1803
In Vienna, 32-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven begins his 3rd Symphony
('Eroica' ['heroic']), in E-flat. The monumental
1st movement is inspired
by his admiration of
Napoleon,
whose wars seem to Beethoven to be a liberation from old-fashioned
tyranny, and the symphony is dedicated to him.
1804
Napoleon crowns himself Emperor of France, and a disgusted
Beethoven angrily scratches out the dedication on his new symphony
(literally, creating a hole in the title page),
and composes a monumental funeral march, 'in memory of a hero',
for the
2nd movement. The 'Eroica' is premièred in Vienna;
the symphony's length and highly dramatic style stun the audience, and
mark a boldly innovative approach to concert music, being the first
large-scale work of 'absolute' music (i.e., no text or programmatic
story-line) to incorporate dramatic narrative, using purely
musical means. Motivated by the grandeur of his
new conceptions, Beethoven also begins
the sketches for what will be his 5th Symphony.
1805
In November, Napoleon's armies invade Vienna.
By January a peace agreement is signed and the French troops
leave.
1807
36-year-old Beethoven interrupts composition of his Symphony in
C-minor [the 5th] to write the smaller-scaled and
less dramatic 4th Symphony, in B-flat.
1808
37-year-old Beethoven completes and premières in Vienna
his
5th Symphony, a work introducing several formal and
orchestral innovations subservient to its dramatic narrative.
Along with it is the debut of the 6th Symphony ('Pastoral'), in F,
written during and just after the last movements of the 5th,
and the first work for the concert-hall
of important musical quality which has a programmatic story-line behind it.
1809
Realizing that Napoleon will not be content to have the
Austrian Empire in the midst of his own European empire,
Austria acts on the offensive and declares war on France.
In May, Napoleon's armies bombard Vienna, which surrenders and
becomes a French city.
Late in the month, Franz Joseph Haydn dies in Vienna at age 77.
1810
Fryderyk Chopin is born on either February 22 or March 1, in Poland.
Robert Schumann is born in June in Zwickau, Saxony.
1811
Franz Liszt is born in October at Raiding, Hungary.
1812
During the French occupation, and most likely a result of
Napoleon's cultural policies, the
Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde ['Society of Friends
of Music'], generally known as the Musikverein
['music association'], is created, to provide the city with
a concert society, music school (Conservatory), and music library.
41-year-old Beethoven composes his 7th and 8th Symphonies.
1813
Richard Wagner is born in May in Leipzig.
Giuseppe Verdi is born.
In Venice, 21-year-old Gioacchino Rossini has the first of his many operatic
successes with the production Tancredi. This signals a
shift in the public's taste away from the heavier style of Beethoven.
Georg Buechner is born in Goddelau (Hesse, Germany). Buechner will
go on to write the play that inspires Berg's opera Wozzeck
a century later.
After a long and difficult seige, Napoleon enters an evacuated Moscow
with his army hungry and freezing. The allied European countries
defeat him, and Vienna is again under Austrian rule.
Maelzel, inventor of the metronome, convinces 42-year-old
Beethoven to write a
symphony commemorating Napoleon's defeat, for a
mechanical instrument he invented
which could play all the different parts. After re-arranging it for
a regular orchestra, with real guns and cannon in the percussion parts,
Wellington's Victory (the 'Battle Symphony') is wildly popular,
and will be Beethoven's most financially successful piece
during his lifetime.
For the next few years, there is a sudden
decline in the number of significant works Beethoven produces, prompted
most likely by his bitterness over the public's neglect of his more important
work while they favored Rossini and this 'throwaway trash' of his own, and
by the time and energy he spends as guardian and teacher of his reluctant
nephew Karl, whom Beethoven has wrested away from his mother in a bitter
struggle after the death of the boy's father (Beethoven's brother).
|
1818
After several years of work, Beethoven finishes his grandiose
Missa Solemnis ['solemn mass'], op.123,
composes the equally
large-scale 29th Piano Sonata ('Hammerklavier'), op. 106,
and begins working seriously on his 9th Symphony.
1823
Beethoven, age 52, composes his 32nd Piano Sonata, op. 111, his
last, containing the notorious
"boogie-woogie
variation", and he also finishes and premières his monumental
9th Symphony in Vienna.
|
Beethoven in his 50s
|
1824
Anton Bruckner is born in Ansfelden, near Linz, in Upper Austria, in September.
53-year-old Beethoven begins his great final series of string
quartets with the 12th Quartet, in E-flat-major, op 127.
1825
Johann Strauss, Jr. (the 'Waltz King') is born in Vienna in October.
Beethoven, 54, composes his 15th Quartet, in A-minor, op. 132,
which is interrupted by a serious illness, and his 13th Quartet,
in B-flat-major, op. 130, including the Grosse Fuge
as its finale. (The numbering reflects dates of
publication, and not of composition.)
1826
Beethoven, 55, composes in the early part of the year
his 14th Quartet, in C-sharp-minor, op. 131,
which he himself considers to be his greatest piece; in October,
he finishes the much smaller and lighter 16th Quartet,
in F-major, op. 135, his last completed work; and at the
end of the year, at the request of his publisher,
writes his very last piece, a new and much shorter and simpler finale for the
13th Quartet, and publishes
its original huge final movment
as an independent composition, the Grosse Fuge, op. 133.
1827
In March, Beethoven dies in Vienna at age 56.
1828
In November, Schubert dies in Vienna at age 31.
1830
27-year-old Hector Berlioz completes and premières his Symphonie Fantastique
in Paris. It is widely hailed by progressives as an important new
musical work, and widely condemned by conservatives as being
an assemblage of cacophonous sounds that should not be referred
to as 'music'.
In November, 20-year-old Chopin leaves Poland and goes to Vienna, intending
to travel on to Italy. He stays in Vienna until the following
summer, and because of hostilities never goes to Italy. During
his stay in Vienna, the Russo-Polish war breaks out and ultimately
Russia occupies Poland. While in Vienna he becomes quite well
known as composer and performer, and his music suddenly becomes
much more dramatic and passionate.
1831
In August, Chopin leaves Vienna and goes to Paris, which will
be his home-base for the rest of his life. He chooses to live
there as an exile, and thus is never able to return to Poland.
He becomes friends with Liszt, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn.
1833
Johannes Brahms is born on May 7 in a Hamburg slum, of German background.
His father is an aspiring professional musician.
1834
24-year-old Schumann founds the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
['new magazine for music']; it will become the leading European
journal for progressive composers.
21-year-old Buechner founds the secret Society of Human Rights,
and writes a political pamphlet, The Hessian Courier,
despising the aristocrats and attempting to incite the peasantry
into rebellion.
1835
The esteemed French music-theorist and musicologist
F. J. Fétis publishes a
scathing review of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Schumann,
intrigued by the varying opinions he's read of the work, obtains
Liszt's piano transcription of it and studies it, publishes
a German translation of Fétis's review, then his own
detailed analysis, mostly praising the piece.
A warrant is issued for the arrest of 22-year-old Buechner because
of his political activities. He flees to France, then Switzerland,
returns to the study of science, and begins writing plays to support
himself; some time within the next two years he writes Woyzeck,
which is left somewhat unfinished.
Wilhelm Jahn is born in Hof, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire,
now in the Czech Republic).
1837
Buechner dies in February at age 23.
4-year-old Brahms is taught cello, violin, and valveless horn
by his father. He progresses well on the cello, but unaccountably
(as there is none in the house) demands to learn piano.
1840
7-year-old Brahms begins piano lessons with Otto Cossel
in Hamburg, seeing
him nearly every day. Brahms quickly becomes the favored child
in the family.
1841
31-year-old Schumann marries Clara Wieck, who as a pianist was
a child prodigy,
and writes his 1st ('Spring') and 4th Symphonies
(the latter will not appear until after the next two).
1842
29-year-old Wagner produces his first opera, Rienzi.
Emil Jakob Schindler is born in Vienna.
1843
Hans Richter is born on April 4 in Györ, Hungary (then part
of the Austrian Empire).
Wagner, age 30, produces his opera Der fliegende Holländer
['the flying Dutchman'].
Brahms's piano teacher Cossel takes him to Eduard Marxsen, the best
teacher in Hamburg, to discourage Brahms's parents from succumbing
to an offer to take the 10-year-old boy to America as a prodigy.
Marxsen tries to focus on the piano, but Brahms insists on learning
composition and progresses rapidly.
1845
Wagner, 32, produces his opera Tannhäuser.
Schumann, 35, completes his Piano Concerto in A Minor.
1846
Schumann, 36, composes his 2nd Symphony.
12-year-old Brahms begins earning money by playing popular tunes
all night on the piano in Hamburg whorehouses. He keeps a book on
the music-stand
and reads poetry while he plays, and his delicate girlish features
subject him to torment from the prostitutes and the sailors who are
their customers. The experience will leave profound scars on
Brahms's psyche and sexuality. To endure it he often becomes drunk,
and the alcohol and lack of sleep undermine his health.
1847
Brahms's father removes the sickly 14-year-old to a friend's farm at
Winsen-an-der-Luhe, where he becomes strong and healthy and fills
his mind with the literary works of German Romanticism. He styles
himself 'Johannes Kreisler, Jr.', after Hoffmann's hero. Returning
to Hamburg, with renewed health that he will retain until his final
illness, he begins teaching piano and playing in more respectable
establishments to earn money. His training and temperament cause
him to value the past musical achievements of Bach, Mozart, and
especially Beethoven, more highly than those composers
holding to the 'New German School' ideology (chiefly, Liszt and Wagner).
1848
Marx and Engels publish the Communist Manifesto, and in
March an uprising in Paris touches off a wave of revolution in
the disunified German and Italian principalities and in the
nationalist Hungarian and Czech parts of the Austrian Empire.
In September, 15-year-old Brahms gives his debut as a recital soloist.
37-year-old Liszt cuts back on his magnificent career as a solo
pianist to become Court Conductor at Saxe-Weimar.
In December, Franz
Joseph becomes Emperor of Austria. He will rule
until 1916, after the outbreak of World War I.
1849
36-year-old Wagner, Court Conductor at Dresden, stands on a
roof and helps to direct fighters during an unsuccessful rebellion.
Fleeing an arrest warrant for his role in this,
he lives in exile outside Germany for 11 years.
Bourgeois prosperity eventually damps down the revolutionary tendencies
in Europe. The bloody
Hungarian
revolution comes to an end as rebels
are defeated and the prime minister and 13 generals are executed in
October; this event inspires Liszt to compose his Funerailles
[a word with the literal meaning 'funeral ceremonies' and the
figurative meaning 'death and destruction'], a new type of work
for piano which he calls a 'tone-poem'.
During the same month, on October 17 in Paris, Chopin dies of
pulmonary tuberculosis. He was a close friend of Liszt, and
this is probably another part of the inspiration for Funerailles.
One of several composers being published under the pseudonym of G. W. Marks,
16-year-old Brahms earns some money by doing hack-work, composing
little salon pieces.
1850
Schumann, 40, moves to Düsseldorf and composes his
3rd Symphony (the 'Rhenish'), his last.
In March, the Schumanns visit Hamburg to perform, and Brahms, 17, sends
Schumann a package containing several compositions. Brahms resents
Schumann when the package is returned unopened.
In Weimar, 39-year-old Liszt premières the first example of
a new type of work he invented, the symphonic poem, with forms
based on literary or visual-art subjects. 19-year-old
violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim accepts a job as concertmaster in Liszt's
orchestra.
Living in exile in Zürich, 37-year-old Wagner writes an
essay called The Artwork of the Future, in which he proclaims
that Beethoven was the last symphonist and that the symphony is dead.
1851
38-year-old Wagner produces his opera Lohengrin.
Around this time, Wagner begins his massive Der Ring des Nibelungen
project.
18-year-old Brahms composes the first work he will publish
under his own name,
the E-flat-minor Scherzo, op. 4 for piano.
1852
41-year-old Liszt composes the 1st thru 15th Hungarian
Rhapsodies.
In November, 19-year-old Brahms completes his 2nd Piano Sonata,
in F-sharp-minor, op. 2, the first written but second to be published.
1853
In January, Brahms, 19, composes the song Liebestreu
['true love']; in March, he completes the 1st Piano Sonata,
in C major, op. 1 (i.e., the piece he considered worthy of
publishing first), and composes the 2nd and 4th movements
of the 3rd Piano Sonata, in F minor, op. 5.
By now an accomplished pianist and composer,
Brahms goes on a tour playing popular 'Hungarian' (really Gypsy)
music with 23-year-old violinist Eduard Reményi,
and in May meets Reményi's old classmate Joachim, 22,
who will be a lifetime friend. When Reményi gets in
trouble with the police, Joachim sends them both to Liszt.
Liszt is very pleased while sight-reading
Brahms's E-flat-minor Scherzo,
then plays his own recently-completed Sonata in B minor,
a work whose main importance lies in Liszt's formal
innovation: an attempt to fuse
all 4 movements of the traditional sonata design into a
1-movement work.
When Liszt looks over to see what his young
visitor thinks, he finds Brahms asleep: a premonition
of the major split that will occur in 19th-century European music.
Brahms claims that he was simply listening with his eyes closed...
Thru Joachim, Brahms visits Düsseldorf and
befriends Robert and Clara Schumann. Schumann is dazzled by
Brahms's three piano sonatas, and declares him to be the prophet
of the musical future, in classically restrained
opposition to the 'New German School'
headed by Liszt and Wagner.
1854
Early in the year Brahms, 20, composes his first surviving chamber
piece, the 1st Piano Trio in B, op. 8, which he will rewrite
35 years later.
Wagner, in a letter to Liszt, expresses his first ideas about
Tristan und Isolde.
In February, Schumann, 43, is finally overtaken by his mental illness
(probably bipolar disorder) and
jumps into the Rhine in a suicide attempt.
He is rescued, and has himself committed
to an asylum in Endenich, near Bonn,
where he will live out the rest of his life.
21-year-old Brahms is inspired by this tragedy to write what
will eventually become his 1st Piano Concerto, in D Minor.
1855
Guido Adler is born in Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) in November.
1856
Schumann, who has stopped eating, dies in the asylum at age 46.
1857
44-year-old Wagner interrupts work on his
Der Ring des Nibelungen in the middle of Siegfried,
the third of the four music-dramas comprising the project,
to begin work on a different music-drama,
Tristan und Isolde.
From October to December, he composes the Prelude
to Tristan, making a bold break with
the past by giving the piece a restless harmonic structure full of
wandering chord progressions where
dissonant chords
resolve into further dissonant chords for long periods
of time.
1858
Hans Rott is born on August 1 in Vienna's 15th district,
illegitimate son of the actor Carl Mattias Roth (later Rott) and the
singer and actress Maria Rosalia Lutz.
1860
Brahms and Joachim write a manifesto condemning the 'New German school'
of composition headed by Liszt and Wagner. Intended to be published
in a music journal with dozens of signatures, it leaks out and gets
printed early in a daily newspaper with only four signatures, causing
more damage than good to Brahms's reputation.
On May 4, Carl Mattias Rott's first wife dies, and
he marries 1-year-old Han's mother Maria.
Mahler's birthplace and first home, in Kaliste, Bohemia [Czech Republic]
|
Gustav Mahler
is born on July 7 in the village of Kaliste in Bohemia (then
part of the Austrian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic),
the second of 14 children, most of whom will die in infancy.
He will grow up in the town of Iglau (Jihlava in Czech), in Moravia
(likewise, then Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic).
His ethnic background is Polish-Jewish.
|
Around the same time, 47-year-old Wagner
completes Tristan und Isolde.
He has been running from creditors and his new work expresses his
philosophy of finding redemption from the turmoil of life in a
quasi-Buddhist nirvana of death and nothingness. These ideas
attract the attention of the philosopher Nietzsche. Wagner has
a premonition of the difficulties Tristan will encounter,
and indeed, the first two attempts at a première are eventually scrapped.
On December 24, Julius Korngold is born in Brünn, Moravia
(then part of the Austrian Empire, now Brno, Czech Republic).
He will go on to become an
influential newspaper critic, and father of a precocious composer.
1862
29-year-old Brahms visits Vienna for the first time, and after
several extended stays, will make it his residence.
The physicist Hermann Helmholtz, teaching at Heidelberg University,
publishes his groundbreaking study of musical acoustics,
On the Sensations of Tone, as a Physiological Basis for the
Theory of Music. Helmholtz also has constructed a
24-tone harmonium tuned in just-intonation.
1863
39-year-old Bruckner composes his Symphony in F minor, now
known as No. 00, his earliest surviving symphony.
Franz Schalk is born in Vienna on May 27.
1864
Richard Strauss is born in Munich, of German background.
Bruckner, 40, composes a Symphony in D minor, now known
as No. 0, and his Mass No. 1, in D minor.
The eccentric
King Ludwig II of Bavaria seeks Wagner, installs him in Munich,
pays off all his debts, and offers him total financial support and love.
Wagner completely changes his outlook and becomes a devout Christian,
repelling Nietzsche.
1865
The première of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, conducted by
Hans von Bulow, finally occurs in Munich, and
turns the musical world upside-down
with its 5 hours of evaded cadences, rampant chromaticism,
and orgasmic love-scenes.
In Iglau,
5-year-old Mahler has already displayed an extraordinary talent for
reproducing tunes and other sounds on his toy accordion, begins taking
piano lessons and makes rapid progress, and writes his first compositions.
1866
Ferruccio Dante Michelangilolo Benvenuto Busoni is born on April 1
in Empoli, Italy (near Florence). His father is a virtuoso clarinettist
and his mother (whose father is German) is a pianist. He shows
talent early and takes lessons from his parents.
33-year-old Brahms finishes Eine deutsches Requiem
['a German Requiem'].
Bruckner, 42, composes his Symphony No. 1, the first to which
he gave a number, and his Mass No. 2, in E minor.
Wagner summons Hans Richter to Luzern (Switzerland) to copy the score
of Die Meistersinger.
1867
42-year-old Johann Strauss, Jr. composes The Beautiful Blue Danube,
still the most popular waltz ever written.
1868
44-year-old Bruckner, who has been organist at St. Florian in Upper Austria,
moves to Vienna and becomes Court Organist and professor at the
Conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde [society
for the friends of music]. He composes his Mass No. 3, in F minor
('Grosse Messe').
Max von Schillings is born on April 19 in Düren (Rheinland), Germany.
Still on hiatus from his Ring project,
55-year-old Wagner produces his comic music-drama Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg ['the master-singer of Nuremberg'], which
will be greatly admired, privately, by Brahms.
In America, Scott Joplin is born sometime during the summer
in northeastern Texas, to a couple who had been slaves until
the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
1869
Hans Pfitzner is born on April 23.
1870
In October, 10-year-old Mahler gives his first public
performance at the piano in his hometown of Iglau.
The heaviest early influence on him is that of Schubert.
1871
Alexander Zemlinsky is born in Vienna in October.
His ethnic background is is also Slavic
Jewish, the family originating in Galicia (Poland) on his father's side
and Muslim Bosnia on his mother's side. His father uses 'von Zemlinsky'
as his last name, but without actual noble lineage, Alex eventually
drops the 'von'.
1872
Bruckner, 48, composes his 2nd Symphony.
On August 14, 14-year-old Hans Rott's mother dies.
Willi Möllendorf is born. He will be a microtonal pioneer.
1873
Bruckner, 49, composes his 3rd ('Wagner') Symphony.
13-year-old Mahler performs at the piano in several concerts in Iglau.
1874
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is born in Vienna into a wealthy banker's family,
Jewish on his mother's side, Austrian and Italian on his father's.
Arnold Schönberg is born in September
and raised in the Leopoldstadt section of
Vienna, also of Slavic Jewish background.
Bruckner, 50, composes his 4th ('Romantic') Symphony.
Mahler's 13-year-old brother Ernst, the closest to him in both
age and affection, dies after a long illness; Mahler
says later that no other death affected him so deeply.
For the winter term 1874-75, 16-year-old Hans Rott enrolls
at the Vienna Conservatory, becoming Bruckner's favorite pupil.
On December 22, Franz Schmidt is born in Pressburg (then part
of the Austrian Empire, "Pozsony" in Hungarian, present-day Bratislava, Slovakia).
1875
42-year-old Brahms becomes the most important member of the
Austrian Commission for the Conferring of Artists' Scholarships.
At 15, Mahler goes to Vienna and begins his studies at the conservatory,
majoring in piano under Julius Epstein, and studying harmony with
Robert Fuchs and composition with Franz Krenn.
Altho not actually a pupil of Bruckner,
Mahler admires Bruckner's music, attends his lectures, and develops
a friendship that will last until Bruckner's death.
Two of Mahler's classmates and closest friends are Hugo Wolf,
a talented composer of lieder [songs],
and Hans Rott, gifted son of a famous actor, and Bruckner's favorite pupil.
All of them fall heavily under the spell of Wagner.
4-year-old Zemlinsky shows musical talent and begins taking piano lessons.
1876
Rott's father dies, leaving the 18-year-old orphaned and broke.
Sometime during this year, Mahler, 15 or 16 years old,
composes his earliest surviving piece, the
1st movement of a
Piano Quartet in A minor.
At the end
of his first year at the Vienna Conservatory, he wins
two first prizes from the Conservatory, one for piano with
his playing of a Schubert sonata,
and one for composition
with a Quintet movement. (There is much confusion
about Mahler's early quartets and quintets: only the
piano quartet movement has survived intact, and references to quintets
may in fact concern this movement.)
Wagner's artistic center at Bayreuth is completed and has its
grand opening with the first complete performance of Der Ring
des Nibelungen, spead over four evenings.
The whole endeavor is dedicated to the realization
of Wagner's ideas of the gesamtkunstwerk ['total-art-work'].
43-year-old Brahms finally completes (after 20 years of work)
and has
performed his 1st Symphony. Upholders of the classical
tradition immediately proclaim it as 'the 10th', a not-very-subtle
reference to its worthiness as a successor to Beethoven's
great 9th Symphony.
Thanks mainly to the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who is a good
friend of Brahms, the musical game
of the day is to declare yourself either a Brahmsian or a
Wagnerian, the two factions supposedly being exact opposites in
terms of style, technique, and philosophy. Brahms repeatedly claims
to be 'the best of the Wagnerites': the composer of the 'New German
School' whose work he really criticizes is Liszt.
Despite a life-long admiration of Wagner,
Mahler's later friendship with Brahms will balance his artistic views
quite a bit, and after his successful efforts at combining his
admiration of these two composers in his own work, Zemlinsky,
and then Schönberg, who both begin as Brahmsians and later
come to admire Wagner, will be the first to fully reconcile this dilemma.
Brahms and Dvorak also meet for the first time and become
good friends. Brahms will be an important supporter of Dvorak.
Hanslick writes a long article praising 10-year-old Busoni's
talents as a pianist and composer. The Busoni family moves
to Graz, Austria.
In September, Bruno Schlesinger is born in a Berlin slum, to Jewish
parents. (He will later change his name to Bruno Walter).
12-year-old Richard Strauss writes his first orchestral piece,
a Festmarch ['festival march']. It will be published
five years later with financial help from an uncle as Strauss's opus 1.
1877
In March, Wolf is dismissed from the Conservatory for breaking the rules.
During summer vacation, Brahms, 44, writes his 2nd Symphony.
Bruckner, 53, completes his 5th Symphony, and revises
his 3rd.
In September, 17-year-old Mahler enters the University of Vienna.
He drops his piano studies, to concentrate on composition.
Near the end of the year, with his friend Krzyzanowski's help,
he makes a piano-duet arrangement of Bruckner's 3rd Symphony.
It is the first of any of Mahler's work to be published.
During Mahler's attendance at the University of Vienna,
Josef Petzval is teaching his students about
31edo
and meantone,
and demonstrating instruments he has had constructed in
those tunings. Decades later, Mahler's remarks to
Schoenberg indicate that he was familiar enough with
meantone to complain about its replacement with
12edo.
In December, Brahms meets 36-year-old Dvorák and from then on will
be a strong supporter of his work.
1878
From January to September, 54-year-old Bruckner revises his
4th Symphony,
and during October and November, replaces the original Scherzo with
the famous 'Hunting Scherzo'.
During the Spring, 19-year-old Hans Rott begins composing
the 1st movement of his Symphony in E-major. On July 2
Rott presents this movement at a composition competetion, and
is ridiculed by all except Bruckner.
In July, Mahler wins a Conservatory prize for the Scherzo
of a Piano Quintet (no longer in existence).
1879
Early in the year, 19-year-old Wolf visits Brahms, whom he admires,
and who gives Wolf's work a very negative judgment. Wolf hereafter
hates Brahms, and proclaims it in many of his published reviews.
36-year-old Emil Schindler, who is still poor but has become one of
the most important 19th-century Austrain painters, marries Anna Bergen,
who has just completed her musical training and accepted a job in Leipzig,
which she now gives up. Their daughter Alma is born in Vienna in August.
Bruckner composes his String Quintet, revises his
2nd Symphony, and begins work on his 6th Symphony.
From May to October, around his 21st birthday, Hans Rott
composes the final 3 movements of his Symphony in E-major.
Wolf tells Mahler of his novel intention to write a tragic fairy-tale
opera based on the story of Rübezahl. Mahler insists
that it could
only be treated as a comedy, and a week later shows Wolf his own
libretto for it. Wolf is infuriated that Mahler has stolen his idea,
stops work on his project,
and ends their friendship. Mahler will continue to work on the
Rübezahl project for several years before finally
abandoning it and recycling some of its music into later pieces.
Karl Emil Franzos uses a chemical preparation to restore the
faded manuscript of Buechner's Woyzeck, deciphers the
illigible parts of it, changes the spelling to Wozzeck,
and issues a performing edition.
1880
Bruckner completes the fourth version of the finale to his
4th Symphony; together with the first three movements from the
second version of 1878, this comprises the surviving autograph manuscript.
22-year-old Rott completes his Symphony in E major,
which has only become known in the 1990s, and which will be
a huge influence on Mahler, who will even quote some of it
literally in his own symphonies after Rott is dead and forgotten.
15-year-old Richard Strauss composes his String Quartet in A-major,
op. 2, his first piece to be published without a subsidy.
Over the summer,
20-year-old Mahler accepts his first job as a conductor, a very
minor one, but it is the beginning of his meteoric rise to fame
as the finest opera-director of his day.
In the fall, Mahler completes his first really significant work, a cantata
called Das Klagende Lied ['the sorrowful song']. He submits it
to the competition for the
Beethoven Prize, whose jury includes Brahms and Hanslick, but he
fails to win, and for the rest of his life he
blames this loss for his inability to make a living
as a composer and for the resultant necessity to have a conducting career.
Hans Rott
|
In September, 22-year-old Hans Rott, suffering from lack of both family and money,
and from an unrequited love,
submits his symphony to the Beethoven Prize competition,
and goes to play it to Brahms, who enters a cruelly
harsh judgment: "the composition contained besides such
beauty so much triviality and nonsense that the former
could not possibly stem from Rott himself". Brahms advises
Rott to give up composition. Rott's symphony boldy combines
the styles of several major German/Austrian composers, and
in the last movement contains a theme presented 3 times which
sounds much like that from the last movement of Brahms's
own 1st Symphony -- Brahms may easily have misinterpreted
the combination of that with Wagnerian-style material as a put-down.
On October 22 or 23,
Rott goes insane while traveling on a train,
and spends the rest of his short life in an asylum, where he
continues to compose and uses his manuscripts for toilet paper,
saying 'that's what human works are worth'.
|
1881
In February, 57-year-old Bruckner sees the première of his
4th Symphony in Vienna. It is the first adequate performance
of one of his symphonies, and his first real success as a composer.
After this triumph, Bruckner makes another revision of his
4th Symphony, and finishes his 6th Symphony.
Two rich patrons buy all of 38-year-old
Schindler's paintings, suddenly making him wealthy.
He also takes on Carl Moll as a pupil.
In the fall, 21-year-old Mahler is hired for
his first important post as an opera
conductor, at the provincial theater of Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia),
for one season.
46-year-old Wilhelm Jahn becomes Director of the Vienna Opera.
1882
Richard Heinrich Stein is born on February 28 in Halle, Germany.
On March 23, in the asylum, 23-year-old Hans Rott attempts to
hang himself, unsuccessfully.
Wagner, 69, produces his last major work, the religious music-drama
Parsifal.
22-year old Mahler returns to Vienna in the fall, working on his
fairy-tale opera Rübezahl, which will remain unfinished,
and which provides material later incorporated into his
Symphonic Poem, the work we know today as his 1st Symphony.
At some point Mahler plays Hans Rott's Symphony in E-major on the
piano to Rott's friends.
8-year-old Schönberg begins taking violin lessons.
6-year-old Bruno Schlesinger starts school and also begins piano lessons.
The concerts of Charles Lamoureux in Paris begin the Wagner craze there.
1883
Wagner dies in February in Venice, at age 69.
Mahler conducts in Olmütz in the spring, then accepts a post
in Kassel in the fall. He sends his score of Das Klagende Lied
to Liszt in hopes of getting it performed by the
Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein [general German
music association]. Liszt returns it a month later, commenting somewhat
favorably on the music but condemning the text (which was written
by Mahler). Liszt refers to the piece as 'Waldmärchen' ['forest
fairy-tale'], which is the subtitle only to Part 1, and which may indicate
that this is possibly the only section which Liszt reviewed; it
is the part which Mahler later removes from the work.
Alfredo Casella is born in Turin, Italy, on July 25.
During his summer vacation, 50-year-old Brahms completes his
3rd Symphony, which is a resounding success at its première
in December in Vienna.
Anton von Webern is born in December into an aristocratic German family.
He too later drops the 'von', and is known as Anton Webern.
17-year-old Busoni lives in Vienna and becomes friends with
Goldmark and Brahms.
|
Bruckner, 59, completes his 7th Symphony.
With Wagner gone, and without any desire or active
participation on Bruckner's part,
he now becomes the embodiment of Wagnerianism in the 'musical war'.
Brahms at this point is a big admirer of Wagner, and
also completely disinterested in being spokesman for a faction
in this affair, altho he openly detests Bruckner's works.
|
Anton Bruckner
|
1884
Late in January, in Kassel, 23-year-old
Mahler gets the first opportunity to
attend concerts conducted by von Bülow and is deeply impressed.
He writes a letter to the famous conductor begging to become his
pupil; von Bülow
brushes him off and sends a copy of Mahler's letter to his superiors,
which deteriorates his relations with the Kassel Theater.
After leaving the university, Richard Strauss is encouraged by
his father to travel and meet other musicians. In Berlin in
January, 19-year-old Strauss completes his Symphony in F-minor.
Theodor Thomas, an American conductor visiting Europe, sees the score
and gives the première with the New York Philharmonic
in New York in December.
Rott, living in the asylum, dies of tuberculosis in June at age 25,
the most tragic result of the Brahms-Bruckner dispute.
At the same time, Mahler composes incidental music for Der Trompeter
von Sakkingen ['the trumpet-player of Sakkingen'], the main piece
of which, a serenade, will later be used as the 'Blumine' movment
of his Symphonic Poem. (There is also a very popular opera of
this name by Nessler, which Mahler will have to conduct frequently.)
Over the summer, Brahms, 51, composes the 1st and 2nd movments of
his 4th Symphony.
Bruckner, 60, revises his Te Deum and begins his 8th Symphony.
13-year-old Zemlinsky enters the Vienna conservatory and begins composing.
10-year-old Schönberg begins his first attempts at composition,
writing small pieces for 2 violins modelled after the duets he
plays with his teacher.
Mahler in 1884, age 24
(with that mustache he looks a bit like Queen's
Freddie Mercury,
doesn't he?...)
|
After a summer vacation spent in Iglau and Vienna, Mahler, now 24,
returns to Kassel in the fall, falls in love with Johanna Richter,
and in December composes his song-cycle Lieder eines fährenden
Gesellen ['songs of a travelling stranger'].
|
1885
Alban Berg is born on February 9 in Vienna.
Hans von Bülow, impressed with Richard Strauss's Symphony in F-minor,
offers the young composer a position as Assistant Conductor with
his Meiningen Orchestra. Brahms is present at Strauss's debut,
and congratulates him on his symphony. von Bülow soon resigns,
eventually settling in Hamburg, and Strauss takes over.
During this period he composes his Burleske for piano and orchestra.
Otto Klemperer is born in May in Breslau, Germany [now Wroclaw, Poland].
In June, Mahler is engaged by the Prague Opera for the 1885-1886
season. At a festival in Kassel (frequently cited erroneously as
the Munden festival) near his 25th birthday,
he achieves his first great success
as a conductor, leading Mendelssohn's oratorio Paulus ['St. Paul'].
During his summer vacation, 52-year-old Brahms completes his 4th
Symphony, his last, with the 3rd and 4th movements.
24-year-old Julius Korngold graduates from the University of Vienna
and becomes a lawyer. He also begins reviewing concerts for the
Brünner Morgenpost [Brünn Morning Post], then becomes
editor of the newly-formed Brünner Montags-Zeitung [Brünn
Monday Times]. An article he writes about Brahms's 4th
gets the attention of Eduard Hanslick, which eventually results
in Korngold getting a job at the main Brünn paper, the Tagesbote,
and also meeting and befriending Brahms.
42-year-old Schindler moves his family to a small castle called Plankenberg,
in Upper Austria near Vienna, where Alma, now 6, spends her childhood
amidst sumptuous parties and musical evenings.
9-year-old Bruno Schlesinger enters the Stern Conservatory in Berlin.
11-year-old Schönberg enters secondary school and becomes friends
with Oskar Adler, who teaches him the rudiments of music-theory.
Together with his cousin and Adler, the group performs string trios
every Sunday. Schönberg eagerly teaches himself as much as
he can about music as each installment arrives for his family's
encyclopedia. With the addition of another violinist to the group,
Adler produces an over-size viola, strung with zither strings and
tuned like a cello, on which Schönberg can play the cello part
of string quartets. After studying the long-awaited encyclopedia
entry for 'sonata', as well as some Beethoven string quartet scores,
he begins composing quartet movements that can be tried out by his
little ensemble.
1886
Liszt dies at Bayreuth at age 74.
During his first summer vacation in Thun, Switzerland, 53-year-old
Brahms composes his 2nd Cello Sonata, 2nd Violin Sonata,
3rd Piano Trio, and several songs for opp. 104 and 105.
After a trip to Italy, 22-year-old Richard Strauss, who has become interested
in Liszt's work, composes his first symphonic poem, Aus Italien,
which he calls a 'symphonic fantasia'.
The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen reduces the size of the orchestra, so
Strauss quits and returns to Munich as third conductor at the Court Opera.
The première of Aus Italien is received badly.
Strauss also begins a symphonic poem based on Macbeth,
which will take a few years to complete.
26-year-old Mahler begins his post in Leipzig in the fall.
1887
During his second summer vacation in Thun, 54-year-old Brahms composes
his Concerto for Violin and Cello ('Double Concerto').
Schindler is commissioned to paint and draw pictures of the Dalmatian
coastal cities, and ends the trip with a long stay on Corfu, where
8-year-old Alma begins to study music composition.
In September, 63-year-old Bruckner finishes his last-completed
and largest work, the 8th Symphony, and makes further revisions
to the 4th Symphony.
27-year-old
Mahler achieves his first great success outside of conducting by completing
Carl Maria von Weber's unfinished opera Der Drei Pintos
['the three pintos'] while in Leipzig. After its première and
publication by Kahnt, the work's popularity gains international attention for Mahler,
and will bring in royalties
that give him a measure of financial stability.
Much of the music is composed by Mahler based on themes from other
little-known works by Weber.
In October, 23-year-old Richard Strauss performs his
Symphony in F Minor in Leipzig, and meets Mahler.
The piece evidently makes a strong impression on Mahler, and
Mahler is probably also intrigued by Strauss's program-symphony ideas.
In Paris, Erik Satie composes his Sarabandes, which make use
of unresolved 'major 7th' and 'dominant 9th' chords; these will
have a strong influence on Debussy.
Near the year's end, inspired by his new compositional activity on
Der Drei Pintos, by the Strauss symphony, and by a love-affair
with Marion von Weber, the wife of the composer's grandson,
Mahler begins his sketches for two different
large-scale compositions, Symphonic Poem and Totenfeier.
1888
In March, Mahler completes his first 'official' symphonic work,
a Symphonic Poem. Mahler makes much use of old material
of his in all movements but the Finale; this movement, I think, betrays a
strong interest in Strauss's Symphony in F-minor: it begins in
this same key, which is very remote from the symphony's overall
tonality of D major.
The work is scored for the
standard symphonic orchestra of the time, with 4 horns and other winds
in pairs. (Mahler will continuously augment the orchestra in each
successive revision of the work. This original manuscript is now lost.)
The situation in Leipzig comes to a head, von Weber supposedly goes mad,
the affair between Mahler and Marion von Weber
comes to an abrupt and not-too-pretty end,
Mahler leaves town,
and over the summer
immediately finishes composition of the symphonic poem
Totenfeier
['funeral feast']. The title comes from a translation by his
friend Lipiner of a poem which has the uncanny coincidences of
a hero named Gustav who contemplates suicide after an unrequited love affair.
von Bülow settles in Hamburg.
During his third and last summer vacation in Switzerland, 55-year-old
Brahms finishes his 3rd Violin Sonata.
13-year-old Franz Schmidt moves with his family from Pressburg
to Vienna. Schmidt enrolls at the Vienna Conservatory, studying
composition with Robert Fuchs and cello with Ferdinand Hellmesberger.
|
On von Bülow's recommendation, Richard Strauss leaves Munich and becomes
assistant to Hermann Levi for the summer festival in Bayreuth.
He begins writing his own libretto to his first opera, Guntram.
In the fall Strauss becomes third conductor in Weimar, where he
premières his 2nd symphonic poem, Don Juan, which
is successful, and composes his 3rd, Tod und Verklärung
['death and transfiguration'], which is even more popular.
|
Richard Strauss in 1889
|
At 28, Mahler's career takes an abrupt turn to the big-time in the fall as
he becomes director of the Royal Budapest Opera, and strives with
great success to create a Hungarian national opera out of the
multi-lingual mess
that he inherits. His new responsibilities as Director also keep
him too occupied during the season to leave any time for composing.
Mahler's 15-year-old brother Otto follows in his footsteps and enters
the Vienna Conservatory; he has talent, but is hardly as serious
about his music studies as Gustav was.
1889
As if prophesied by the title of his latest piece (not the last time
this will happen to him),
Mahler's father dies in February, Mahler himself undergoes a painful
hemorrhoid operation over the summer and thus does no composing,
then his sister Poldi and his mother both die in the fall.
Strangely, considering how much he loved his mother, he stays with
his duties at the Opera and misses her funeral.
As the eldest surviving
son, the 29-year-old feels the burden of responsibility,
and becomes head-of-household
for the family of two brothers (Alois and Otto) and two sisters
(Justi and Emma); the brothers turn
out to be a tremendous burden indeed.
In February, 12-year-old Bruno Schlesinger has his debut as a pianist
with the Berlin Philharmonic. Seeing von Bülow conduct at
another concert, however, convinces him that he must be a conductor.
The conservatism in his training depressing him because of his
love for Wagner's operas, Schlesinger finally resolves the problem when
he discovers the Wagner scores at the library, and begins tutoring himself.
Shifting his summer vacation back to Bad Ischl, the main compositional
activity of 56-year-old Brahms is not a new piece, but a revision
of his youthful 1st Piano Trio from 1854.
During the summer, in Paris, the Exposition Universelle
presents folk music from all over Europe and the 'Orient': Scandinavia,
Spain, the gypsies, Arabia, Africa, and perhaps most influential
of all, Javanese gamelan. Many Parisian composers witness various
performances and explore facets of their impressions in their
subsequent pieces. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov conducts two concerts of
Russian nationalist music, and this begins the 'Franco-Russian
alliance' in music.
Zemlinsky studies harmony and counterpoint with Robert Fuchs.
In October, the Klemperers move to Hamburg, which 4-year-old
Otto will consider his hometown.
In November, Mahler's first important première as a composer, that of his
'Symphonic Poem', in 2 parts, in Budapest, is a failure.
Part 1 (the 1st movement, 'Blumine' serenade from Der Trompeter,
and scherzo)
receives some applause, but Part 2 (the 'Frère Jacques'
funeral march and finale) meets with a total lack of comprehension
from the conservative audience. (The manuscript from this performance,
in a copyist's hand with revisions by Mahler,
is now in the Rosé collection at the
University of Western Ontario.)
Shohé Tanaka, a pupil of Helmholtz, has
JI
harmoniums built in Berlin and Stuttgart.
von Bülow is so impressed with what he calls the
Tanaka Enharmonium that he orders one for himself.
1890
In March, after a year of work, Bruckner completes the revision of
his 8th Symphony. In addition to several cuts, the revision
augments the woodwinds from double to triple.
Bad reviews at the end of the season indicate that
Mahler's initial success at reforming the Budapest Opera
has already deteriorated. He finally takes a real vacation,
at Hinterbrühl in the Wiener Wald [Vienna Woods].
18-year-old Zemlinsky is recognized as the 'best pianist in the
Conservatory' in his class.
26-year-old Richard Strauss finishes Macbeth, which is his
4th completed symphonic poem.
24-year-old Busoni marries in Moscow, then pursues his career
as a piano virtuoso in Boston and New York.
Sándor Alexander Jemnitz is born in Budapest on August 9.
57-year-old Brahms, satisfied with a long and successful career,
and feeling his work to be increasingly irrelevant to the changing
artistic Zeitgeist, composes his 2nd String Quintet
in G, op. 111
and intends for it to be his last composition.
The première in Vienna in November is a sensation.
Brahms adores Don Giovanni so much that he claims
to prefer silently reading the score to seeing
the opera performed, in his opinion,
always inadequately. In Budapest in December, he is tricked by a few friends
into attending a performance of it conducted by Mahler, and Brahms
is so pleased with Mahler's rendition that, while he continues to hold a
low opinion of Mahler's compositions, he proclaims Mahler
a genius and becomes an important ally.
1891
Schönberg's father dies in Vienna on New Year's Eve in the flu epidemic,
and the 16-year-old
is forced to leave school and begin working as a clerk in a bank.
His boss soon complains to Schönberg's mother that he is covering
all of his papers with musical notations.
The new intendant of the Budapest Opera, Count Bela Zichy,
is an ardent Hungarian nationalist with
a real interest in music, and he usurps much of the director's powers
from Mahler, who won't stick around much longer. At his last appearances,
however, the audience enthusastically shouts 'Viva Mahler!' and does
not wish to see him go.
By March, 30-year-old Mahler is conductor at the Hamburg Opera.
It doesn't take long for von Bülow, who had ignored Mahler's
request to become his disciple, to notice the young man's
talent for conducting. 6-year-old Klemperer often sees Mahler walking around town, and
intrigued with his strange faces and unusual way of walking,
stares at him 'as if he were a deep sea monster'.
For the summer, Mahler rents a flat
with his brothers and sisters at Perchtoldsdorf, near Vienna,
possibly composing a few Wunderhorn Lieder for voice and piano,
and takes a sailing trip thru Scandinavia for his vacation.
During his summer vacation at Bad Ischl, 58-year-old Brahms, inspired
by both the success of his 2nd Quintet and his new love for
the clarinet playing of Richard Mühlfeld, breaks his retirement
vow and composes his great Clarinet Quintet in B minor
and Clarinet Trio in A minor.
On September 27, 30-year-old Julius Korngold marries Josephine
Witrofsky. Hanslick begins considering Korngold for the position
of his successor when he retires from the Neue Freie Presse
[New Free Press], which is at this time the leading newspaper
in Vienna, and he commissions Korngold to review provincial concerts
and, later, events outside Austria, for the Neue Freie Presse.
In the fall, Mahler encounters the writings of Nietzsche, which have
a tempororary but strong influence on his thought.
At the end of September back in Hamburg Mahler finally
gets the opportunity to play one of his compositions,
Totenfeier, on the piano
for von Bülow, who has come to have tremendous admiration for Mahler's
abilities as a conductor, but whose negative reaction to Mahler's creative
work includes the comment:
[von Bülow]
If what I have just heard is music, then I no longer understand anything
about music! Compared to your piece, Tristan seems
like a Haydn symphony.
This is obviously a huge blow for Mahler, whose own admiration
for von Bülow's conducting had filled him with hopes of having
another important champion not just of his conducting but of
his compositions.
His disappointment is alleviated somewhat at the end of November
when the usually aloof Brahms visits his
old hometown and shows real friendship towards Mahler.
Having Brahms on his side will open a lot of doors for Mahler.
At the same time, Mahler's success as a conductor gives him the
confidence to know that his compositions will not live only on
paper, but rather will also come alive in performance under his
own baton. This is
an important aspect of Mahler's compositional routine, for he
continues to revise and refine every new symphony after its première,
and indeed also after subsequent performances under his direction.
In Vienna, Tanaka introduces Bruckner to his
JI Enharmonium
by playing Wagner's Lohengrin prelude on it. In a lecture,
Bruckner relates how he used to pass on the dictum of his teachers
that 'our ear cannot tolerate pure intonation, and that for
this reason tempered tuning was invented', but that he could
never again say this after having heard Tanaka's instrument.
I suspect that Bruckner's familiarity with this instrument
has something to do with the harmonic experiments in his
9th Symphony, which he is now composing.
In December, 17-year-old Schönberg saves up enough money to buy
an old second-hand cello, to replace the makeshift instrument he
has been playing.
In Montmartre (Paris), 29-year-old Claude Debussy meets Satie at the Auberge du Clou
cabaret where Satie plays piano. Satie talks to Debussy about
the need to write really French music 'without Sauerkraut',
(i.e., Wagner) and to transpose the methods of painters like Cezanne,
Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec to music.
1892
Mahler in 1892, age 31
|
31-year-old Mahler's friendships with Brahms and von Bülow,
and his growing confidence as a conductor,
inspire him back into creative activity
after a 3½-year hiatus, and with the lightest schedule of his
period in Hamburg giving him some extra time, he composes 5 of
the lieder from Des Knaben Wunderhorn ['the boy's magic horn']
for voice and orchestra, which he collectively titles Humoresken,
during the winter:
- Der Schildwache Nachtlied ['the night watchman's song'],
- Verlor'ne Müh ['wasted effort'],
- Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? ['who made up this little song?'],
- Das himmlische Leben ['the heavenly life'] (later used as finale to
the 4th Symphony),
- Trost im Unglück ['comfort in unhappiness'].
|
In my opinion, the attention from Brahms
probably has a lot to do with Mahler's renewed interest in composing.
At the same time, he engages in a deep study of
Bach's cantatas, and three small volumes of his early songs are Mahler's
first compositions to be published.
In April, 18-year-old Otto Mahler leaves the Conservatory without
graduating, and perhaps even without Mahler knowing.
Summer brings an engagement for Mahler in London,
and altho publicly successful,
Mahler is displeased with the artistic results and resists future offers,
this is in part also to keep his summers free for composing.
He composes another Wunderhorn song, Urlicht
['primal light'], which he will incorporate next year
into a new symphony.
Edward Steuermann is born on June 18 in Sambor, Poland.
In Paris over the summer Debussy buys a copy of Maeterlinck's
drama Pelléas et Mélisande, and immediately
begins sketching parts of it to music. The resulting opera
will occupy him for the next 10 years.
On July 25, Julius Korngold's oldest son Hanns Robert is born in Brünn.
During the Hamburg cholera epidemic, on a trip to Sylt in the
North Sea, Schindler has intestinal pains, but is misdiagnosed
by the doctors and continues travelling. He
dies on August 9, at age 50. 12-year-old Alma is crushed by the loss.
After the family relocates to Vienna, she begins taking counterpoint
lessons with Joseph Labor, a blind organist, and also becomes a
fervent admirer of Wagner's music-dramas.
28-year-old Richard Strauss has also become quite ill, and goes on a long holiday
in Greece and Egypt to recuperate, where he composes most of Guntram.
20-year-old Zemlinsky completes his studies at the Vienna Conservatory and
presents the 1st movement of his Symphony in D minor as his
graduation work.
Back in Hamburg in the fall von Bülow tells
Mahler that he cannot make sense
out of Mahler's strange songs, and that Mahler must conduct the
performance in November. Mahler finally gives up hope of having
von Bülow as an advocate of his compositions.
In December, 68-year-old Bruckner experiences the greatest triumph
of his career at the première of his 8th Symphony in Vienna.
1893
In January, at Hamburg, 32-year-old Mahler revises his Symphonic Poem.
Aside from changes in orchestration and
increasing the number of winds from double to triple,
the chief revision is a whole new
beginning for the recapitulation of the finale; otherwise the form remains
the same. (This manuscript is now in the Osborn collection at Yale
University.)
Brahms visits old friends in Hamburg at this time,
and I think it is likely that he visits with Mahler, and that this
further contact with the great master of concert music
may be the inspiration for Mahler to 'renovate' his first symphonic work
and to carry on by expanding smaller old projects into vast new ones.
In this year begins a pattern of quiet summer vacations devoted to
composing which Mahler will continue for the rest of his life
(with only three interruptions, due to illness and his daughter's death);
this too may be a habit that he picks up from Brahms. The chosen
location for the next 4 years is Steinbach, where he has the
first of his famous Hauschen ['composing huts'] built,
on a small peninsula away from the main house.
Mahler decides to use Totenfeier as the
1st movement
of a new symphony, and over the summer embarks upon his
2nd Symphony,
composing the 2nd movement (a Schubertian Andante,
from sketches made in 1888 in Leipzig) and 3rd movement
(Scherzo, expanded from his song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt
['St. Anthony of Padua's sermon to the fishes']), and
incorporating intact a song written the previous summer (Urlicht
['primal light']) as the 4th movement.
He wants to write a big choral finale, à la Beethoven's
9th Symphony,
and searches thru 'all human literature', including even the Bible,
but finds nothing suitable for a text.
In America, for 6 months from May to October, the World's Fair known as the
Columbian
Exposition is held in Chicago, attracting 27 million
visitors. 25-year-old Scott Joplin is there.
The African-American style of music known as "ragtime",
previously confined mostly to the area around St. Louis, Missouri,
is introduced to the larger public for the first time. Over the course
of the next decade the ragtime craze will mark the first widespread
acceptance among Western culture of an African-American art-form.
During a teaching engagement in New York,
52-year-old Antonin Dvorák,composes his
'New World' Symphony, with themes reminiscent
of African-American ['Negro'] spirituals and Native-American dances.
Dvorák's symphony is intended in part as an illustration of
how American composers might develop a national style of art-music based on
their indigenous folk music, and he will later encourage them
to do so ... with respect to ragtime, this is what Scott Joplin will accomplish.
Oscar Wilde's play Salome, based on the biblical story
and written in French, is published in Paris.
Alois Hába
is born on June 21 in the small village of Vizovice in Moravia .
At Bad Ischl for the summer, 60-year-old Brahms completes several
sets of miniature piano pieces begun the year before, his
Rhapsodies, Fantasies, Impromptus, etc., of opp. 116-119.
21-year-old Zemlinsky joins the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein
['Viennese Tone-Artists Association'], and thus secures performances
of several of his chamber works.
Back in Germany, 29-year-old
Richard Strauss, fully recovered from his illness,
completes his first opera
Guntram in September.
17-year-old Schlesinger obtains a 1-year post at the Cologne Opera.
In October, Mahler gives a performance of the revised Symphonic
Poem in Hamburg. Always attracted to literary themes,
it is now presented under the name
'Titan', ein Tondichtung in symphonieform
['Titan', a tone-poem in symphony-form], a title certainly inspired by
the novel by Jean Paul (one of Mahler's favorite authors, altho Mahler
denied that the symphony was in any way 'about' the book),
with descriptive titles and information for each of the parts and movements.
It is received by this audience much
better than at the première, but critics still pan it.
Around this time, 18-year-old Schönberg and other young music
students found the modest little amateur 'Polyhymnia' Orchestra.
The only cellist in the group (and playing with incorrect technique,
using violin fingering), Schönberg becomes friends with its conductor,
Zemlinsky, who has a reputation as one of the most diligent and
talented young musicians in Vienna. Schönberg's earliest dated
manuscripts, two songs, survive from this summer; one of them,
Schilflied ['reed song'], is awarded a composition prize
from Polyhymnia, in a competition organized by Zemlinsky.
In November, 22-year-old Zemlinsky premières his Piano Quartet
in D-major in Vienna.
At the end of the year, Mahler is occupied with another revision of
his early work Das Klagende Lied, in hopes of performing it.
In this version, he eliminates the entire Waldmärchen
['forest fairy-tale'] (the original Part 1), and the offstage band
which appears later in the work.
In Paris just before Christmas, Debussy premieres his
Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune
['Prelude to the Afternoon of a fawn'], to disinterested
reviews in the press and criticism from musicians.
The piece is today praised as a radically innovative departure from
earlier musical styles.
1894
von Bulow dies in February in Cairo, and while attending his funeral
in Hamburg in March,
33-year-old Mahler hears the choir sing a hymn set to Klopstock's
poem Aufersteh'n ['resurrection'] that finally inspires him to
write his finale: the 2nd Symphony is completed that summer
in Steinbach.
Having been snubbed twice earlier in his life, when the position would
have been important to him, Brahms ironically receives an offer for the
post of music director from the Hamburg Philharmonic, and he refuses.
Over the summer Brahms, now 61, writes his two Clarinet Sonatas,
op. 120.
Mahler has been unsuccessfully campaigning to secure the première of
Richard Strauss's first opera Guntram, which finally has its debut at
the 30th Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein [general German
music association] festival in Weimar in May. The festival also includes
the new fairy-tale opera Hänsel und Gretel by Humperdinck,
and another performance of Mahler's 'Titan' Symphony in June,
announced in the program with the same titles and descriptions as
at Hamburg the year before. (This manuscript is now in the Bruno
Walter collection at the New York Public Library. At some later point,
Mahler increases the woodwinds from triple to quadruple, and adds
three more horn parts.)
Mahler's work is again a failure, received with a mixture of
booing and weak applause; there are fights in the street after
the performance over the varied opinions of it.
Aside from one good review, the newspapers are again hostile.
Mahler blames the poor reception on a bad performance, which
ensures that he will rehearse future performances of his works
with much greater care.
Bruckner, now 70, is working on his 9th Symphony,
the last movement of which he will never complete.
It is my hunch that Bruckner's admiration of the
JI tuning of Tanaka's Enharmonium
have something to do with the strange harmonies
Bruckner used in many places in the scherzo and
adagio of this piece.
(To be explored in a future webpage...)
Richard Strauss, 30, composes his 5th symphonic poem,
Also Sprach Zarathustra
['thus spake Zarathustra'], based on Nietzsche's book.
(The opening to this piece becomes hugely popular when
it is used by Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 film
2001: A Space Odyssey.)
The piece becomes notorius for its unresovled ending
mixing a B-major triad on the trombones with a pizzicato
C on the basses.
28-year-old Busoni settles in Berlin, where he will live
for the rest of his life.
In Sedalia, Missouri (America), 26-year-old Scott Joplin
is the leader of the Texas Medley Quartette, which is really
an 8-member double quartet, singing in a capella "barbershop" style.
The Quartette goes on a tour which takes them as far as
Syracuse, New York, where Joplin's compositions are published
for the first time -- Please Say You Will and
A Picture of Her Face, two songs of the sentimental type popular
at the time among White audiences.
Probably written during this year by 19-year-old Schönberg
(or possibly even earlier) is his
Presto in C for string quartet,
his earliest surviving complete
movement for an instrumental ensemble; the style reminds one of
Schubert more than anyone else. Seeking the advice of a respected
musician, this quartet-movement is performed for Alma's teacher Joseph Labor,
who is impressed and insists that Schönberg must become a musician,
even despite his lack of training.
Schönberg is therefore delighted when his employer goes
bankrupt and closes down, and proclaims that he'll never work in a
bank again. (A famous quip by Zemlinsky:
'Schönberg preferred his music-notes to his bank-notes'.)
At this time, on Labor's recommendation,
he begins studying with Zemlinsky; Schönberg later
credits Zemlinsky's instruction in counterpoint and composition
as the only formal training he ever received from a teacher.
He and Zemlinsky both earn money by doing copying and orchestrating
of other composers's work.
18-year-old Schlesinger is engaged at the Hamburg Opera, where
he meets Mahler, who recognizes his talent and becomes a close friend.
Mahler exerts a powerful influence over his young colleague.
In October, Schönberg completes a set of 3 Piano Pieces
(1st piece,
3rd piece),
his earliest surviving dated instrumental compositions, and
leaves unfinished a
Scherzo in F-sharp-minor for piano;
they betray an intense admiration of Brahms (especially Brahms's
Rhapsodies, Fantasies, Impromptus, etc., of opp. 116-119
from the year before), which is probably at
least partly the result of Schönberg's contact with Zemlinsky.
Zemlinsky is also already quite familiar with, and fond of,
Wagner's musical idiom, and eventually this will also rub off
on Schönberg, but from the evidence in Schönberg's surviving
compositions, this will not happen until after Mahler's arrival
at the Vienna Opera and his radical new productions of Wagner.
During the fall and winter in Hamburg, Mahler copies and corrects his
2nd Symphony with a view towards a performance with
Richard Strauss's orchestra in Berlin, and has a reading rehearsal in
January. He also spends a lot of time retouching the
orchestration of Beethoven's symphonies for his own performances
in the subscription concerts.
Quite an important year along the Paris-Hamburg-Berlin-Vienna musical axis.
1895
Thru Mahler's help, his 21-year-old brother Otto has secured a
post as conductor in Leipzig. Back in Vienna in February, Otto, whose
capriciousness caused Mahler
much pain and unneeded expense, and whom Mahler once said was
'a man of great talent, far more gifted than I',
commits suicide by shooting himself.
(According to Bruno Walter, Otto left 2 symphonies and an almost-complete
3rd, and lieder, some with orchestra and some with piano.
His music vanishes when Alma's house is damaged during the bombing of Vienna
in World War 2.)
It seems
entirely possible to me that Mahler's support of Schlesinger at
this time is a transference of his desire to see Otto succeed,
since they are so close in age; but Mahler doesn't think very
highly of Schlesinger's compositions, and so in his opinion
Schlesinger's abilities are
purely recreative, and I think Mahler will also later find in
Schönberg a gifted composer of his brother's generation to whom
he can provide assistance.
In March, Mahler gives the incomplete première (the first three
movements only, announced in the program as 'the First Part')
of his 2nd Symphony, in Berlin. It is
surprisingly successful with the audience,
altho the newspaper critics are more negative.
(The 'Titan' will henceforth be known as the 1st Symphony.)
In Hamburg, Mahler's subscription concerts have been less and less well
attended, and he is not hired for the following season.
Also in March, at the première of 24-year-old Zemlinsky's
Orchestral Suite in a Society of Music-Friends concert in
Vienna, Zemlinsky meets Brahms.
Over the summer, Zemlinsky finishes his first opera Sarema, which is
jointly (with Thuille's opera Theuerdank) awarded the prize
from Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria.
Zemlinsky encourages Schönberg into more practical musical roles
in trying to help his friend earn a living,
and around his 21st birthday, Schönberg becomes conductor of a
metal-workers choral society.
Karl Lüger and his anti-semitic Christian Socialist party
win the May elections, setting the stage for a
drastic change in Austrian politics that will lead to Lüger's
becoming mayor of Vienna, and eventually to Hitler's victories.
31-year-old Richard Strauss composes Till Eulenspiegels Lustige Streiche
['Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks'], his 6th symphonic poem.
Hanslick at 70 retires from his position at the University of Vienna,
and is succeeded by Mahler's 39-year-old friend Guido Adler, who becomes
professor of music history.
Around his 35th birthday over the summer in Steinbach,
probably the most productive of his life,
Mahler composes all the shorter movements
of his gigantic 3rd Symphony
(the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,
5th, and
6th),
as well as several Wunderhorn lieder.
In the fall, the gifted young soprano Anna von Mildenburg debuts at
Hamburg. Mahler senses her talent immediately and rehearses with
her every day, leading inevitably to a stormy love affair.
In November, Alma's widowed mother Anna marries
Schindler's former pupil Carl Moll, himself a talented painter.
December brings the full première of Mahler's 2nd Symphony
in Berlin, and is his first important success as a creative artist,
the real beginning of his career as a composer. Half of the cost
is supplied by Hermann Behn, a wealthy Hamburg arts patron and
music-lover, who also writes a 2-piano arrangement of the work, and the
other half by Wilhelm Berkan.
Also in December (but with a copyright date of 1896),
Mahler's original piano score of Urlicht
and Behn's 4-hand 2-piano arrangement of Mahler's 2nd Symphony
are published by Friedrich Hofmeister in Leipzig. These pieces are
the second group of Mahler's works to be published, and also financed by Behn.
(Later taken over by Weinberger in Vienna, still later,
by Universal Edition).
1896
In February, at the suggestion of Richard Heuberger,
21-year-old Schönberg composes his
Six 4-hand Piano Pieces.
In March, a concert in Berlin is devoted to Mahler's music:
the Totenfeier [the original version of the 2nd Symphony's
1st movement], the première of the Lieder
eines fahrenden Gesellen, and the Symphony in D-major
for large orchestra, revamped out of what was the 'Titan'
by dropping the sentimental 'Blumine' slow movement and
eliminating the program and titles. (A manuscript of this version
exists, but is inaccesible at present, in a private collection.)
Played to a half-empty hall, the songs are applauded,
but the symphonic pieces get a disappointing reception.
Also in March, Zemlinsky's String Quintet in D-minor
is performed in Vienna. Brahms hears it and invites Zemlinsky to bring
the piece to him; he goes over it with much criticism, bringing
out a Mozart Quintet as an example from which to learn, but then,
showing appreciation of Zemlinsky's talent and
inquiring about his finances, Brahms offers him a monthly
allowance so that the young man may be able to
devote more time to composition.
Assured of an autumn performance of his Blumenstück
['flowers-piece'] (the 2nd movement of his 3rd Symphony),
Mahler completes orchestration of it in April.
In May, Clara Schumann has a stroke and is very ill. Under this
tragic inspiration, Brahms, just after his 63rd birthday, composes
Vier ernste Gesänge ['four serious songs'], op. 121, his last
completed work. Clara dies later that month in Frankfurt, at age 76.
It is a tremendous loss for Brahms, who is himself now ill from
liver cancer.
21-year-old Franz Schmidt graduates "with excellence" from
the Vienna Conservatory, and secures a position as cellist with
the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, often playing under Mahler's direction.
24-year-old Zemlinsky wins a prize from the Tone-Artists Association
for his
Piano Trio with Clarinet,
op. 3. Brahms had provided
the prize money, and he recommends the work to his publisher Simrock,
who accepts and publishes it the next year.
As with Mahler, the support from Brahms helps bring Zemlinsky greater
recognition from the musical public.
32-year-old Richard Strauss composes Don Quixote, fantasy variations
for cello and orchestra, which can be considered his 7th symphonic poem.
During his summer vacation in Steinbach, with Schlesinger as his
guest for the summer, 36-year-old Mahler composes the massive
1st movement
which completes his 3rd Symphony.
At Bad Ischl, he visits Brahms for the last time, and shows
the old master the score to his 2nd Symphony.
Brahms considers its Scherzo to be a work of genius (an
opinion he rarely gave out), and says 'I now consider Mahler
the king of the revolutionaries'. As is always the case with Brahms's
ambiguous and sarcastic humor, this may be taken as either a compliment or
a put-down, but in any case, Brahms states clearly that he recognizes
Mahler's superiority over Richard Strauss.
In September, just before his 22nd birthday, Schönberg begins
composing a
Serenade in D for small orchestra, for the
Polyhymnia Orchestra to which he and Zemlinsky belong. Only
the 1st movement is completed; it sounds very much like Brahms.
In America in the Fall, Scott Joplin publishes Combination March
[hear my version
which uses, for each of the four strains, the notated form for the
first time and a syncopated ragtime version improvised by me for the
second time] and The Great Crush Collision March
[version as notated,
improvised
syncopated ragtime version], the latter including a programmatic
commemoration of an actual staged locomotive crash. It is clear
to me that Joplin played these "marches" in the ragtime form but
did not yet know how to notate the rhythms properly.
20-year-old Schlesinger bids farewell to Mahler in Vienna
and begins his engagement in Breslau [now Wroclaw, Poland].
Bruckner dies in Vienna on October 10 at age 72, leaving his
9th Symphony unfinished.
In November before a packed hall, the Berlin Philharmonic under Nikisch
premières Mahler's Blumenstück, and it receives
the best reception (from both audience and critics) so far for Mahler.
In December, the same orchestra under Weingartner performs the
piece in Hamburg, and the audience insists on an encore. Also in
December, Mahler conducts the first two movements of his
2nd Symphony in Leipzig, the first movement to mixed applause
and boos, and the 2nd movement more successfully.
Zemlinsky has two premières in Vienna in December: his
Clarinet Trio in D-minor,
op. 3 and his
String Quartet
in A-major, op. 4. They both sound very much like Brahms.
1897
Composed early this year, or possibly even the year before,
is the first version of 22-year-old Schönberg's
String Quartet in D-major
(1st movement);
the work will not be put into its definitive form until after
Zemlinsky reviews it and offers criticism. Schönberg later
confirms summer 1897 (after Brahms's death)
as the date of composition of the Quartet, and the only surviving manuscript
(the revised version) bears the date of October 1897,
but Hanns Eisler (who will study with Schönberg decades later)
and Zemlinsky both indicate this work as the quartet which Zemlinsky
shows to Brahms, who is intrigued with the piece, so the discarded version
of the Quartet had to be composed before Brahms died. When Zemlinsky
tells Brahms that Schönberg has been scraping out a living by
arranging and copying music, Brahms offers to pay Schönberg's tuition
to study at the Conservatory; Schönberg turns it down.
Altho the earlier version was apparently quite different from
the revised one which we know, the Quartet in D is indeed
the most significant early piece composed by Schönberg, and the
only one likely to attract such strong attention from Brahms.
It is possible that this is the last piece of new music Brahms reviewed.
The complete orchestral score of Mahler's 2nd Symphony is published
by Hofmeister: the third publication of Mahler's music,
and the first of his symphonies to appear in print in full score.
In January, Schuch conducts the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th movments of
Mahler's 2nd Symphony in Dresden, and
Nikisch conducts the Blumenstück [from the 3rd
Symphony] in Leipzig, all with great success.
Knowing that his being a Jew is the biggest obstacle to his career,
in February Mahler has himself baptised as a Catholic.
Preceded by a lecture about Mahler
which was published as a booklet, in March, in Berlin,
Felix Weingartner conducts 2nd, 3rd, and 6th movements
of Mahler's 3rd Symphony, before a full house, to
very mixed reviews. Later that month, in the midst of his
first international concert tour, Mahler successfully performs
the Blumenstück in Budapest.
Brahms dies in Vienna on April 3 at age 63.
|
The same day brings the founding of the Vererinigung Bildender
Künstler Österreichs ['Association of Austrian
Fine Artists'], commonly known as the Secession. Chiefly the
idea of Klimt, Engelhart, and Moll, it is the most important
event in the fin-de-siècle Vienna art-world.
Because of her ties to both Klimt and Moll, Alma Schindler
is intimately involved with the Secession.
Alma is considered by those in her social
circle to be the 'prettiest girl in Vienna', and she is wooed
by many older and well-established men, both single and married.
Her strongest ambition
is to make a mark as a great composer.
|
Alma at 18, with an example of
her notoriously illegible handwriting in her signature
|
Ever since his college days, Mahler has considered Vienna his
hometown. His wish to return is finally fulfilled,
in large part thanks to the support Brahms had provided, as
he leaves Hamburg in May at age 36 and becomes conductor
and eventually Director
and supreme tyrant of the Vienna Opera, beginning a decade of artistic
achievement that will be remembered long afterward. 62-year-old
former Director
Wilhelm Jahn has failing eyesight and is ousted when the new season
begins in the fall.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold is born in May in Brünn, the younger of
the two sons of the eminent newspaper music-critic Julius.
Contracting a bad sore throat soon after arriving in Vienna, Mahler
spends the summer convalescing and does no composing.
21-year-old Schlesinger secures a contract for the Stadttheater
in Riga, to begin in 1898, but wants to leave Breslau immediately,
so he obtains a post for the coming season as principal conductor
in Pressburg [also known in Hungarian as Poszony;
now Bratislava, Slovakia]. Over the summer, he
visits Mahler in Vienna, gets to know many of Mahler's friends,
and feels that he belongs in Vienna, which he visits occasionally
from Pressburg (only a short train ride away).
Schönberg himself gives the summer of 1897 as the date
of composition of his
String Quartet in D-major
(1st movement) -- altho
apparently it must have originally been composed earlier and
shown to Brahms (see above). The 2nd movement is originally
a Scherzo,
composed 27 July - 7 August, which will later be replaced,
in accordance with Zemlinsky's suggestion.
Also during this summer Schönberg makes the piano-vocal score
of Zemlinsky's Sarema. Sometime during these years
Schönberg also becomes very well acquainted with Wagner's work,
claiming later that by the time he was 25 (1899) he had seen each of
Wagner's operas 20 to 30 times, evidently mostly in performances that were
conducted by Mahler.
Zemlinsky spends the summer composing his Symphony in Bb-major.
In October, his first opera, Sarema, is premièred
in Munich. He also begins his second opera, Es war einmal
['once upon a time'].
In the fall Schönberg shows his String Quartet
in D-major (1st movement)
to Zemlinsky. Subject to heavy revision after Zemlinsky's critique,
Schönberg composes the revisions of the 1st and 4th movements,
and two entirely new movements (the
2nd [Intermezzo]
and 3rd) in the fall. Sounding very much like
Brahms (and, betraying Schönberg's repertoire as a performer,
even more like Dvorak), but with some boldly abrupt modulations,
the work will be successfully received at both
its private and public premières the following year.
It is Schönberg's last 'apprentice'-work.
After finishing the Quartet, Schönberg is inspired by
the poetry of Richard Dehmel into writing songs which provoke
his own more personal compositional tendencies
(Mädchenfrühling),
with which he is now able to better integrate the techniques
learned from Brahms.
Late in the year, Mahler's friend Guido Adler, the musicologist,
succeeds in getting a grant from a Bohemian art society,
to subsidize the publication of Mahler's
1st and 3rd Symphonies, which are printed by Eberle
and published by Weinberger the following year in Vienna.
Mahler becomes a member of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Autoren,
Komponisten und Musikverleger, or AKM ['Society of authors,
composers and music-publishers'].
With
- the deaths of Bruckner and Brahms,
- Mahler's appointment to the Vienna Opera,
- the public emergence of Schönberg, and
- the founding of the Secession by their visual-artist compatriots,
all happening within a few months of each other,
the musical climate among composers in Vienna quickly begins
to shift toward a more modern outlook, while the public's taste remains
very largely conservative.
1898
|
March is an important month for 37-year-old Mahler: in Prague, he gives the
fifth performance, and the first successful one,
of his 1st Symphony,
and Sylvain Dupuis conducts Mahler's 2nd Symphony
in Liège: the first performance of a complete Mahler symphony
without the composer's presence. It is so successful that a repeat
is scheduled.
During this spring, Mahler completes what is
intended to be the definitive
revision of his youthful Das Klagende Lied, with an eye
toward its publication. Mahler is also offered, and seriously
considers, a job as concert conductor and
Director of the National Conservatory in New York City.
|
Mahler in 1898
|
Zemlinsky gets on the board of the Tone-Artists
Association, and brings Schönberg in as a member.
During March, Schönberg's
String Quartet in D-major
is premièred at a private Tone-Artists Association concert
in Vienna. At this time, Schönberg also converts to Protestantism,
being baptised as a Lutheran.
Mahler undergoes another operation to stop his more and more
frequent hemorrhages, and spends the summer in pain at Vahrn,
composing only the 3 Wunderhorn Lieder:
Lied des Verfolgten im Turm ['song of the prisoner in the tower'],
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen ['where the proud trumpets blow'],
and another unidentified one.
34-year-old Richard Strauss composes his 8th and last symphonic poem,
Ein Heldenleben ['a hero's life'].
Over the summer, Schönberg begins exploring ideas learned from
the 'New German School', and works on a symphonic poem called
Frühlings Tod ['the death of spring'],
which he eventually abandons,
and composes his 2 Songs, op. 1. These pieces are more
expansive than his previous ones, but Schönberg's style will
change again with the works written next year, after a powerful
new poetic stimulus.
Schlesinger spends the summer in Berlin, then, at 22, becomes chief
conductor at the theater in Riga (Latvia).
On August 25, Mahler's sister Emma marries Eduard Rosé and
they emigrate to America, where Eduard becomes cellist with the
Boston Symphony.
In December, 24-year-old Schönberg's
String Quartet in D-major
is given its public première in Vienna, and is well
received. In his review of the concert, Hanslick remarks: 'there is
a new Mozart growing up in Vienna'.
1899
Mahler goes to Liège himself in January
for another performance of his 2nd Symphony.
Altho the performers are not adequate, the
audience is deeply impressed.
In March, Mahler conducts his 1st Symphony in Frankfurt-am-Main.
The work is met with polite (rather than enthusiastic) applause,
but the musicians like it, which pleases Mahler.
Also in March, 27-year-old Zemlinsky's Symphony in Bb-major
is premièred in Vienna.
In April, Schönberg attends the Vienna première of Mahler's
2nd Symphony and, suprisingly, leaves unimpressed, as it is Mahler's
first great success as a composer with the Viennese public, something
he has dreamed about for nearly 20 years. The critics,
however, agree with Schönberg, and roundly denounce the work
and its creator.
During this time Schönberg falls in love with Zemlinsky's
sister Mathilde, and he becomes deeply engrossed in Richard Dehmel's book
Weib und Welt ['woman and world'], setting many of its erotic
poems as songs, three of which appear in his 4 Songs, op. 2
(Erwartung is #2) and one
in his 6 Songs, op. 3. Schönberg's style changes
dramatically, as he begins to incorporate compositional
techniques learned from his study of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf.
In May, after the Philharmonic season, Mahler completes the final
revisions of the 3rd Symphony and Das Klagende Lied,
reinstating the off-stage band into the score of the latter.
Returning home after a trip to Venice, Alma sees Mahler in the
street and thinks it noteworthy enough to mention in her diary.
Johann Strauss, Jr. dies on June 3 in Vienna at age 73.
Zemlinsky's opera Sarema is published by Berté in Leipzig.
24-year-old Franz Schmidt composes his 1st Symphony.
During his summer vacation at Aussee in the Salzkammergut,
Mahler composes Revelge, which he considers may be the
most important of his lieder, and comes up with a plan
for his 4th Symphony, deciding to use as the finale
a song he wrote in 1892 (and which he had intended to use in the
3rd Symphony),
and he composes the 1st
and 2nd movements.
It is a much lighter work than his previous symphonies, and seems
to mark a change in his style... (but the real change will come with
the next work, his 5th).
Several of Alma's friends go out one night while she is ill and
in bed; when they return, they claim that they spent the night
in Mahler's company, and that they sent her a postcard which he
signed, but which she never receives. After two weeks, she finds
out that the whole story is a lie. Mahler finds out about it too,
and, enabling Alma to have the last laugh, actually does send her
a card. A few days later Alma and her friends happen to run into
Mahler on a bicycle ride; he hopes to be introduced, but she dashes
off ahead, wanting not to spoil her admiration for him as an artist
by becoming acquainted with him as a man (and presumably learning
of his flaws). At this point it is clear that Mahler is already
very attracted to Alma.
Mahler finally has enough capital to have his own summer house built,
and Mildenburg recommends an architect who convinces him to do so;
construction is begun on the 'villa Mahler' at Maiernigg on the Attersee,
in the Austrian Alps, and also, of course, on a little Hauschen
[composing-hut] in the woods some distance away from the house.
14-year-old Webern writes his first compositions, mostly songs.
The earliest one which survives is
Vorfrühling
['earliest spring']. This and many of Webern's other early
songs are on texts by Ferdinand Avenarius, whose style is an important
influence on the composer.
In November, 25-year-old Schönberg composes his tone-poem
Verklarte Nacht
['transfigured night'], for string sextet,
based on a poem from Dehmel's Weib und Welt ['woman and world'].
The piece is very evocative of
the moods of the poem upon which it is based. It is obvious that
Schönberg has by now already assimilated Wagner and, musically,
has reached a great level of maturity, and this becomes his
first piece to attract the attention of publishers,
and is destined to remain his most popular composition.
It is also the first time Schönberg uses a large single-movement
form, an idea which will preoccupy him for the next few years in his
instrumental works.
A foreshadowing of things to come:
because of one chord, an inverted 'dominant 9th' with the '9th'
in the bass, which is forbidden by the harmony textbooks, the
Viennese ensemble scheduled to première it refuses. A critic's
comment:
It sounds like someone smeared the the score of Tristan
while the ink was still wet.
Schönberg before 1900
|
So with the Wagner-Brahms controversy raging all around him
(even tho they're both dead by now),
Schönberg, just as he was so often later to seem to be the virtual
embodiment of paradox, while in his mid-20s effortlessly combines
his admiration for both composers, and it is reflected in his own
compositions.
|
Also in November, Seigmund Freud publishes his book Die Traumdeuting
['the interpretation of dreams'].
1900
In January, Mahler conducts the première of Zemlinsky's
2nd opera Es war einmal ['once upon a time'],
after suggesting, and helping Zemlinsky with, heavy revisions
of the text and music.
In February, Alma meets Zemlinsky. They develop a strong interest
in each other,
based at first on their mutual admiration for Wagner and Mahler.
In March, for a Tone-Artists Association competition in which
Zemlinsky is a judge, 25-year-old Schönberg begins his Gurrelieder
as a cycle of 9 songs with piano. Either because he misses the
deadline or because he feels he won't win, the songs are never
submitted. But by April, disregarding Zemlinsky's doubts,
Schönberg changes the piece into a
monumental cantata-like work for soloists, choirs, and orchestra.
Over the next year he continues composing it,
while doing hack-work orchestrating
thousands of pages of operettas for a living.
15-year-old Berg's father dies, and during this summer Berg writes
his first songs, and a few piano pieces, including
Mein erster Walzer
['My first waltz'].
In April, Alma happens to run into Mahler while out walking with
a friend; Mahler greets the friend but stares at Alma. Under Zemlinsky's
influence, Alma also
starts attending Tone-Artist Association concerts, and sees
Schönberg at an after-concert dinner. Zemlinsky shows an interest
in Alma's songs; by May she decides that Labor's emphasis on technique
is not enough, and she will supplement his training with additional
lessons from Zemlinsky, to learn how to 'capture the atmosphere of a poem'
in her songs.
In June, Mahler takes the Vienna Philharmonic to Paris and, indicating his
interest in Alma already, sends her a postcard from there.
Richard Strauss begins trying to convince Mahler to leave the AKM,
saying that the music-publishers are setting the tone rather
than the composers.
Settling into his new composing-hut in Maiernigg,
Mahler completes his 4th Symphony with the 3rd movement Adagio,
then celebrates his 40th birthday a month late, after finishing his work.
Mahler has also taken along the score of Rott's symphony,
in hopes of performing it; it never happens, but I hear bits
and pieces of Rott's piece echoed in Mahler's 1st, 2nd,
3rd, and 5th symphonies.
(I wonder exactly how long Mahler had this score in his possession...)
Mahler decides around this time that writing programs to explain
his symphonies does more harm than good, confusing the public rather
than enlightening them as to the intellectual basis of his work.
He makes the famous statement 'down with the program books!',
and presents all subsequent works (except those
which have an overt text) as pure music.
24-year-old Schlesinger becomes conductor at the Berlin Opera.
A new agent in Berlin feels that he is a rising star, and also secures
his first symphony concert, with the Berlin Philharmonic.
He occasionally takes the long train journey to make visits to Mahler
in Vienna and to see his fiancé in Basle, and quickly becomes
unhappy with his job in Berlin.
After being apart for the whole summer, in November,
21-year-old Alma Schindler begins taking compositions
lessons from Zemlinsky, who is 29. Thru Zemlinsky, she also becomes friends with
Schönberg. Within the next few months, she falls in love with Zemlinsky.
Also in November, Alma attends the Vienna première of Mahler's
1st Symphony. Except for loud applause from Mahler's
cult following, it is a unanimous failure.
Alma fails to recognize the value of Mahler's
compositions, and Schönberg is also apparently there because
he too later makes disparaging remarks about the work.
In December, Alma attends a lieder concert including songs by
Zemlinsky and the première of Schönberg's 2 Songs, op. 1.
She finds Zemlinsky's work to be the best on the program,
and Schönberg's pieces are 'flabbergasting, mind-boggling...by no means
uninteresting - but beautiful...?'. Zemlinsky says to her:
'you wait - before long the world will be talking about him'.
1901
At the beginning of February, Mahler's early cantata
Das Klagende Lied is finally published, by Weinberger,
and premièred in Vienna. It is a rousing success with
the audience, but is unanimously attacked by the newspaper critics.
That same month, Schönberg completes the unorchestrated score
of his magnificent Gurrelieder,
the epitome of what a composer steeped in the work of Wagner and Richard
Strauss could accomplish. The work won't be orchestrated
until 1910, nor performed until 1913, by which time Schönberg will
have made his most radical advances, his style by then sounding vastly different
from that of the Gurrelieder.
Ernst von Wolzogen, a writer, founds the Überbrettl
['over-boards', a German pun with the less literal meaning of
'super-theater'], an
artistic cabaret theater modelled somewhat after those in Montmartre
(Paris) during the 1880s-90s. Poetry by Wolzogen and
others associated with the Überbrettl is published
in a volume called Deutsche Chansons ['German songs',
using the French word for 'songs']; Schönberg sets several
of these Brettl Lieder
to music. When Wolzogen and the Überbrettl are
on tour in Vienna, their conductor Fried hires Schönberg to
substitute for him at the Carl-theater, where Schönberg and Wolzogen meet.
Wolzogen hears his 'chansons', and hires Schönberg to direct his theater
in Berlin during the following season.
At Klagenfurt in April, 17-year-old Webern composes the song
Tief von fern
['from far away'],
the first of 8 settings by Webern of poems by Richard Dehmel.
Webern is already a big fan of Mahler's 2nd Symphony.
In May, on the anniversary of
Wagner's birthday and just before his own 36th birthday,
Strauss completes his second opera, Feuersnot ['fire famine'],
with a libretto satirizing Munich's conservative music-lovers, written
in Bavarian dialect by von Wolzogen (who was also from Munich).
In June, Mahler's publisher Weinberger and printer Eberle
and other major Vienna publishers found
Universal
Edition,
the publishing company which eventually takes on all of
Mahler's symphonies and much of the work of the '2nd
Viennese school'.
After recovering from a serious internal hemhorrage
(a problem from which he suffered all his life), and operation,
Mahler begins his 5th Symphony, with the
1st movement
Funeral March, the stormy 2nd movement (with its
big climax),
and the monumental 3rd movement
Scherzo, which apparently was an earlier idea.
Inspired by his close brush with death,
and his study of Bach during his convalescence,
this work marks a sharp change in style,
and the symphony is filled with counterpoint.
Hedwig Lachmann translates Wilde's Salome into German and it
has its first performance in Germany.
In September, 16-year-old Klemperer goes to Frankfurt to study
piano at the Hoch Conservatory.
Mahler writes to 25-year-old Schlesinger offering him a job in Vienna,
and he accepts, becoming once again Mahler's assistant. Schlesinger,
changing his name to Bruno Walter (because it sounds less Jewish),
will remain in Vienna until 1912.
By the fall, Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde is pregnant by
27-year-old Schönberg. In October they marry;
thus Schönberg's former teacher becomes his brother-in-law.
By November, 22-year-old Alma Schindler is totally in love with
Zemlinsky. At a party, she formally meets and finally engages in
conversation with 41-year-old Mahler,
who falls head over heels for her and woos her like a love-crazed
schoolboy. Alma's admiration for Mahler quickly turns to love
and displaces Zemlinsky in her heart. Things move fast.
Julius Korngold and his family move to Vienna in November, where
he works at first as a lawyer.
Later in November, Strauss's opera Feuersnot is premièred
in Dresden, under the direction of Schuch.
A few days later, Mahler conducts the Kaim Orchestra in the
première of his 4th Symphony in Munich, the first
new work of his to be performed since the 2nd Symphony in 1895.
Where the public had by now come to appreciate the 2nd,
and expected another large imposing work, it is baffled by the
smaller scale and 'antiquated style' of the 4th.
The critics are almost universally hostile.
The Kaim Orchestra then goes on tour with Mahler's 4th
under its regular conductor, Weingartner. At one performance,
Weingartner pleads illness, takes a break, and returns to conduct
only the finale from Mahler's 4th. Audiences do not know
what to make of the work, the tour is a disaster for Mahler's
reputation, Mahler breaks his friendship with the conductor,
and Weingartner never conducts a Mahler piece again.
Schönberg and Mathilde move to Berlin in December, where Schönberg
begins his job as music director of the Überbrettl;
his contract is until July 1902.
Mahler conducts his 4th Symphony in Berlin in December, receiving
a storm of boos and nasty reviews. His 2nd Symphony is
performed in Dresden under Schuch, to warm applause but negative
reviews. In Leipzig, Hermann Seemann publishes the first monograph
on Mahler, a small book by Ludwig Schiedermair, in his
Moderne Musiker series.
According to Alma, around this time she asks Schönberg
(who is unaware of her relationship to Mahler) if he will
be attending the performance of Mahler's 4th Symphony, and
he answers 'How can Mahler do anything with the 4th when he has
already failed to do anything with the 1st?'; it will be three
more years before Schönberg appreciates Mahler's music.
1902
January brings the publication of Mahler's 4th Symphony
by Doblinger, just before the Vienna première.
Alma still fails to recognize the greatness of Mahler's compositions,
but since he is chasing her, she is magnetized by his
powerful personality, genius as a conductor, and most of all
his profound intellectual prowess. Mahler had scheduled a performance
of his 1st Symphony for a week later, but replaces it with
another performance of the 4th, followed by the second
performance of Das Klagende Lied; the
newspaper reviews are all negative.
At the end of January, Mahler conducts the Vienna première
of Strauss's opera Feuersnot. The bad newspaper reviews keep the public
away from subsequent performances.
Alma's chief ambition is to be a composer, but Mahler tells her bluntly
that there will be only one great composer in their house (and guess
who that is?...). Alma tries to hold back her tears and accept her fate
stoically, but she is heartbroken, and altho she loves him and submits
to his demand, she will remain bitter about this sacrifice
for the rest of her years with Mahler.
In March, Mahler and Alma marry... so much for Zemlinsky.
He accepts the situation as best he can,
as he too recognizes Mahler's genius and understands
Alma's attraction to it, and also because he feels somewhat
obligated because Mahler also expresses a very active interest
in Zemlinsky's own work.
Also in March, Schönberg's
Verklarte Nacht is premièred in
Vienna. Schönberg himself, living in Berlin, is not able to attend,
but 18-year-old
Webern is there, his family having moved to Vienna.
Zemlinsky had shown this score to the critic Max Graf,
who claims to have been the first to show it to Mahler, before the
break in their friendship in early 1902.
Mahler also misses the performance, as he and Alma are on their honeymoon
in St. Petersburg, but it is clear that he has indeed
seen the score and that it made an impression on him,
because he says in a letter that he would have
been very interested in hearing the piece.
It is also around this time that Webern first hears Tristan
and becomes engulfed in Wagner's musical world; so evidently,
Webern began to be influenced by both Wagner and Schönberg
at around the same time.
In April, in Berlin, and probably thru Wolzogen, Schönberg
meets Richard Strauss, and they become fairly close.
Strauss recognizes Schönberg's talent, critiques Verklärte
Nacht, and tries to help him earn money.
In Paris, Debussy's opera Pélleas et Mélisande
is premiered. It rapidly becomes a big success at the box-office.
In June in Krefeld, Mahler finally premières his
3rd Symphony at the 38th General German Music Association festival.
The hall is packed, and the symphony is met with a thunderous ovation:
this concert is the turning-point in Mahler's career,
and really puts him 'on the map' as a significant composer.
For a few years after this,
rather than having to solicit publications and
performances of his works, he will be able to select from
the handsome offers of publishers and concert directors.
Over the first of what will be five happy summers with his new family,
Mahler completes his 5th Symphony with
the famous 4th movement Adagietto (which,
according to Mengelberg, is a love song to Alma),
and the 5th movement Rondo-Finale. This work thus finds a
unique structural form, and ushers in the triptych of instrumental
symphonies of Mahler's 'middle period'.
Schönberg's contract at the Überbrettl theater runs out
in July and is not renewed, probably because Wolzogen himself
has left the theater. Schönberg remains in Berlin anyway, and
Strauss helps him earn money by finding
him jobs orchestrating and copying thousands of pages of operettas.
Now finding the time to begin a large project, Schönberg
asks Strauss for advice on an opera text, and Strauss proposes
a German translation of Maeterlinck's play,
Pelleas und Melisande;
apparently both of them are
unaware of Debussy's just-completed opera on this text.
Schönberg composes a symphonic poem on the subject instead,
which is finished by early next year when he is 28.
It is again a long single movement, but this time
Schönberg appropriates from Liszt
(i.e., the B-minor Sonata) the idea of fusing all 4 traditional
movements into a 1-movement form, amalgamating aspects of
the other movements of symphonic form (scherzo, adagio, finale)
with the first-movement 'sonata-form', something Schönberg will
do again in his next two large pieces. The work also
marks his first really adventurous harmonic advance, using
progressions of augmented chords in contrary motion to produce
hexads made up of the entire 'whole-tone scale',
as well as
tetrads built on '4ths'
(whereas harmonic theory had dictacted since the time of Zarlino, c. 1558, that
chords be built on '3rds').
In August, due to Hanslick's influence, Moritz Benedict hires 41-year-old
Julius Korngold to succeed Hanslick as chief music critic of the Vienna
Neue Freie Presse, dashing the hopes Richard Heuberger (the number-two
critic at the paper) had for obtaining the position. While most established
critics, including Heuberger, oppose Mahler's changes at the Opera,
Korngold writes a lead article supporting Mahler, which put Korngold's
name in the public eye from then on. Julius's 5-year-old son Erich
has also by now already learned all the chords in all the keys on the piano,
and begins taking piano lessons and music-theory lessons with
Emil Lamm (a relative), and soon writes his first compositions.
On the recommendation of Strauss, Schönberg obtains a position as
teacher of composition at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. (As far as I
know, there is no surviving record of his activity.)
In September, 17-year-old Klemperer also moves to Berlin,
following his piano teacher to the
Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory.
In November, Mahler and Alma's first daughter Maria is born.
Lachmann's German translation of Wilde's Salome has
a long run in Berlin, by which time Strauss has become inspired
by it and has already begun composing an opera based on it.
1903
Under the influence of Mahler's new circle of friends via his wife
- the artists of the Vienna Secession movement - he becomes
suceptible to the most avant-garde artistic ideas.
In February, Mahler's new production
of Tristan und Isolde, in collaboration
with imaginative new ideas in scenery, costumes, and especially
lighting, by his new stage-director Roller, opens a new era in
opera production, becoming ever closer to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk
['total-art-work'] concept.
|
Early in the year, Strauss and several other composers form the
Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer ['Cooperative of German
Tone-Setters'], to keep account of concert
performances and pay orchestral composers royalties in the same way
opera-composers receive them. Strauss tells Mahler that his
membership is essential in getting the organization off the ground,
and shows sincere concern for Mahler's financial rights as well.
Mahler joins when his membership in the AKM expires at the end
of the year.
|
Richard Strauss after the turn of the century
|
Having resigned from the Tone-Artists Association when they refused
to play Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht, and with Schönberg
away in Berlin, Zemlinsky forms a new music-society with the intention
of sponsoring new music in Vienna, the Ansorge-Verein, named after the
composer Ansorge. The society
gives concerts for only one season before folding.
In the spring, Strauss hires Schönberg for himself, to
copy the score and parts for his
new work Taillefer, for soloists, choir and large orchestra,
composed as thanks to Heidelberg University for the festive occasion of
conferring on Strauss an honorary doctorate, to be presented in October.
Schönberg copies the Strauss piece while he is orchestrating his
own Pelleas und Melisande and Gurrelieder.
In July, Strauss completes his Sinfonia Domestica while
staying on the Isle of Wight.
Over the summer, another happy one, Mahler composes the first movement
and the Andante of his
6th Symphony. About the lyrical second theme of the first
movement, he tells Alma 'I wrote you into my symphony';
I believe that here and in each of his subsequent symphonies
Mahler portrays himself and his wife in the principal and subordinate
themes, respectively, of his first movements.
18-year-old Berg has an affair with a Carinthian [provincial Austria]
girl, she gets pregnant and has an illegitimate daughter (it will be
Berg's only child), and Berg
attempts suicide but lives; given Berg's flair for theatrical drama,
it is possible that this is just a call for attention and is not
meant to be successful.
At Preglhof for summer vacation after his first year at the
University, 19-year-old Webern composes several songs
(including Aufblick
['looking upwards']). In September, he composes
Siegfrieds Schwert ['Siegfried's sword']
for voice and orchestra on a poem by Uhland.
In August, Schönberg and his wife leave Berlin for a stay in the country,
which is probably where he begins working on a string
quartet in D-minor (different from op. 7)
which will remain incomplete; its first movement is a big
double-fugue. Then they return to Vienna,
sharing housing with the elder Zemlinskys to save money, and
Schönberg begins his long teaching career in earnest,
holding harmony and counterpoint classes
in Eugenie Schwarzwald's school. Mainly due to the Strauss's
influence, Schönberg is awarded the Liszt Foundation fellowship.
In October, 29-year-old Schönberg's work is published for the first time:
the 2 Songs, op. 1 and 4 Songs, op. 2, by Verlag Dreililien
in Berlin, a publishing-house started by the Mahler admirer and
critic Max Marschalk. Between November
and May, Schönberg composes several songs that will appear in his
6 Songs, op. 3 (Die Aufgeregten
and Geübtes Herz),
8 Songs, op. 6 (Traumleben, Verlassen,
and Ghasel),
and 6 Orchestral Songs, op. 8 (Das Wappenschild
and Natur).
Strauss sees Hofmannsthal's German version of Sophocles's Electra,
and immediately recognizes the similarities with Salome and
the dramatic possibilities.
Mahler's 4th Symphony is performed with Julius Buths conducting
in Düsseldorf.
1904
Strauss goes on his first concert tour of North America, conducting
the world première of his Sinfonia Domestica in New York
at the end of March.
Earlier in March, Schönberg's
Verklarte Nacht is performed
for the second time in Vienna, by the chamber group
headed by Arnold Rosé, Mahler's concertmaster and brother-in-law.
According to Max Graf, Mahler had seen and admired the score in 1902;
Rosé, recognizing the quality of Schönberg's music,
invites Mahler to the rehearsals, and Mahler is very impressed.
Mahler will support Schönberg's work from now until
practically his last breath, even the first atonal pieces which
are beyond his understanding. I speculate that Mahler's feelings
for Schönberg run so strong partly because Schönberg is only
a year younger than Mahler's brother Otto, who according to Mahler
was a talented composer, and who had killed himself 9 years before;
it seems possible that Mahler transferred his ambitions for Otto
to Schönberg upon meeting the latter and learning his work; together
with Walter, who is slightly younger, the pair of musicians provide
the outstanding composer/conductor Mahler was himself, and hoped
to see reproduced in his younger brother.
Later this month, Schönberg begins what he officially calls
his 1st Quartet, op. 7, and he
will work on it on and off for the next year and a half.
In April, his 6 Songs, op. 3 are published by Dreililien.
He is awarded the Liszt foundation fellowship for the second time.
Also in April, after the demise of the Ansorge-Verein,
Schönberg, Zemlinsky, Walter, Karl Weigl,
and other leading members of the Viennese avant-garde, form the
Vereinigung Schaffender Tonkünstler
['Union of Creative Tone-Artists'], modelled after the Secession,
and name Mahler as honorary President; it will last only the
one concert season 1904-05.
For the next three years,
until Mahler's departure from Vienna in 1907, Schönberg and
Alma's ex-boyfriend Zemlinsky visit together regularly
at Mahler's house.
The evenings begin cordially, but in musical discussions afterwards
tempers flare, and the argumentative and headstrong Schönberg,
who has not yet been able to appreciate Mahler's own compositions,
repeatedly causes the two of them to be banished from the house
because of his disrespect for the master's opinions.
Still, Mahler must be intrigued by the force of Schönberg's
logic, because he always invites them back.
During one of these conversations with Schönberg, Mahler
laments the loss of
meantone
as an intonational paradigm in European music. This provides the
only clue outside of the actual notation used in his scores
(much of which has now been "simplified" by editors)
as to Mahler's intentions regarding the tuning of his music.
It must be remembered that he wrote almost exclusively for
the orchestra, which has flexible intonation, and the frequent
occurence of "double-sharps" in his sketches implies that he
was often thinking in meantone rather than in
12edo.
(see Yates 1990)
Mahler enjoys reading Fechner's Zend-Avesta around this time.
Webern, now 20, has been composing a lot of songs, and on the advice
of Guido Adler, his University teacher, he and Jalowetz go to
Berlin to meet 35-year-old Pfitzner for the possibility of taken lessons.
When Pfitzner disparages Mahler's music, Webern leaves in a rage,
and Adler's second recommendation is Schönberg.
Over the summer Webern
drafts two large movements for orchestra, which remain incomplete,
and composes an orchestral tone-poem,
Im Sommerwind ['in the
summer-wind'], his last
and most significant composition before studying with Schönberg.
In June,
Mahler and Alma's second and last child is born, their daughter Anna.
They have another blissful summer vacation, and he
composes a lot:
- several lieder for the song-cycle Kindertotenlieder
['songs on the death of children'], which freaks out Alma;
- the 6th Symphony is completed with the Scherzo, where
he portrays his two daughters playing in their sandbox in the trio,
and its huge 4th movement, with its bold harmonic experiments; and
- the two Nachtmusiken ['night musics'] which will become
the 2nd and 4th movements of his 7th Symphony.
Alma is troubled by the gloomy despair she hears in Mahler's
6th Symphony,
with its 'three blows of fate, the last of which fells the hero',
as Mahler described the last movement,
composed during a time of such outward happiness. Indeed,
this symphony will be nicknamed the Tragic, and again,
will seem to be prophetic of the events in Mahler's life in 1907.
Regarding a government move to reorganize the Vienna Conservatory,
which has suffered from bad management, Mahler's friend Guido Adler,
the great musicologist who is also sympathetic to modern developments
in music, endeavors to reform the institution, bringing
Schönberg and Zemlinsky in as teachers, and to have
Mahler appointed General Director of a board overseeing all Viennese
pedagogical establishments. Aware of the growing anti-Semitism in
Vienna and Mahler's increasing dissatisfaction with his job, Adler
works on these plans for the
next three years, in hopes of keeping Mahler in Vienna in the
event that his position at the Opera comes to an end; as a result of
political changes, the plan will eventually come to nothing.
In July, Schönberg sets aside his work on the first section of
the 1st Quartet, to finish the 6 Orchestral Songs, op. 8.
In August, the influential critic and teacher Eduard Hanslick
dies in Vienna at age 78. While Hanslick had been an anti-Wagnerian
and not fond of Mahler's compositions, he admired Mahler's abilities
as conductor and director, and
his influence was so important to getting Mahler the job in Vienna
that I suspect that perhaps his death during the composition of the 4th movement
of Mahler's 6th Symphony may have caused Mahler to emphasize
the tragic aspects of this music and conclude the piece in that mood,
as a sort of tragic memorial to Hanslick.
Reger joins the Union of Creative Tone-Artists, and the plans
to include his String Quartet in D-minor, op. 74 on
a Union concert may have an influence on Schönberg
when, later in the year, he returns to the composition of
his own quartet (in the same key), sketching the scherzo theme,
then continuing work on the first section.
7-year-old Erich Korngold begins school in the fall, and
also writes down his first compositions.
In September, a pocket
study score of Mahler's 5th Symphony is published
by Peters. Later that month, with the Vienna Philharmonic, Mahler
has two reading rehearsals of the work, and realizing that his
'new style demanded a new technique', he heavily
revises the orchestration; these changes are included in the full
score and parts published in November, but the early printing of
the pocket score leads to some confusion in subsequent editions.
In October, in Cologne to conduct the première of his
5th Symphony, Mahler hears Strauss play his new opera
Salome in a piano store, and he is impressed, and begins
campaigning to have the première given in Vienna; he is
unsuccessful in this because of the conservatism of Austrian royalty.
Unfortunately, Mahler's 5th is such a failure at the festival
that Peters refuses to publish anything else by him.
Also in October, 19-year-old Berg becomes an apprentice accountant
in the service of the Austrian government, and just after, begins
taking lessons with Schönberg.
The following month brings the American première of Mahler's
4th Symphony, conducted by Walter Damrosch in New York.
On November 23, at the first Union of Creative Tone-Artists
orchestral concert, Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica has
its Vienna première. Strauss was supposed to conduct
it, but Mahler, as honorary President of the Union, does it instead.
I believe that Mahler's reception of the Domestica has
a powerful influence on his subsequent compositions, especially
the very next one (his 7th Symphony, particularly the
1st movement).
Also in the fall of 1904, Schönberg, now 30,
begins teaching private lessons,
taking on as his first students Webern, Jalowitz,
Berg, and Stein. Webern and Berg will prove to be the most
talented of all of Schönberg's pupils, and the three of them
will ackowledge that together they took part in the break away
from tonality.
In December, Schönberg attends a performance of Mahler's
3rd Symphony,
finally recognizes Mahler's genius, and in fact becomes so
enthusiastic about Mahler's work that he says later that
in his admiration
he felt 'like a schoolgirl'. For the rest of his own long
life, Schönberg will hold Mahler in the greatest esteem.
1905
On January 27, at the second Union of Creative Tone-Artists
orchestral concert in Vienna,
Zemlinsky conducts the première of his symphonic-poem
Die Seejungfrau ['the mermaid'], a fantasy for orchestra after
Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tale. On the same concert,
Schönberg conducts the première of his
Pelleas und Melisande.
Mahler, busy with his duties at the Opera, misses the première
but attends the final
rehearsal on the 25th and follows Pelleas with the score;
he also tells Alma to invite Schoenberg to his house and has
him bring the score of Pelleas. Mahler
already admits to having some difficulty
comprehending the complex and not always harmonious counterpoint,
but nonetheless continues to champion Schönberg's cause.
A few days later, the Union has a lieder concert
scheduled for the 29th which
premières Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.
The concert is sold out, and so tickets are also sold
for the public to attend the final rehearsal on the 28th.
It is a huge success for Mahler. The concert is repeated
a few days later on February 3, and Mahler is so pleased that
he gives a banquet afterwards for the Union musicians, consisting
mostly of Schoenberg's pupils; 21-year-old Webern meets Mahler there.
After a few more concerts of chamber-music during the spring,
notably featuring pieces by Bruno Walter (which, Mahler confided
to Alma, were weak),
the Union folds after this single season, from lack of
financial support.
In February Nikisch conducts Mahler's 5th Symphony in Berlin,
in a performance not liked by Mahler.
In March Mahler seeks a visit from Oskar Fried, in Vienna to see
Franz Schalk conduct a performance of Fried's choral work
Das trunkene Lied ['the drunken song' - settings from
Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra].
Mahler finds Fried's artistic ideas very compatible with his own,
and wishes Fried to conduct future performances of his symphonies.
Also this month, Mahler conducts his 5th Symphony
in Hamburg, and the work receives its
American première with the Cincinnati Symphony conducted by
Frank van der Stucken.
By April, Schönberg has completed the draft of the first half of his
single-movement
1st Quartet, up to the Trio of the Scherzo.
This piece makes extensive use of the "whole-tone scale"
(= 6-EDO),
and its tonal contrasts are not those of different keys as
much as those between tonal and atonal passages.
Mahler, Moll, Pfitzner and others, talking shop, 1905
|
In April, around Pfitzner's 36th birthday,
Mahler conducts the Vienna première of Pfitzner's opera
Der Rose vom Liebesgarten ['the rose in the love-garden'].
Initially unreceptive to Pfitzner's opera, Mahler is eventually
convinced of its merits by Alma and Bruno Walter, who both admire
Pfitzner's work. Mahler also takes a
liking to Pfitzner's String Quartet, which is dedicated
to Alma.
Pfitzner is only one in a long line of men who are enchanted
by Alma's beauty and intelligence, even while she is married to Mahler.
|
In May, Mahler's 5th Symphony
and Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica
are teamed up at a Strassbourg music festival. Exposed to the
Domestica for the second time, I believe Mahler's
interest in the Strauss piece is a big influence on the rest
of his 7th Symphony, most of which he composes in the
following months.
Also in May, after many delays, Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht,
op. 4 is finally published, by Dreililien.
(Pelleas und Melisande is tagged as op. 5,
but Marschalk does not accept it for Dreililien, and it will
not be published until 1912 by Peters.)
After Schönberg finishes his
1st Quartet that summer,
he begins a choral piece Georg von Frundsberg, and a String Quintet,
both of which are left unfinished.
During Pentecost holiday in June, 21-year-old Webern
and his cousin Wilhelmine fall in love with each other, and will later
marry. Under this inspiration, he composes a Langsamer Satz
[slow movement] for string quartet.
Then after leaving Vienna for summer vacation in Preglhof,
and melancholy over his separation from Wilhelmine and inspired
by a painting of Segantini, he writes
a much larger String Quartet in one movement in July.
This quartet has a
climactic section,
which occurs twice, that is really impossible to analyze
in terms of keys: still a lot of late-romantic rhetoric in the style,
but the ultra-chromatic counterpoint produces chords with clashing
notes that cannot be analyzed in terms of traditional harmony.
Recalling the criticisms about Mahler's 2nd
and Schönberg's Verklarte Nacht, one might say that
this Webern quartet sounds like Tristan on acid...
good stuff. In some places this Webern piece is far more
advanced harmonically than Schönberg's quartet of the same period.
Also during this summer, Mahler composes the 1st, 3rd, and 5th movements
to complete his
7th Symphony.
These movements are full of
brazenly dissonant polyphony and chords, and
melodic passages using successive '4ths'. It is clear that his
familiarity with Schönberg's experiments has emboldened Mahler
to stretch his naturally progressive tendencies even further.
This symphony has had a difficult reception from audiences since
the beginning; Mahler experienced considerable difficulty finding
a publisher for it, and to this day, the 7th is still the least
popular of all his works (and, I think, unjustly so).
Mahler also makes a revision of the 4th Symphony.
His 2nd Symphony is performed in Düsseldorf under
Julius Buths at the Lower Rhine Music Festival.
In Berlin, the firm of Gose & Tesslaff publishes a monograph on
Mahler by Richard Specht in its Modern Essays series.
20-year-old Klemperer switches to the Stern Conservatory in Berlin,
and studies composition with 36-year-old Pfitzner.
Schönberg takes on
Wellesz as a pupil. During September and October, Schönberg
composes several of the 8 Songs, op. 6: Alles,
Der Wanderer, Am Wegrand, Lockung,
and Madchenlied. He also drafts a programmatic piano
quintet called Ein Stelldichein ['a rendezvous'],
based on a Dehmel poem, which will remain incomplete.
November brings a performance of Mahler's 2nd Symphony in Berlin,
with Fried conducting and Klemperer directing the offstage instruments.
Mahler tells Fried that his tempi were all wrong, complains to
Klemperer of the incorrect dynamics, and goes over
the work in detail; Fried will eventually go on to make the first complete
recording of a Mahler symphony, with this work (the 2nd), in 1924.
When Klemperer seeks advice from Fried on how to get Mahler's attention,
he is told to focus on Mahler's own creative work, so Klemperer writes
a 2-hand piano arrangement of Mahler's 2nd Symphony
(never published and now lost).
Also in Berlin, Nikisch conducts the Philharmonic with Friedrich
Weidemann singing in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, again not
to Mahler's taste.
Also in November, Mahler makes player-piano recordings of three of
his songs, including the finale of the 4th Symphony, and
the 1st movement funeral-march of the 5th Symphony,
at the Welte-Mignon comany in Vienna.
They are the only reproducable recordings that
Mahler ever made of his work.
Mahler had hoped to give the world première of
Strauss's Salome in Vienna, but in December,
Schuch conducts the première in Dresden.
It is wildly successful with the public
and performers, altho the critics are negative. Mahler's
heroic efforts
to have the work performed in Vienna are crushed by the censor,
and Salome will not appear in Vienna until 1918,
long after Mahler's death.
Also in December, Mahler conducts the Vienna
première of his own 5th Symphony.
All in all, a real banner year for modern music in Vienna.
1906
Early in the year, Strauss approaches Hofmannsthal about using his
version of Elektra for an opera.
In February, Wilhelm Gericke conducts the Boston Symphony in
performances of Mahler's 5th Symphony in Boston, Philadelphia,
and New York. The newspapers report good performances but very
mixed receptions from the audience.
In April 31-year-old Schönberg,
inspired by happy feelings over Mathilde's pregnancy with
their second child, begins his
Kammersymphonie [Chamber Symphony].
The
earliest
sketch of Kammersymphonie opens with a cadence
on E, whereas the final version of this beginning cadences on F;
Frisch maintains that eventually Schönberg pitted the juxtaposition of F
against E as the main tonal basis of the piece; this seems
to me too similar to the characteristic cadences in the
1st movement
of Mahler's 7th Symphony to be a coincidence -- for this
and other reasons (chiefly having to do with similarities in intricate
details of formal structure) I suggest that Schönberg was rather familiar
with Mahler's work of the previous summer on that 1st movement.
Schönberg's portrait of Zemlinsky
|
While on his Easter vacation, Julius Korngold receives in the mail
a cantata called Gold (now lost), written by his 8-year-old son Erich.
This finally convinces Julius of his son's talent, and he is sent
to study with Robert Fuchs. In June, just after his 9th birthday,
the young Korngold plays Gold for Mahler, who follows the
score while Korngold plays and keeps proclaiming that the boy is
'a genius!'. Mahler
urgently presses Korngold's father to send him to Zemlinsky for
the proper development of his talent, but Julius keeps Erich studying
with Fuchs for two more years to give him a solid grounding in
traditional musical technique. Erich idolizes Mahler, to the point
that every time someone asks him what he wants to be when he grows
up, he replies 'Director Mahler!'.
|
Also in June, Webern graduates from the University with his Doctorate in
Musicology, having studied mainly under Guido Adler.
During his last joyful summer vacation in the Alps, and at the peak
of his life as composer, conductor, opera director, husband, and father,
Mahler writes his stupendous 8th Symphony
(beginning of Part 1,
beginning of Part 2)
in a tremendous 6-week burst of inspiration.
Also on vacation in the mountains during the summer,
31-year-old Schönberg finishes his
Chamber Symphony, which explores the
outer reaches of tonality, and about which Webern wrote:
[Webern]
It made a colossal impression. I'd been his pupil for three years
[sic: it had really been two],
and immediately felt, 'you must write something like that too!'.
Under the influence of the work I wrote a sonata movement the very
next day. In that movement I reached the farthest limits of tonality.
... Both of us sensed that in this sonata movement I'd broken thru to
a material for which the situation wasn't yet ripe.
Webern is obviously very inspired and begins several different
pieces, for both piano and string quartet, and finishes a number
of them; it is difficult to determine
which one he was describing in the above statement.
One possible candidate is a piece entitled
Sonatensatz
[sonata movement].
In August, hard on the heels of his 1st
Chamber Symphony,
Schönberg begins and composes much of
a 2nd Chamber Symphony, which he will work on intermittently
while also beginning the composition of the
2nd Quartet,
whose first theme's rhythm has a curious resemblance
to the Webern
Sonatensatz
referred to above. Schönberg will eventually
lay aside 2nd Chamber Symphony in favor of
finishing the Quartet, and not complete it until
1939 in America.
Also in August, and despite Alma's story about Mahler's revulsion
from Nietzsche, a newspaper interview given by Mahler (published
after his death) clearly illustrates his continuing reverence
for at least some aspects of the philosopher's work.
24-year-old Richard H. Stein uses
quarter-tones
in the cello part of his Zwei Konzertstücke, op. 26
for cello and piano, the
first quarter-tone piece published in the European tradition.
|
Schönberg's son Georg is born in September.
In the same month, Webern's mother dies. This event will haunt him
apparently for the rest of his life. Webern claims that all his subsequent
music is written in memory of her.
In October, Fried conducts Mahler's 6th Symphony in Berlin.
Also this month, Berg is able to quit his job and devote his life
to music, because some real estate inherited by his mother provides
the family with an income. He attends six performances of Strauss's
Salome.
Schönberg meets a young artist named
Gerstl
and he and his wife both take painting lessons.
|
Gerstl laughing: a self-portrait (1907)
|
While in America, Busoni learns of Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium,
a forerunner of the synthesizer. This was an electric instrument which
was capable of dividing the pitch-continuum in any desired way. It is
a big inspiration to Busoni, who, after returning to Berlin,
writes his little book Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music,
in which he speculates on the most liberal musical ideas.
In it, he examines possibilities
for over a hundred new scales which are different from the
traditional major and minor, and also proposes
36-tET
as a new tuning giving a mixture of two scales of
'1/3-tones'
a semitone apart.
It is published in January by Trieste publisher Schmidl,
printed in Berlin, and distributed by Busoni himself.
1907
In January, Mahler conducts his 1st Symphony in Reichenberg
and his 3rd Symphony in Berlin. While Mahler is in Berlin,
Klemperer gets a chance to spend some time with him by showing him
the way to Strauss's home. In the spring, while visiting Vienna
on tour, Klemperer gets a recommendation from Mahler which 'will
open all doors for me', and he keeps it in his wallet for the rest
of his long life.
|
Schönberg begins painting seriously at the beginning of the year.
In January, his 8 Songs, op. 6 are published by Dreililien,
and the Rosé Quartet
premières his
1st Quartet on February 5.
A few weeks later, the 1st Quartet is published by Dreililien
as his op. 7,
and Schönberg premières his
Chamber Symphony
in Vienna. The concerts provoke two of the most
notorious scandals in Viennese concert history; at both of them
Mahler loudly applauds amid the booing and hissing and nearly
gets into a fistfight.
|
Schönberg: self-portrait from behind,
probably his most famous painting
|
Mahler confesses to Alma after the Chamber Symphony performance
that he himself can no longer follow Schönberg's development.
He blames it on his 'old age': 46 years. Mahler had gotten into an
argument with Schönberg at one point over whether or not it was possible
to create a Klangfarbenmelodie ['melody of tone colors (timbres)']
by constantly shifting the orchestration of a single note; Schönberg
was to carry out this idea in 1909 in the third of his Funf
Orchesterstücke. With this dispute in mind, Mahler's
remark about being too old to have an ear for
Schönberg's music was perhaps
referring directly to his loss of the ability to hear high
frequencies,
due to aging
and daily exposure to the volume of 100-piece orchestras.
In any case, the logic in Schönberg's thought and music are convincing, and
Mahler continues to support him all the same.
During the spring, 23-year-old Webern composes a
Quintet for string quartet
and piano. It is the earliest of his works for which he retains
a fondness later in life, and the only piece of Webern juvenilia
known until the discovery of a large cache of manuscripts in 1965.
Schönberg interrupts work on the 2nd Chamber Symphony
in March, to compose the choral work
Friede auf Erden
['Peace on earth'], op. 13 (Schönberg frequently visited
Mahler during these years -- could he have been inspired to compose a
piece for choir from knowledge
of Mahler's most recent 8th Symphony?)
and the 2 Ballades, op. 12, which he wrote in hopes of winning
a competition. Other than these vocal pieces, since 1905 Schönberg
has not written many settings of poetry, going thru a variety of poets
without finding one with a large body of work to which he is sympathetic,
as he had been earlier by Dehmel. Schönberg also begins his
2nd Quartet in the Spring;
the 1st movement of this piece,
completed by September, retains only the most tenuous links to tonality.
Gerstl spends summer vacation with the Schönbergs, and his
friendship with Mathilde turns into a love affair.
Schönberg apparently suspects something but brushes it off.
He drafts most of the 1st and 2nd movements of the
2nd Chamber Symphony, and drafts the 1st and
2nd movements of the 2nd Quartet; at this point, he
stops work on the symphony (until the 1930s) and continues with the quartet.
22-year-old Berg meets Helene Nachowski and falls in love; they
will marry four years later. Under this heavy inspiration,
Berg begins his Piano Sonata, op. 1.
10-year-old Erich Korngold composes several waltzes and other piano pieces
and songs. One of these is a cantata entitled
Der Tod [Death],
which he will utilize two years later as the opening piece ["Don Quixote's
Dreams of Heroic Deeds"] in the suite Don Quixote: Six Characteristic
Pieces, which his father Julius encourages Erich to write
after he begins reading Don Quixote.
|
It is a terrible year for Mahler: first, after a 10-year reign as the emperor
of the artistic world in Europe, he finally tires of the anti-Semitic
attacks and the hard work entailed by his position of responsibility
and decides he's had enough
of the Vienna intrigues to dethrone him. He decides to leave his beloved
city to take an attractive offer from New York, where he expects to spend
a few years making a large amount of money in a brief period of time,
and then retire to the Viennese countryside,
so that he can devote the rest of his life to composing full-time.
He faces this decision with an understandable mixture of happiness and regret.
|
The most famous photo of Mahler, in his office at the Vienna Opera
(1907)
|
Then, over the summer, Mahler's eldest daughter Maria gets sick and dies
before reaching her 5th birthday, and his whole world crumbles. As if that
weren't enough, his doctor discovers that he has a serious heart problem and
advises drastic changes in Mahler's active lifestyle.
The Mahlers abandon their villa in Maiernigg forever, spending the
rest of the summer in Schluderbach.
Again, Mahler's music, this time the 6th Symphony, seems to have foretold
tragic events in his life; awareness of having had this premonition
certainly does nothing to alleviate his suffering.
Mahler finds some consolation in reading
The Chinese Flute, a German translation of ancient Chinese poetry.
Some of these poems become the basis of his next and in many ways
most beautiful piece,
Das Lied von
der Erde ['the song of the earth'],
which he begins sketching as summer ends. Again, there is a drastic
change in his style, as he enters his 'third (and final) period'.
Over in America, 39-year-old Scott Joplin leaves St. Louis in June, spends
some time in Texarkana with his family and in Chicago, then
goes to New York in July.
In the fall in Vienna, plans for Mahler to become Director of the Conservatory fall thru,
since he decides to take the lucrative offer from New York.
Adler seeks to blame Alma's desire for
a sumptuous lifestyle as the cause for Mahler's decision, but
Mahler reassures him that he needs to make this move for his own
reasons.
In October, the New York Times reports that Mahler plans to
conduct his 7th Symphony with the New York Symphony Society
in the coming season; it never happens.
In November a concert featuring premières of
music by 8 of Schönberg's students
is given in Vienna; Webern's
Piano Quintet and Berg's
Double Fugue for String Quartet with Piano Accompaniment
(after the manner of a continuo) are singled out, and get them
their first critical notice.
Mahler in profile (1907)
|
Later that month a performance of Mahler's 2nd Symphony
in Vienna is a colossal success, after which he leaves Europe
triumphantly on December 9 to spend his first season in America, conducting
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and living with Alma at
the Hotel Majestic in Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Weingartner succeeds Mahler as Director of the Vienna Court Opera.
Schönberg feels a serious sense of loss with Mahler's removal
from Vienna, as it was mainly Mahler who supported the work of
him and his pupils; this is a large part of the even bigger crisis
experienced by Schönberg over the next year. At the same time,
without Mahler around to criticize his ideas,
Schönberg suddenly feels the confidence
to realize a new ideal of expression that he's had in mind, as
he becomes strongly inspired by the style of Stefan George's poetry,
and composes the first of his many settings of George poems,
and the first piece to really display the hallmarks of "atonality",
Ich darf nicht denkend, no. 1 of 2 Songs, op. 14.
|
1908
In February, Schönberg composes In diesen Wintertagen,
no. 2 of 2 Songs, op. 14, in a style reminiscent of his earlier
tonal work.
The 2nd movment of the 2nd Quartet is mostly drafted by now,
and he begins sketching the 3rd and 4th movements, which eventually will
each employ a vocal part, setting Stefan George's Litanei ['litany'] and
Entrückung ['rapture']
respectively. These two movements were originally planned to be
in the reverse order in which they eventually appear in the quartet.
At this point, the poetry of George has become a big inspiration
for Schönberg, and in March he begins setting a non-cyclical group of
four George poems from the cycle
Das Buch der hängenden Gärten [Book of the Hanging Gardens],
(later expanded into op. 15: #4, Da meine Lippen,
#5, Saget mir, #3 Als Neuling trat ich, and
#8 Wenn ich heut nicht deinen Leib).
Later he sketches another manuscript with three more
(Friedensabend [which remains incomplete],
and from op. 15: #7 Angst und Hoffen and #6
Jedem Werke bin ich fürder tot).
He also makes sketches for
settings of many other poets and for Und Pippa tanzt,
an unrealized opera project, while continuing to work on the
2nd Quartet.
Also in February, Stefi Geyer breaks off her relationship
with Bartok. Bartok contemplates suicide, then pours his emotions
into his 1st Quartet, written during the latter part of the year.
Over in America, on March 5, the New York Age newspaper
publishes an article about Joplin and his work on his opera Treemonisha.
In a later interview, Mahler discusses "Negro music" and
denounces its claim as "American folk music", which seems
to me to indicate that he was at least a little familiar
with ragtime. Given his old habit of reading newspaper
reviews of his concerts, I think it's quite likely that
he could have read articles about Joplin in the New York papers.
(More about this below, in regard to Mahler's 10th Symphony,
under "1910".)
24-year-old Webern is most likely finished with the composition of
his Passacaglia, op. 1 for orchestra, by the spring.
(This piece is frequently referred to
as Webern's 'graduation' work upon finishing his lessons with Schönberg -
it is not. That distinction goes to his next piece.)
23-year-old Berg completes his Piano Sonata, op. 1 over the summer,
and begins sketching the 4 Songs, op. 2.
In June, Busoni writes a letter to his publisher Schmidl about
an expanded version of his book Sketch of a New Aesthetic
of Music, but this version is never issued.
Julius Korngold finally sends his 11-year-old prodigy son Erich
to study with Zemlinsky. Erich writes the first two movements of
his Piano Sonata in D-minor, which he later plays for Mahler,
who is very impressed. Mahler also asks Korngold to play
something Zemlinsky had assigned to Korngold -- a passacaglia on a theme
by Zemlinsky -- and recommends that Korngold use it as the finale for the sonata,
which he does.
Back in the Alps for summer vacation, staying at Toblach [now
Dobiacco, Italy], the mood now one of resignation
rather than joy, Mahler finishes
Das Lied von
der Erde ['the song of the earth'],
considered by many to be his greatest work. Alma's book
recalls how Mahler paced back and forth in the next room when their 4-year-old daughter
Maria had a tracheotomy, and as he approached door to her room he recoiled each
time he heard the horrible wheezing sound of her breathing; I think
the flutter-tongueing of the woodwinds at the beginning of the
1st movement of this work (
Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde ['the drinking-song of Earthly sorrow'])
may be intended to portray Mahler's recollection of this event.
The summer is disruptive for Schönberg: he discovers Mathilde and
Gerstl in bed together, and goes back to Vienna alone.
Spurred on by this crisis, Schönberg enters
the most productive and most creative period of his career. In
August he finishes his
2nd Quartet,
with a programmatic reference in the 2nd movement to
"all is lost", switches the order and revamps the
3rd and 4th movements to each include a vocal part setting
poems by Stefan George, and finally abandons the workings
of traditional tonality in the last movement of this piece,
to the words "I feel the air of other planets".
On 19 September Mahler conducts the première of his
7th Symphony
in Prague, receiving only a lukewarm reception.
Remaining in Vienna alone due to his marital crisis,
Schönberg misses the première, but several of
his students are among the group of young Mahler admirers who attend.
During rehearsals and after the performance, Mahler revises the score.
Now with a much more cynical attitude about love,
Schönberg decides to expand his settings of
Das Buch der hängenden Gärten [Book of the Hanging Gardens]
into a full cycle of 15 songs, utilizing the whole central section
of George's book, which is an interlude about the discovery
of love, whose mood progresses from lyrical to menacing.
Betraying a further evolution
of his style, on 27 September, he composes the draft of
op. 15 #3, Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide,
the first piece without any reference to a key, setting a text
which describes the lover getting in a boat while his beloved
refuses to join him as he drifts away under the weeping willows.
It seems to me that Schönberg's interest in microtonal vocals,
as inferred from Webern's experiments with the same (see below;
no microtonal sketches survive from Schönberg), probably
began at this time, with this change in style.
Mahler gives the 7th its Munich première in October,
then sails off to his second season in New York. The public
reception of Mahler's last three symphonies has not been very enthusiastic,
and it will
take a year of corresponding with publishers to find one
(Bote and Bock) willing to print the 7th.
15-year-old Hába enters the teacher's training college
in Kromeríz, begins to develop an interest in Czech nationalism,
and hears the works of Smetana and Wagner for the first time.
Strauss finishes his opera Elektra,
which will be his last work in a progressive style.
During the autumn, Webern writes out his own copy of
Schönberg's Friede
auf Erden, and it is most likely
around this time that he composes Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen
['flee in light boats'], op. 2, which is likewise for a cappella chorus,
on a text by Sefan George.
This piece, and not the Passacaglia, is the last one
Webern composed under the guidance of Schönberg.
In his first work written after "graduation" from Schönberg's
teaching, but still following very closely in Schönberg's footsteps,
Webern is also inspired to set 14
of George's poems as songs over the next year.
Some of these are eventually published about a decade
later as 5 Songs from Der siebente Ring, op. 3
and 5 Songs on poems of Stefan George, op. 4, the other four
being discovered posthumously and published in 1970. As with Schönberg, the George
poems open up Webern's style, and are also his first 'atonal' compositions.
(Sketches of two of them also indicate Webern's passing interest in
microtonality;
more on that below.)
Schönberg threatens to commit suicide if Mathilde does not
return to him.
In October, mainly at the instigation of Webern, Mathilde leaves Gerstl
and comes back home to Schönberg.
On November 4 a concert is given in Vienna featuring works by
Schönberg's students, including the premières of Webern's
Passacaglia, op. 1 and Berg's 12 Variations on an Original
Theme, for piano.
On or about that same night [the various sources give
conflicting dates], the distraught Gerstl commits suicide at age 25,
making a bonfire of his paintings in his apartment, and
gruesomely stabbing and then hanging himself in front of a mirror.
This act and the events which precipitated it appear to
have a powerful effect on Schönberg;
during the next year he will compose
four incredibly original major pieces at an astonishingly fast pace.
Schönberg's painting of the set for Die Glückliche Hand
A long-range project, Schönberg begins sketching his
music-drama Die Glückliche Hand [literally 'the lucky hand',
meaning something like 'The magic touch' in idiomatic English],
which is based very closely on the Gerstl affair. He also
writes the libretto, as well as very elaborate directions for lighting,
with deliberate correllations between color and sound. The characters
include 12 "spectral voices" and a "mythical beast", and the
work is perhaps the eeriest product of expressionism (a genre already
noted for eeriness).
He will return to this piece on and off for five years, completing it
finally in 1913.
December brings the première, in Vienna, of Schönberg's
2nd Quartet,
by the Rosé Quartet.
Again, the Schönberg première causes a scandal, with more shouting than music.
Rosé answers the outcry by scheduling a repeat in January.
Schönberg's published attacks to the critics's behavior
mark the beginning of his long literary career.
Also in December, across the ocean in New York,
Mahler conducts the New York Symphony Society in
the American première of his 2nd Symphony.
Around Christmas in Vienna, 11-year-old Erich Korngold begins serious work
on his pantonimime Der Schneemann ['the snowman'], the plot
of which is written by he and his father, and which
will occupy him until Easter.
1909
In January, Strauss's Elektra is premièred in Dresden
under Schuch.
|
In February, Schönberg sketches the song Am Strande
[On the beach] (which will remain incomplete), and finishes his song-cycle
Das Buch der Hangenden Garten ['book of the
hanging gardens'], op. 15, which contains the
first pieces which do not refer to traditional tonality at all,
and about which he says:
[Schönberg]
I have succeeded for the first time in acheiving an ideal of
form and expression that I have had in mind for quite some time,
but for which I had previously lacked the courage to execute.
|
Schönberg in his study, with some of his paintings (between 1908-1911)
|
A letter
written later this year shows that
Schönberg had been interested in
microtonality.
