ch8

It is worth focusing on one central point in Pfitzner's essay as this would ultimately harness many intellectuals into the anti-Semitic thinking of National Socialism. Clearly, there was more at stake than the question of which strand of musical development had a legitimate claim to Beethoven's inheritance, and accordingly Pfitzner moved the debate to something even more profound by making a claim on behalf of musical conservatives of the German soul itself. Composers of all musical tendencies believed that music was somehow a privilege uniquely bequeathed either by fate or by God to the German people. Pfitzner, in common with Wagner (whose Das Judenthum in der Musik he described in his own tract as ‘serious, brave and loving‘³) saw Jews as non-German foreigners. He goes on to accuse the Jewish Bekker of leading an international assault, and uses the words ‘international’ and ‘Jewish’ in tandem so often that they soon become interchangeable. ‘International’ thus becomes the opposite of ‘German’. The Communist Party was at this time called the ‘International’, which was described as ‘Bolshevik’: thus, ‘international’ = ‘Jew’ = ‘Bolshevik’ = ‘non-German’. In due course, other euphemisms for Jews would stand in for ‘international’, 'cosmopolitan’ emerging as a favourite used by both National Socialist and Communist anti-Semites alike. Ultimately, all these euphemisms meant outsiders, usurpers, parvenus, Möchtegerns and confidence tricksters. To Pfitzner and others, such as his journalist ally Alfred Heuß, editor of the nationalist, conservative Zeitschrift für Musik, these were merely synonyms for ‘non-German’.

Paul Bekker was born in Berlin and was briefly a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic before leaving to work as a conductor in Aschaffenburg and Görlitz. He started writing music criticism in 1906 and from 1911 to 1923 he was chief music critic of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Germany's liberal answer to Austria's Neue Freie Presse. This placed him in a similar position to Julius Korngold, and their rivalry was legendary. In an open letter to Korngold from 1924, Bekker wrote the following attack on him:

My dear Dr Korngold!

One taunts those whom one loves – this truism occurred to me as I recently read in the Neue Freie Presse your anguished cry regarding atonal insanity and the demise of human feeling and passion. I continued to be reminded of this truism as I noticed that despite these human catastrophes, you still managed, somehow, to intone your predictable grandiose song in praise of the natural order. It was at this point that I suddenly realised that it was my own good self you meant when naming the un-credited spokesman for the ‘journalistic pulp’ that calls itself the ‘Vienna Newspaper for Atonal Music’ [Anbruch]. So, I thought to myself, you really love me, don't you Julius? Why deny it? Only a deep love can bring forth such great pain, such grievance and such anger. […] For this reason, I shall attempt to explain why I, Julius, cannot love you, at least as far as such things can be accounted. […] You see, Julius, I happen to view Beethoven as being different from Wagner, just as Krenek is different from Schoenberg. I see two operas by Schreker from different perspectives and am proud of the inconsequence that it does not result in me being against Schreker, though he doesn't happen belong to the [atonal] ‘movement’. […] When I walk through the garden, I cherish the apple tree, the pear tree, the peach tree, the roses and the thistles. I do not value a single one of these to the exclusion of others. Rather, I am conscious of the fact that apples, pears and peaches are fundamentally different in both taste and appearance. I still enjoy eating all of them, according to the individual tree's fruit and whims of the season. I'm delighted by the rose. As far as the thistle goes – please don't blush, Julius – I must admit it pleases me the least of all. But I think to myself, God also created the thistle and he surely must know why. For that reason, it should continue to stay where it is, growing and bringing whatever fruits it may bear – even if only asses enjoy eating it.4

On the recommendation of Leo Kestenberg, Musical Advisor to the Prussian Ministry of Culture, in 1923 Bekker was made director of the opera house in Kassel, where he worked closely with Krenek. As Krenek relates in his memoirs, one of Bekker's first productions was, ironically, Pfitzner's Der arme Heinrich, mounted prior to Schreker's Die Gezeichneten, which was scheduled ‘towards the end of his directorship’.⁵ Bekker had written, in addition to his Beethoven monograph, biographies of Offenbach and Oskar Fried, along with numerous articles and essays on Schreker, Mahler, ‘Art and Revolution’, and other aspects of German music of the day. The Nazi Lexikon der Juden in der Musik accords him a particularly blistering entry:

Bekker, Paul (H [= Half Jew]), * Berlin 4.12.1882, + New York 1937: music critic; from 1925 director of the State Theatre in Kassel; 1927–32 director in Wiesbaden. Famous writer during the time of general decline; well-known by his work at the Frankfurter Zeitung (1911–1925); promoter of such degenerating tendencies as Mahler, Schoenberg, Schreker etc. Hans Pfitzner directed his polemic The Aesthetic of Musical Impotence against him, in which he states clearly that ‘Whoever took the nihilistic views seriously of this “Frankfurt darling”, in proclaiming who the legitimate successors to Beethoven and Wagner were, wasn't in a position to tell the difference between the production of art and shit.‘6

The lexicon goes on to detail the withdrawal of Bekker's German citizenship and accuses him of hiring only Jewish minions to carry out his work while at Kassel (though Krenek, as we have seen, was certainly not Jewish). It goes on to recycle Pfitzner's accusations of Bekker's Bolshevism, which were so ludicrous that when Pfitzner brought them up in his Impotence polemic, Bekker never even bothered to address them.

In an article entitled Beethoven und die Moderne,⁷ printed as part of the Berlin Staatsoper's Almanac in 1926, Pfitzner had his own chance to reclaim Beethoven from the modernists. Julius Korngold, in his review of this morose essay, wrote:

It would occasionally appear that the pessimism which befalls the composer of Palestrina may compel him to give up composing altogether. ‘All music has something of the wilting bloom about it’, he opines, before suddenly reaching for yet another of his many contradictions and dismissing this thought by expressing the belief that the creative artist's sense of self-preservation is such that he cannot find the wherewithal to stop believing in himself. Good. Inevitably, the sun must set, ‘but should and must one’, he wails, ‘speed up this inevitability by throwing muck at the horizon?’ This is a singularly powerful thought that appeals to us more than Pfitzner's latest bloodless musings. However, it could be argued that most of the muck thrown at the horizon comes from those who write about it rather than from those who compose.⁸

Until the height of summer in 1914, the composer believed that as far as he was concerned, the devil could take politics. He saw himself as a Romantic composer, that is to say a national, but not a political composer. It was with the outbreak of war that he realised that national feelings would inevitably be transmuted into the political: this introspective, gentle and cerebral artist thus transformed himself into a power-seeker. He longed for the warrior triumph of Germany: at the height of the morality-debate on the waging of U-boat attacks, he dedicated a chamber work to Admiral Tirpitz. In a word, Germany's national composer had politicised himself into the anti-democratic nationalist. And who should be surprised? He was steeped in the spirit of German music as no one else. His fundamental instinct […] was antagonistic to such foreign things as European intellectualism or the artifices of democracy.¹⁰

Pfitzner had already thrown down the gauntlet in 1917 in an anti-Futurist polemic directed against Busoni, whose Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music had appeared ten years earlier. The tract Musical Impotence caused far greater controversy. According to Pfitzner, ‘international’ influences included Impressionism, and the fact that both Schoenberg and Schreker had used Impressionistic effects in their earlier works only confirmed, in his view, how un-German they were. His use of the concept of ‘impotency’ as an aesthetic idea, with its alternative notion of ‘potency’ (implying, of course, Pfitzner himself), carries forward the subliminal idea of the artist as hero and the female as non-creative and passive, thus preparing the way for Nazi propaganda that would dismiss music by Jewish composers as ‘weak and effeminate’.

We must go a different way if we want to overcome the pathos, the overbearing sentimentality, and the natural aversion to romanticism. Germany was deeper under the spell of Romanticism than any other country. Romanticism was indeed a specifically German creation. We must overcome this disease, and therefore cannot afford to treat the attempts at deliverance as a question of fashion, no matter how ridiculous the gestures these attempts may produce. […] We believe that we write new music: yet we only avoid writing old music. The old music no longer exists, and the new music does not yet exist as a positive expression of our times. We, too, try to parody and to ridicule the bourgeoisie and the sentimentality of romantic music […] to come near a so-called musical ‘Gothic’ by linear development of melody or to do away with the old methods of composing by inventing new matters, and by depriving all motives, themes, and concords of the original soul, to create the tabula rasa, the chaos which is to bring forth a star. The star is not born yet, neither do we know whether it will be born, but we know that we cannot go back and that our present evolution is necessary even if there are few spectators. The evolution will be all the quicker the more passionately the issue is fought.¹²

If Einstein's view was that Germany was stuck in some sort of late-Romantic time-warp, Alban Berg highlights the associations between Pfitzner's German nationalism and his use of unfettered emotion as a blunt object against reason. He starts by quoting from Pfitzner's own essay: ‘With such a melody [Schumann's Träumerei] we simply float on air. Its quality can only be recognised, not demonstrated; there is no intellectual path to its understanding. Either one comprehends its beauty innately through the delight one feels or not. He who cannot empathise has no arguments to bring, nor can he be met with counter-arguments. One can only play the melody and say, “how beautiful”. What it says is as deep and clear and mystical as truth itself.‘¹³ Berg then offers the following observation:

To read these words from a composer of such standing as Pfitzner must have been to many musicians, certainly it was to me, a grave disappointment. In addition to everything else, they come from a book that is so full of erudition that it hardly omits a single field of human intellectual endeavour in its contents. In equal quantities it offers philosophy, politics, music history and racial-theories; aesthetics, ethics, journalism, literature and frankly, God knows what all else! The one place it leaves us wanting most is precisely the area it was meant to cover, namely music. It takes a position right from the outset that suppresses every possibility of judging good from bad.14

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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 Diana³⁸ 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:

In Egon Wellesz's fine and delicate work Idyllen [Op. 21] we can clearly hear the composer's admiration for French Impressionism. Is this perhaps a conversion away from his grim radicalism of earlier days? We ask this question eagerly of the erudite young composer whom we also greet as a fellow critic within our midst. One may hopefully be able to deduce as much from his essay in the latest edition of the Berlin Rundschau in which he tells us that he is now studying the melodic structures of the music of antiquity and even that of folk music. If, as he writes, this leads him to greater simplicity and a more sincerely felt expression, then we may be witnessing some interesting changes taking place amongst the circles of Vienna's modernists.⁴⁰

He even keeps faith with Wellesz after a performance of the Second String Quartet a few months later:

Newness in music is never the result of mixing and matching. […] Experimentation as an attempt at being different and writing music that addresses the ‘problematic’ is merely incompetent and not ‘new’ at all. And as for crowbarring old music into new: well, here in Vienna during the past fifteen years, we've heard quite enough of this gimmick, though I believe at long last we may have finally seen it off. The latest apostate of this movement is our young colleague Dr Egon Wellesz, who appealed recently for a return to the melodic element in the manner of earlier days – even suggesting a return to the folk song. His string quartet […] should not deceive us. It's a work that originates from over a year ago and cannot be attributed to this latest conversion. It's fundamentally a sin of the past and is best viewed as a clinical demonstration of all the problematic nonsense that this would represent.

We find ourselves confronted in this work with something I refer to as ‘negative composing’. […] Yet the movements (naturally, they're not laid out in any kind of traditional sequence) never actually lose sight of a fundamental idea, while at the same time giving no hint of what one might conceivably identify as (this reddest of red-rags to the extremists) a structural tonic. […] There is simply one essential fact that is impossible to get around: that which is artificially concocted and remains far from traditional tonality neither sings nor speaks to us. Otherwise, Wellesz offers us many interesting tonal combinations and instrumental effects.

