Yet despite being Schoenberg's first biographer in 1920, he was by no means a blind disciple. Wellesz was also a Francophile and one of the first to promote
Debussy's music in Vienna. His orchestral
Stimmungsbild
, from 1912, entitled
Vorfrühling
,
37
has impressionistic colours and an opening flute solo that could be considered a dark central-European view of Debussy's
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
. Bartók was an early admirer of Wellesz and managed to procure him his first contract with the Budapest publisher Rózsavölgyi. In due course, both composers would move to Universal Edition in Vienna. Béla Balázs, Bartók's librettist for
Duke Bluebeard's Castle
(1911) and author of his ballet
The Wooden Prince
(1914–16), also wrote the scenario for Wellesz's first stage work, the ballet
Das Wunder der Diana
38
from 1914–17. The two composers remained in close contact, both took part in the Congrès de musique arabe at Cairo in 1932, and they were frequent colleagues at various ISCM events.
Such an unusual and knowledgeable voice among Vienna's progressive musicians was a puzzle to the conservative Julius Korngold. He was impressed by the young man's intelligence and talent, but this admiration was not reciprocated: Wellesz mentions Korngold in the earliest pages of his memoirs as a critic of ‘despotic power with the ability to poison relationships between composers who otherwise would have admired one another’.
39
Korngold's impressions of Wellesz are prescient. They date from 1919 and, as can be seen in his review of Wellesz's piano
Idyllen
, Korngold had high hopes for the 34-year-old composer: