Authors: Michael Haas
Korngold has interesting things to write about Weißmann's views on Mahler:
A particular trouble-maker for Weißmann's scalpel-sharp observations [is Mahler], who as a hypersensitive individual, exists in a continuous state of near hysteria. He is the culmination of the Jew whose German nature has resulted in total self-annihilation to his art. In fleeing from reality, Mahler, the man of the theatre, finds a metaphysical refuge in his own variety of the Symphony. In his ecstasy, he senses relationships […] with Goethe's
Faust
, and within the ethical and metaphysical he is related to both Beethoven and Wagner. Yet ultimately he remains a minstrel yearning for the ‘original sound’ and longing for the community and culture of his native country.
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As can be understood from reading Weißmann and the controversy his book ignited, Romanticism was far from being a spent force by the early 1920s. A number of composers felt that the late-Romantic ideal of overloading the senses was still the best way forward for music. Clearly, this style was popular with audiences, as evidenced by the success of Schreker's operas, along with
those of Richard Strauss, Puccini and Eugen d'Albert. These remained the preferred repertoire for any opera house seeking to appeal to popular tastes.
Unexpected Developments
Then a quite unexpected change occurred, the significance of which can be sensed from an examination of the list of operas performed in German-speaking Europe during the 1927–8 season, compiled by the music historian Wilhelm Altmann. It was in 1928 that the 27-year-old Ernst Krenek's
Jonny spielt auf
, a risqué opera featuring a black jazz violinist as its central character, was performed at the Vienna State Opera. Following its premiere in Leipzig on 10 February 1927, it went on to have 421 performances in some 45 different houses during a single season. It's interesting to compare this with the second most performed opera, d'Albert's
Tiefland
, which clocked up 296 performances on 51 different stages. Pfitzner's
Der arme Heinrich
and
Das Christelflein
, with a combined total of 80 performances in 39 houses, were more popular than his highly demanding
Palestrina
, which achieved only 28 performances in six houses. Puccini remained one of the most popular composers with 876 performances and 167 different stagings of his five most popular operas, while Strauss's operas clocked 416 performances, with
Rosenkavalier
alone making up more than half of these. Even Janáček's
Jenůfa
had a remarkable 77 performances, though this was down from the 96 performances of the previous season.
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When we start to look at Jewish composers, however, we get a different picture. Schreker's operas, once so dominant, are in steep decline:
Der ferne Klang
appears in only two opera houses for eight performances;
Die Gezeichneten
has only three performances; and
Der Schatzgräber
, which had been the most popular of all, has only five performances. Zemlinsky has only ten performances divided between two operas,
Eine florentinische Tragödie
and
Kleider machen Leute
. Weill's
Der Protagonist
receives 11 performances on three stages; Wellesz's
Alkestis
has just four performances, while Gál has to make do with five performances of two operas. Even Korngold's
Die tote Stadt
has gone down from 20 performances in the previous season to just 14 in four opera houses; his
Violanta
also runs in only four theatres for a total of nine performances. Braunfels's
Don Gil von den grünen Hosen
has also gone down to 11 performances from 17 the previous season. The older generation of Jewish composers, meaning those born before 1895, were giving way to a younger generation of composers who were turning towards the trend of the
Zeitoper
, with radios, motorcars, flappers and other
accoutrements of the roaring twenties. Even such stalwarts of the opulent sound-world of fin de siècle Vienna such as Schreker and Zemlinsky would start a process of paring down their music in an attempt to adjust to the demands of the time.
In any case, it was beginning to become apparent that music claiming a German ‘Romantic’ heritage was starting to take on subtle political and nationalistic overtones. Within only a year, it was a lot less subtle. In January 1931, Hans Heinsheimer wrote a leading article in
Anbruch
called ‘The Secret Terror’ that examined the political situation in 1930. Heinsheimer advises that a careful eye must be kept in light of a recent development: the film
All Quiet on the Western Front
had to be taken out of cinemas in Berlin and Vienna as it was seen to offend the nationalist mood. The same trend afflicted music as well: Kurt Weill's
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
was removed from the schedules of Max Reinhardt's theatres. Heinsheimer quotes correspondence from opera house directors, as well as from members of the public, with their references to ‘what one should expect as a Christian and a German’ from publicly subsidised theatres. The article is followed by another called ‘A Look into the Third Reich’ in which a comprehensive list of works is shown from Thuringia's theatres where a local Nazi government had been in place since 1929. The scheduling of theatres in Jena and Gera was merely anticipating what would happen throughout Germany after 1933.
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Returning to the 1927–8 season, Altmann goes on to analyse his statistics further:
Tiefland
has the most productions overall, followed by
Madame Butterfly
,
Tosca
and
Jonny spielt auf
,
Der Rosenkavalier
and
La Bohème
. Altmann also cites the number of performances too, concluding that the total of 421 for
Jonny spielt auf
breaks every record he has ever kept for a single work in a single season. Berg's
Wozzeck
, first performed to such acclaim in 1925, is missing from the 1927–8 season altogether, as are previously successful operas such as
Die Vögel
by Braunfels, and Zemlinsky's
Es war einmal
and
Der Zwerg
. Hindemith's
Cardillac
(1926) received 45 performances, as did Max von Schillings's more established
Mona Lisa
, which had enjoyed unbroken popularity since its premiere in Stuttgart in 1915. Altmann's list indicates that musical tastes were shifting not only towards the contemporary thrill offered by
Zeitoper
but, more revealingly, by the angular musical language that was moving away from the Romanticism of earlier works by Schreker, Zemlinsky, Korngold, Braunfels and even Strauss and Pfitzner
.
Puccini seemed to remain immune to these changes in taste, as did the unshakeable popularity of d'Albert's
Tiefland
and Strauss's
Rosenkavalier
.
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The huge success of
Jonny spielt auf
would dramatically alter the shape of opera scheduling over subsequent seasons. If the popularity of late-Romantic
operas by Jewish composers had started to wane, a younger generation of Jewish composers was busily compensating with
Zeitopern
. Many of the most successful, such as
Maschinist Hopkins
by Max Brand (120 performances in the 1929–30 season), Wilhelm Grosz's
Baby an der Bar
and Karol Rathaus's
Fremde Erde
, emanated from the same stable that had produced Krenek: the composition class of Franz Schreker. But even Krenek's record of 421 performances was broken in the 1929–30 season by the 490 performances clocked up by
Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer
,
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by the Jewish Czech composer Jaromír Weinberger.
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Schwanda
was neither modernist, nor a jazzy
Zeitoper
. It was an entertaining Bohemian folk-tale about devils, ice queens and the human foibles of its central folk hero. Weinberger may have studied with Reger – regarded as the spiritual father of many New Objectivity composers – but he was no ‘New Objectivist’. The music of
Schwanda
is far closer to Dvořák than to Hindemith.
There are several superficial parallels in the biographies of Weinberger and Erich Korngold: they were more or less the same age, with Weinberger born a year earlier than Korngold in 1896; both were born in what is today the Czech Republic, with Korngold maintaining the Austrian citizenship that all Czechs born before 1919 received automatically, and Weinberger taking the steps to become a citizen of the newly founded state of Czechoslovakia; both were child prodigies and non-practising Jews, and both had a solid classical training while finding that perhaps their true metier lay with lighter opera. Here, though, we encounter a certain creative contrary motion between the two, with Korngold moving towards light music in the second half of his life with
Die stumme Serenade
,
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following his last opera
Die Kathrin
, which was essentially a large-scale operetta. Weinberger, on the other hand, started off composing lighter operas, but his last work,
Valdštejn
from 1937, was a serious work based on Schiller's
Wallenstein
trilogy. Neither composer made major changes to their musical idiom whether in lighter or more serious operas. Both saw traditional tonality as adequate for their needs, and neither forgot the importance of guaranteeing an audience aural delight. Weinberger would ultimately remain a ‘one-hit-wonder’ with
Schwanda
. Korngold, on the other hand, was a more subtle composer whose influence on twentieth-century popular culture would extend well beyond the world of Vienna's
haute bourgeoisie
. With his consolidation of what later became the ‘Hollywood Sound’, Korngold established not only a new genre within applied music, but, through cinema, unleashed a more powerful fusion of image and sound than even Wagner could have anticipated. The ‘crisis’ that Weißmann had written about concerned the futility of the continuous ‘over-loading’ of emotional, or as he expressed it, ‘nervous’ stimulation. This was the crux of
the dilemma in musical Romanticism. Weißmann would never have foreseen Korngold's Hollywood scores as the answer to the critical question of where it could possibly lead.