Dr Wellesz […] has a very real talent for composing music. His technical facilities are convincingly well beyond most of his colleagues, regardless of whether they strike out towards the musical left or the musical right. He should perhaps consider forgetting his dead-end developments concerning music from antiquity and listen to the purity of his fundamentally unprejudiced and naive musical heart.41

Within a few years, Korngold's hopes for Wellesz had been dashed. Wellesz was a co-founder of the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1922, an organisation that Korngold dismissed as ‘German infiltration’ of Austria's musical heritage.⁴² Given that the other founding members – Rudolf Réti, Hugo Heller, Rudolf Bing and Emil Hertzka – were Austrians, this was obviously an absurd assertion.⁴³

A meeting was held in January 1923 in London, where it was decided that the organisation should be given a name. It was at this point that it was christened the International Society for Contemporary Music or ISCM. It would be based in London, and Edward Dent, who was British, would act as its President. There was to be an international jury of five selected members who would decide what was performed. The first jury members were Wellesz, André Caplet, Ernest Ansermet, Hermann Scherchen and Alexander Zemlinsky. The first official chamber music festival under ISCM auspices was held the following summer in Salzburg, with the orchestral concerts held later in the year in Prague. The third ISCM Festival, held in Venice, became one of the milestones in the relationship between Stravinsky and Schoenberg, both of whom were accompanied by their circles of respective acolytes: Stravinsky ignored Schoenberg, and Schoenberg was visibly rude to Stravinsky, establishing a pattern that would be maintained throughout the rest of their lives, including the years they jointly spent in exile in Los Angeles.

Edward Dent offers his own version of events as reported in The Times in 1934:

One day Wellesz and I were invited to a local committee to consider the future of Salzburg as a ‘festival Town’. I suggested that they should run a six-week festival from the beginning of August to the middle of September inviting all sorts of musical and dramatic bodies from different countries to take part in turn, and publishing early each year a day-to-day diary of all the events including plays, concerts, operas, folksong and dance meetings, church music and the Marionette Theatre.

This was received with blank amazement, and it was evident that they all thought me only fit for a lunatic asylum. The local committee was interested mainly in Max Reinhardt and a project – for which it was assumed the Americans would pay, of course – to disfigure the beautiful park of Hellbrunn by building a theatre there for him in the shape of a monstrous wedding-cake. Prague solved our problem for us by inviting us to that most musical of all European cities in 1924, and in 1925 we divided the festival between Prague and Venice. Our French friends had always told us that the Italians would never form a national section, as they were all too busy quarrelling among themselves; but for once the French were wrong, and we have had three festivals in Italy (Venice 1925, Siena 1928, and Florence 1934) which have been among the most brilliant in our history.46

Other than Scherchen and the British (but German-born) Robert Mayer, Germans did not predominate in the ISCM in these early days – certainly not to the extent that Korngold could speak of an ‘infiltration of Austrian music’.⁴⁷ Indeed, the ISCM appeared to be overwhelmingly Austrian in its initial membership even if its President was British. This did not deter Julius Korngold from founding, with the help of colleagues at the Neue Freie Presse, something called Der Österreichische Kulturbund,⁴⁸ which from 1923 was holding alternative new-music festivals led by himself and Julius Bittner. The ‘Kulturbund’ festival for 1923 in Vienna (8–11 August) included works by Richard Strauss, Joseph Marx, Franz Schreker, Wilhelm Kienzl, Erich Korngold, Wilhelm Grosz, Julius Bittner, Max Springer, Egon Kornauth, Hans Gál and Bernhard Paumgartner, along with some early Schoenberg songs and Zemlinsky's First String Quartet, which, according to Alban Berg, were included as ‘fig-leaves’ to disguise the blatantly conservative strain of Austrian music being presented.⁴⁹ Though the occasional mention of the Kulturbund is made right up through 1929, it never approached the prestige of the ISCM.

It was through his wife, the art historian Dr Emmy Wellesz née Stross, that Wellesz developed a deep interest in Byzantine music and, together with the English Byzantine scholar H. J. W Tillyard, deciphered middle-Byzantine Neumic notation in 1916. Wellesz would eventually become as highly regarded for his expertise on Byzantine music as for his work as a composer. Though this interest did not colour much of his own music – only his Festliches Präludium Op. 100 and Mirabile Mysterium Op. 101⁵⁰ set out explicitly to make the connection – his fascination with Byzantine chant gives an indication of Wellesz's eclectic musical tendencies. If we look at his first fifteen opus numbers, we are confronted with a dizzying array of musical identities, seeming to represent entirely different musical personas. His earliest piano works and songs, the pieces that impressed Bartók, are nothing short of proto-minimalism akin to Satie. During the early days of the twentieth century, they must have sounded quite radical in their unremitting simplicity. Other works are sharp and aggressively atonal, while a number are closer to French Impressionism than to the Austro-German Impressionism that was so characteristic of Schreker, early Schoenberg and Zemlinsky.

Wellesz maintained a unique position among opera composers of the day. His desire to recreate the splendour of the high Baroque is explained in an article he wrote entitled ‘Das Problem der Form’ (‘The Problem of Form’) for the magazine Von neuer Musik in 1920 and it is quoted by his wife Emmy in her completion of his memoirs:

During the years of the First World War it became more and more evident that outward events should not impose demands on the contemporary musician. Rather, the artist should lift his gaze to his surroundings and search for a firm footing on something solid and sacred that is totally enclosed by a wondrous tradition. The dramatic artist need not speak of himself or of his own destiny, or even of individual destinies. Instead, he should speak of the things that are interconnected within this world and the outer-world. I have a vision of a dramatic work in which song is combined with dance in a near cultic fashion so that aspirations of our time which have been absent from the operatic stage can be revealed in the context of something with which we are already familiar. This form is best revealed using material that is timeless and detached from period. It is placed in a distant world that speaks to our world today and from where we are offered a view into a higher plane. The secret of great art is thus found in the recognisable from our own world combined with the incommensurable. 53

According to Emmy, this was an idea that came to Wellesz following lengthy conversations with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was enthusiastic about returning to antiquity as a source of reinterpreting material for contemporary audiences. The hybrid dance-opera, a continuation of Baroque practice, became very much a Wellesz speciality and – apart from the familiar collaborations with Richard Strauss – their libretti remain the only other texts supplied by Hofmannsthal to a composer.

Wellesz further exploited the chorus as a dramatic device that comments on the action, while at the same time moving rhythmically in such a way as to provide additional narrative illustration. This idea of movement generated Wellesz's further interest in dance, and probably no other composer of note from this time apart from Stravinsky wrote so much music specifically for ballet. Wellesz's Persisches Ballet (Persian Ballet) of 1920, his one-act Achilles auf Skyros (Achilles on Skyros) from 1921, based on a scenario by Hofmannsthal, and his exclusive use of percussion in Die Nächtlichen (Those of the Night, 1923), were considered pioneering in German contemporary dance. In discussions with the choreographer Kurt Jooss, Wellesz developed the opera-ballet Opferung des Gefangenen (Sacrifice of the Prisoner) in 1924–5, based on a scenario by Eduard Stucken. It was to be the third part of Wellesz's ‘Heroic Trilogy’ which already consisted of two works to texts by Hofmannsthal: the short opera Alkestis and the ballet Achilles auf Skyros. Opferung des Gefangenen was a further hybrid of theatrical genres in that each character was accorded both a dancing and a singing persona, a device employed nearly a decade later by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in The Seven Deadly Sins.

Apart from his short comic opera from 1927, Scherz, List und Rache⁵⁴ based on Goethe's libretto for the composer Phillip Christoph Kayser (1755–1826), Wellesz remained during his interwar years wedded to the world of antiquity. Die Bakchantinnen,⁵⁵ 1929–30, would be the culmination of this experimentation with dance, movement, chant and pageantry.

Wellesz's previous operas had enjoyed success in German opera houses. Ernst Toch was taken with Alkestis following its premiere in Mannheim, and the two composers became friendly despite their very different aesthetic ideas: Wellesz's highly individual style was, if anything, extraordinarily subjective, propelling him beyond the conventional boundaries of new-objective Modernism, while steering clear of Expressionistic excesses.