Korngold: The Resolute Romantic
There was a much-circulated quip about Korngold attributed to Ernst Toch, one of the principal exponents of Germany's New Objectivity who had also ended up composing film music in Hollywood: ‘Korngold has been composing music for Warner Brothers his whole life. It's just that when he was a kid, he didn't know it at the time.’ No statement could make the point more clearly that Korngold's brand of early twentieth-century Viennese Romanticism determined what would become known as the ‘Hollywood Sound’. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that Hollywood quickly became a happy repository for many more of Europe's Jewish ‘resolute Romantics’.
Korngold considered his most important work to be the opera
Das Wunder der Heliane
. This huge work is almost a third longer again than his previous opera,
Die tote Stadt
, and it demands large forces similar to Strauss's
Die Frau ohne Schatten
, an obvious model for
Heliane
with its generically named roles (The Ruler, The Stranger, The Warden, The Messenger, and so on). It was the culmination of Korngold's harmonic and melodic development and represented the 30-year-old at his creative peak. According to his father Julius, its premiere in 1927 should have guaranteed Erich's position as the leading composer of his generation. Yet grievances that had grown out of Julius's determination to undermine anyone at the opera who followed Mahler, his erratic treatment of artists who supported (or ignored) his son Erich, and the general spirit of the age resulted in the young Korngold's biggest professional disappointment. A Korngold ‘failure’ was still more successful than many other composers’ ‘successes’, but the clash of Viennese premieres between Krenek's
Jonny spielt auf
and Korngold's
Heliane
resulted in more than just a public slanging match, it was a true
Kulturkampf
. On the one side was Erich with his string of commercial successes and his powerful father. On the other was Krenek, a young man who had managed to tap into the spirit of the age with the most popular opera on any German stage at any time. Erich Korngold, who had been regarded as sufficiently modernist to be represented at the ISCM festival in 1925, decided at this point to become the champion of late-romanticism.
Even when still seen as a modernist, Korngold was never interested in following in Schoenberg's footsteps. But a letter from Rudolf Réti inviting him
to propose works for the 1925 ISCM festival in Venice indicates that atonal and serial music were by no means the sole criteria of the musically progressive.
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The Kolisch Quartet performed Korngold's First String Quartet at the 1925 Venice Festival in a series of concerts that also featured music by the Schoenberg pupil Hanns Eisler. By then, Eisler was in the process of breaking with his teacher and was writing music reviews for the Communist paper
Die Rote Fahne
. He reviewed both
Heliane
and
Jonny spielt auf
for the paper and starts his review of
Heliane
with a quip about prodigies already being as untalented at the age of six as other people are at the age of sixty. He then cuts straight to his conclusion: ‘
Das Wunder der Heliane
is an unbelievably bad and ill-conceived work.’ He offers a potted version of the plot while damning the librettist Hans Müller as ‘a typical lower-middle-class writer’: ‘This kind of opera-
Schlock
simply should not be put in front of any public unless it's intended as a joke. […] The music is intoxicating, unoriginal and lives less from its creativity than it does from its appealing effectiveness, which of course only comes across today as boring.‘
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Eisler's review of
Jonny
is possibly even more scathing, though his points are far more political than musical. He hates the easy sense of entitlement expressed by all of the principal characters as they travel in luxury and stay in expensive hotels. ‘This is a seriously botched opera plot! […] Like most modern operas these days, it's resolutely petit-bourgeois and despite the presence of locomotives and cars, it doesn't reflect our time at all. As for the music, one can only say that the otherwise talented Krenek has totally messed this one up. It's astonishing how poorly orchestrated it is and the dance numbers aren't as good as those heard in the cheapest beer-halls. Only at the end are we offered anything decent – but that's after sitting through two-and-a-half hours of tedium. Stylistically, it's a mixture of Puccini, d'Albert and Stravinsky. It's pity to think of all the money they invested in this worthless dud.‘
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