Wellesz wrote over 40 articles for Anbruch and he features as the subject in nearly as many again. It is surprising that Die Bakchantinnen, which uniquely among Wellesz's stage works was not published by Universal Edition, is not singled out for a dedicated essay, as previously with his major works. The most substantial review came from Julius Korngold in the Neue Freie Presse, spread over the first four pages of the newspaper. The critic astonishes first of all with his understanding of Euripides as a historian, author and poet. The breadth and depth of his classical education informs his review of Wellesz's treatment. He mentions the history of classical subjects and opera, and he correctly identifies Gluck as Wellesz's model. He also sees Die Bakchantinnen as part of a larger trend that includes Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and admits to a certain bemusement that contemporary operatic fashions appear to offer up various versions of the Zeitoper and its diametrical opposite: works that hearken back to antiquity. He praises the way Wellesz solves dramatic problems, and mentions that the best bits of the opera are those involving the chorus, and that ‘fortunately, there are a lot of scenes with chorus’.⁵⁷ He goes on to write that Wellesz's connection with Schoenberg's circle and his association with the ISCM will guarantee no shortage of admirers and positive publicity. From here, however, the review goes downhill, but not in the way one might expect. And as is often the case with Korngold, it is the very points he criticises that make the work so remarkable.

The tragedy of an opera such as Bakchantinnen is its lack of emotional expression.

[…] After letting this first hint of the work's most fundamental flaw slip out, something not remotely compensated for by the cacophony of semi-atonality and heterophony, let us at least hasten forward to praise the restless industry of the composer and his courage in risking what amongst his colleagues would be seen as a bathetic retrospective into antiquity. In point of fact, he goes all the way back to – dare we mention the name? – Monteverdi. And along with fellow Viennese composer Alban Berg, we must also emphasise the seriousness, character and the artistic idealism of Wellesz as well.

Since we have mentioned Alban Berg, perhaps a comparison with Wozzeck will inform the reader as to the style and manner of Bakchantinnen. Wellesz is not as intransigent in his atonality as Berg and when he does resort to it, it is on a totally different level. There are triads in Bakchantinnen, even C-major triads: allegiances to a key-signature! This is indeed a man with whom we can do business! Atonality and polytonality crash against one another in vertical directions, in other words, in the notes heaped together as chords and the layering of voices. Horizontally, the lines are generally tonal and the ability to comprehend and follow a melody is not as limited as with Wozzeck, in which much of the singing is not singing at all but is in fact, non-melodic speech. […] As this work, however, misses its fundamental harmonic power, one cannot get away from the thought that much of it is merely worthy, or over-eagerness to score points with party dogmatists. Alban Berg's methods are more organic and thus – a surprising conclusion – more tolerable, as they are rooted in colour and polyphony in a more orthodox ‘Schoenbergian’ style. […] The predictable atonal avant-garde devices are employed also by Wellesz: a lot of secessionist movement-choruses, escaping into an ostinato bass that hammers away like the Russians, Stravinsky or Prokofiev. This constant reminder of how he can compose wrong-sounding music, the scrupulous avoidance of anything that might possibly sound like a natural cadence; in a word: this negative composing.58

There follows a further comparison with Wozzeck, concluding with the observation: ‘Wozzeck in its everyday use of language is more original – as indeed Alban Berg is the more spontaneous and differentiated – and in fact technically superior composer.‘⁵⁹ To be damned by Julius Korngold in an unfavourable comparison with Alban Berg was no doubt insulting, especially as Wellesz had campaigned assiduously to have Wozzeck first performed in Berlin, and even more because Korngold had rarely condemned a work as thoroughly as he had Wozzeck, suggesting that people attending performances might prefer to leave their ears at home (though in fairness, Korngold is generous in his praise of Berg's undeniable brilliance).⁶⁰

What both Gál and Wellesz represented was the view that there were different ways of reacting to the post-Wagnerian Romanticism identified by Alfred Einstein as the ‘debilitating condition’ that undermined German music's capacity of reinventing itself, and thus maintaining its supremacy. There were, however, several young, Austro-German Jewish composers who believed that the musical ideals of Wagner represented the better way forward, lining themselves up behind such established figures as Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, Siegfried Wagner and Franz Schmidt. To them, post-Wagnerian Romanticism was not at all a spent force but a legitimate direction that offered plenty of scope to a younger generation of composers.

CHAPTER 8

A Question of Musical Potency

The Anti-Romantics