Considering his later comments on lack of instruments to play microtones
(in Harmonielehre),
and the possible similarities with Webern's work discussed below,
his interest in them was probably in connection with the dispassionate
declamatory style of the vocal parts written
during the second phase of composition of the
George Lieder, op. 15 (September 1908 - February 1909,
particularly in
#13 Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide
and 14 Sprich nicht),
since both works after op. 15 will be for instruments alone.
Sketches for two of Webern's George-songs,
An Bachesranft
['At the brook's edge'] and
Das lockere Saatgefilde ['The relaxed seed-realms'], contain indications for
microtonal
pitches, which are eventually abandoned. At the end of the Bachesranft
sketch Webern wrote the same microtonal accidentals Schönberg used
(see Schoenberg's 1909.8.24
letter to Busoni),
showing how true Schönberg's statement was that "I have to keep
all of my new ideas secret from Webern, because he steals everything
as soon as I mention it." But apparently this worked both ways...
Webern's notation for the
microtonal pitches uses little crosses in place of note-heads,
which are identical to the
notation used a few years later by Schönberg for the sprechstimme ['speech-voice']
in the published scores of his Gurrelieder,
Pierrot Lunaire, and Die Glückliche
Hand, and which therefore seems to indicate that Webern was the
one who originated this idea at least a year before Schönberg used it.
Schönberg is eager to apply his new melodic and
harmonic techniques to instrumental forms, and also composes the
1st
and 2nd of his 3 Piano Pieces, op.11,
in February. The
first
of these is considered to be the first completely atonal
composition. Schönberg detests the term 'atonal' with which the critics
tag his work, preferring 'pantonal' (see my work-in-progress,
Searching for Schönberg's Pantonality),
but the negative term sticks like glue,
and in later years Schönberg will use it himself in his own writings.
Around Easter, a little before his 12th birthday, Erich Korngold
completes the piano version of his pantomine Der Schneemann,
the piece which will make him famous as a child prodigy. As a result
of several music-critics being impressed upon receiving the private
printing of Erich's compositions from Julius, articles begin appearing
in newspapers in cities near Vienna. Moritz Benedikt, editor of
the Neue Freie Press, realizes that his paper can no longer
ignore Erich's talent, but also that it would be improper to have
Erich's father write the article, so Ernst Decsey is hired.
In April, Mahler meets 25-year-old Alfredo Casella for the first time,
while passing thru Paris on his way back to Vienna from New York.
Casella has studied all 6 of Mahler's published symphonies,
and Mahler is impressed with Casella's own compositions
(his 2nd Symphony is very imitative of Mahler) and
apparently authorizes Casella to write the 2-piano 4-hand
arrangement of his 7th Symphony.
In mid-June, 25-year-old
Webern completes 5 Movements for String Quartet,
op. 5, which are even more radical-sounding than Schönberg's
pieces so far.
24-year-old Berg writes the last of the songs which he will include
in his Sieben Frühe Lieder ['7 early songs'] for voice
and piano (orchestrated in 1928), and
completes his 4 Songs for medium voice and piano, op. 2.
He begins his String Quartet.
Between May and August, Schönberg composes his
Funf Orchesterstücke
['5 Pieces for Orchestra'], op. 16, the third of
which is an experiment in Klangfarbenmelodie
['tone-color-melody']: very little harmonic movement with overlapping
entrances of the instruments. Schoenberg sends the score
to Strauss asking for a performance, but Strauss replies
that his audience is far too conservative to accept them.
Hofmannsthal begins working on a libretto for Strauss's fifth opera,
Der Rosenkavalier ['the rose cavalier'], which they want to
be in a light-hearted comic style. After seeing Schönberg's
latest work, Strauss has turned his back on the musical progressivism
that he himself helped initiate.
Over the summer, 12-year-old Korngold assembles his Don Quixote:
6 Characteristic Pieces for piano, adapting his earlier cantata
Der Tod
as the opening piece of this work.
Mahler and his only surviving child Anna, summer 1909
(Anna's favorite photo of him, because he was smiling)
|
On June 26, spending the summer in Toblach in what is
now the Italian Alps, Mahler signs
his first contract with Universal Edition, for the publication
of his 8th Symphony.
During July and August, Mahler composes his 9th Symphony. Its
1st movement makes a
deep impression on all those to whom he plays it, especially Berg.
|
In August, Schönberg composes the 3rd of his 3 Piano Pieces, op. 11.
Leter that month, Busoni sends Schönberg a copy of his Sketch of a
New Aesthetic of Music, and Schönberg
writes a letter
to Busoni commenting on both the latter's
description of 'third-tones',
and a notation Schönberg had previously devised for
quarter-tones
using the mathematical signs < and > as accidentals.
He tells Busoni that he ultimately rejects the use of microtones.
(He will explain why a year later in Harmonielehre.)
Immediately after writing the letter to Busoni follow two
incredible weeks in September during which Schönberg composes
his amazing 'monodrama'
Erwartung
['expectation'], op. 17, with a morbid story-line
and a solo female character who is psychotic.
The piece has been called 'athematic' (as well as
atonal), since there are no recognizable repetitions of any motifs,
and in my opinion it marks the sharpest break with tradition in the
history of European music. Schönberg's letter to Busoni
speaks about his desire to free his music from all formal bounds, and
to express "pure feeling" -- I think to a great extent this is
exactly what he achieved in Erwartung.
Also in September, Webern, brooding over his
mother's death 3 years before, composes his
6 Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6.
The original
version uses a huge orchestra, which is toned down in the revised 1928 version.
In October, 12-year-old Korngold completes his 1st Piano Sonata.
Also in October, Mahler's
7th Symphony is performed once in
The Hague and twice in Amsterdam, with Fried present at Mahler's invitation.
In September, Schönberg also signs a publishing contract with
Universal Edition. The success of Universal does a lot
towards disseminating the work of both he (and ultimately also
Berg and Webern) and Mahler.
In the fall Mahler goes to New York for his third season there,
he and Alma moving to the Hotel Savoy. Having given up his position
at the Metropolitan Opera, he directs a season of
concerts leading the reorganized New York Philharmonic.
In November, Schönberg attends the Vienna première of Mahler's
7th Symphony
conducted by Ferdinand Löwe,
and is greatly impressed by Mahler's music, even despite his
reservations about Löwe's achievement as a conductor.
Schönberg sends a glowing letter to Mahler telling him
what a powerful impression the work left on him.
Paul Landau issues a new arrangement of Wozzeck, the play.
12-year-old Erich Korngold begins his
Piano Trio in D-major, op. 1.
Because of his position as the leading Viennese music-critic,
Julius Korngold is apprehensive about revealing his young son
Erich's amazing talent as a composer to the public. In December,
he decides to issue 3 of Erich's compositions (Piano Sonata No. 1,
Don Quixote: Six Characteristic Pieces, and
Der Schneemann) in a privately-printed and numbered
edition, to musician friends and associates, with a preface
stating explicitly that the pieces are not to be brought to the
attention of the public. The responses are all extremely
enthusiastic, including an often-quoted one by Richard Strauss
in which Strauss encourages Julius to get Erich away from composing
and to take him skiing and sledding "lest his young brain becomes
prematurely tired and worn out before it reaches its full productivity".
1910
In January, Fried conducts the two Nachtmusiken ['nocturnes':
the 2nd and 4th movements] from Mahler's 7th Symphony, in Berlin.
Mahler responds to Schönberg from New York, and also
tells him that he has the score of Schönberg's
privately-published 2nd Quartet with him, and that he
studies it from time to time even tho 'it is difficult' for him
to follow.
Bartok's 1st Quartet is premièred in Budapest
on March 17.
12-year-old Korngold's Der Schneemann is premièred
in its 4-hand piano version in Vienna on April 14 at a soireé held
by the wife of the prime-minister, and causes a sensation.
The success is so great that another performance is prepared
for an expensive benefit concert on April 26, which sells out.
Prince Montenuovo (the Court Chamberlain) brings the work to
the attention of the Emperor, and
a production is planned for the Vienna Court Opera later in the
year, which requires that it be orchestrated -- thus, Zemlinsky
then teaches Korngold orchestration by having Erich
observe as Zemlinksy scores Der Schneemann.
In the spring, when Mahler returns to Europe, he
brings the score of Ives's 3rd Symphony with him,
in hopes of performing it; it is played at some point over
the summer, probably in a reading rehearsal in Munich, during
the course of Mahler's busy rehearsals for the première of his
8th Symphony. The Ives score is lost in Europe, and so Ives has to
make another copy.
Around his 13th birthday in May, Korngold also completes his
Piano Trio in D-major, op. 1, which he rightly sees
as his first fully mature work.
In June, 26-year-old Webern composes
4 Pieces for Violin and Piano, op. 7,
and in August, 2 Songs on Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, op. 8.
25-year-old Berg completes his String Quartet.
Zemlinsky is working on his opera Kleider machen Leute
[Clothes make the man].
During the summer, 35-year-old Schönberg writes his
Harmonielehre
['treatise on harmony'] book. Mostly a review of traditional
Austro-German harmonic theory, it ends with such wild new ideas
as chords built on 4ths, unresolved passing-tones, and
Klangfarbenmelodie ['tone-color-melody'], and includes speculations on
microtonality
and unrestricted use of the
chromatic scale.
He gives as main reasons for rejecting microtones the lack of instruments
so tuned, and the increased resources of his particular use of the
regular chromatic scale. His influence will go a long way towards
entrenching 12-tET
ever deeper into Western musical practice for the rest of the century.
Schönberg also finishes the libretto for Die Glückliche
Hand, and begins to compose the music for it;
it contains his first use of sprechgesang with
a full choir of voices.
|
Over the summer, Mahler, now 50, again spending his holiday at Toblach,
works on his 10th Symphony (unfinished),
the first movement of which contains
a climax culminating in this
massive dissonant chord.
There is also a section near the very end of the symphony
which uses typical ragtime chord progressions and voice-leading,
which leads me to believe that Mahler must have become familiar
with some ragtime (probably Joplin's) while living in New York.
Mahler discovers that Alma has been having an affair with Gropius,
a young architect. Mahler demands that she choose between them,
and is so delighted in sending Gropius away that his love for Alma
reaches an intensity it never had before.
He suddenly realizes how little attention he has
been giving her, and what a mistake it was
to force her to stop composing; he reconciles with her, and now
encourages her to compose and publish her work.
|
Mahler in 1910
|
After the summer, Zemlinsky leaves Vienna to begin his conducting
post in Prague.
With Zemlinsky gone, 13-year-old Korngold's apprenticeship is over,
and his compositions already sound like the work of a fully mature man.
Over the second half of the year, he
composes his 2nd Piano Sonata, in E-major, op. 2
and
7 Märchenbilder ['fairy-tale pictures']
for piano, op. 3. Korngold refers to the orchestration of
the Märchenbilder as the end of his instruction under
Zemlinsky, but Korngold had only composed a few of these before
Zemlinsky moved to Prague. (The orchestrated version was never published.)
In September, Mahler premières his great
8th Symphony
(nicknamed 'Symphony of a thousand') in Munich, a musical event
the size and spectacle of which has never been seen before -- even
the hall was specially built for the event. Mahler becomes dismayed
with the circus-like atmosphere created by the advertising,
but with the addition
of the awe-inspired music -- flawlessly executed by its massive body
of performers, thanks to a whole
summer of rehearsals for which Mahler traveled feverishly all over
central Europe -- it is by far the crowning achievement of
Mahler's life as both conductor and composer, and an event that will
be remembered for decades afterward by all who were present.
Among those attending are Schönberg, Webern, Strauss,
the Korngolds, Klemperer, Fried, Bruno Walter, Arnold Rosé,
Alfredo Casella, Leopold Stokowski, Stefan Zweig, and Thomas Mann. The
occasion also provides the first meeting between Korngold and Strauss.
Late in September, 46-year-old Strauss finishes his opera
Der Rosenkavalier, marking an abrupt regression in style,
back to a more romantic-era idiom.
|
Schönberg has the first exhibition of his paintings in the fall,
and Mahler anonymously buys three of Schönberg's paintings to give him
much-needed financial support. Schönberg is also appointed
teacher of composition at the Imperial Academy for Music.
|
Schönberg: portrait of Mahler (1910)
|
On Emperor Franz Josef's name-day, October 4, the orchestrated version
of 13-year-old Korngold's ballet-pantomime Der Schneemann is performed
at the Vienna Court Opera, and causes a sensation.
The cafés of Vienna are filled with gossip about the father
and son Korngolds, many people suspecting that Julius or
Zemlinsky were the real composers of the music.
In November the Mahlers sail for the last time to America, staying again at the
Hotel Savoy in Manhattan. This time they bring along their daughter
Anna.
1911
In January, Fried conducts Mahler's
7th Symphony in Berlin.
Schuch conducts the première of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier
in Dresden. It is immensely popular, with premières following
in the next few weeks in Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, Vienna, Berlin, and
Milan, and will remain Strauss's most successful opera.
In February, Schönberg composes the first five of 6 Little Piano
Pieces, op. 19. (no. 2.)
Weingartner resigns from the Vienna Opera, and Hans Gregor, a theatrical
director and not a conductor, replaces him as Director. Walter
tries repeatedly during the season to terminate his contract.
Against his doctor's advice to relax,
Mahler has kept up a feverish pace with his conducting work,
becomes seriously ill and collapses during a performance
in New York, and returns to Europe for treatment
in Paris. When this is unsuccessful and it becomes obvious that
he is dying, he is taken back to Vienna to be buried in his adopted hometown.
Even on his deathbed, he laments:
'what's going to happen to poor Schönberg now that I'm gone?',
which illustrates vividly his faith in Schönberg's gift.
He expires at age 50 on May 18, the end of an era in Viennese music.
His last word was 'Mozartl' [a diminutive nickname, something like
'(my little) Mozarty' in English].
Mahler's early death has an extremely profound effect on everyone in the Mahler
and Schönberg circles.
The following month Schönberg writes
the last of 6 Little Piano Pieces, op. 19
as a memorial to Mahler. Over the summer, Schönberg's Harmonielehre
is published with a dedication to Mahler's memory - the book was intended
to be dedicated to Mahler while he was alive in recognition of his
superiority not only as an artist but also as an intellect and a
human being: Schönberg calls him 'a saint'; this iconoclastic book will
bring Schönberg as much notoriety as did his radical compositions.
During June and July, Webern composes the 1st and 4th pieces of
5 Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10, and during the summer,
the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of the 6 Bagatelles for String Quartet,
op. 9.
A revised and enlarged version of Busoni's book Sketch of a New
Aesthetic of Music is published in English translation.
From April to September, 14-year-old Korngold composes his
first piece for orchestra,
Schauspiel Overtüre ['overture to a play'], op. 4,
which is premièred in December by the Leipzig Gewandhaus
Orchestra under Nikisch.
In Vienna, 39-year-old Willi Möllendorf and Jörg Mager build
quarter-tone harmoniums.
In August, 37-year-old Schönberg becomes involved in an altercation
with a neighbor in his building; when it turns violent, Schönberg
abandons his Vienna apartment and stays with Zemlinsky in Starnbergersee.
In late September he decides to leave his devoted students behind and
move back to Berlin, giving lectures at the Stern Conservatory. He finally
finishes the orchestration of his huge Gurrelieder, composed
10 years ago in a style from which he has by now moved away completely.
He says later that this stage of work on the piece involved only
minor bits of composition, primarily in Klaus the fool's melodrama,
which involves the earliest use of sprechstimme ['speech-voice'], where the
singer follows the
rhythms precisely, but only sings the pitches tenuously, gliding
away quickly as in speech. This technique
is apparently a result of Schönberg's (and his former pupil Webern's)
interest in
microtonality
(see above, under "1909"), and is one that will be used by
Schönberg thru-out his long career.
Schönberg had written positively about the possibility of
microtonality in music in his Harmonielehre,
but dismissed it as being impractical, mainly because of the
lack of instruments; note that he left Vienna at precisely
the time that some composers there made those instruments available.
Even tho he was certainly exposed to Busoni's microtonal ideas
while in Berlin, he probably did not get the opportunity to actually
hear microtonal music, as Busoni wrote none;
given the microtonal activity in Vienna in the next few years
by Möllendorf and Mager (and, a bit later, Hába),
I believe that Schönberg and his circle might have explored
quarter-tones further
had Schönberg stayed in Vienna.
Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde
is premièred posthumously
under Bruno Walter in Munich in November. Berg travels there from Vienna
to attend, and Webern from Berlin; Schönberg wishes to go but
cannot because he begins a lecture series in Berlin -- upon returning
to Berlin, Webern plays it for him on the piano.
Back in Vienna immediately afterward, Berg begins sketching
his Altenberg Lieder
In December, Schönberg composes Herzegewächse, op. 20
['foliage of the heart'],
has the première in Vienna of
Friede auf Erden, and his
Harmonielehre
is published.
He begins touring to other European cities to conduct his works
(Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, London), Scherchen going with him.
1912
At the end of February, Schönberg is to conduct
his Pelleas und Melisande in Prague. With Webern
following him from Berlin, Zemlinsky already in Prague,
and Berg and several other Vienna students joining, it
is a big reunion of the "Schönberg Circle". Webern
presents Schönberg with a copy of the "Tribute Book",
written by Schönberg's students about him, in hopes
of interesting other students in studying with him.
At the end of March, 37-year-old
Schönberg composes the first song for his cycle
Pierrot Lunaire, featuring
his novel sprechstimme ['speech-voice'] technique.
28-year-old Webern is occupied during most of April and part of May
with writing a 2-piano reduction of Schönberg's
5 Pieces for Orchestra. Then he goes on vacation
in Klagenfurt and Vienna, with a mountain climb in between,
stops in Berlin to see Schönberg,
and moves to Stettin on June 21 to begin a new job at the theater.
In June, at a music festival in Vienna,
Walter gives the posthumous première of Mahler's
9th Symphony [- hear part of the
1st movement -],
and conducts the Vienna première of
Das Lied von der Erde.
The Mahler 9th concert is framed by two concerts featuring
music of Schönberg and his students, notably
Schönberg's Buch der hängenden Garten
and 2nd Quartet, Berg's Piano Sonata, and
Webern's 4 Pieces for Violin and Piano -- and this time,
surprisingly, the "new music" is a big success with the audience
... but the newspaper critics still hate it. The brochure
accompanying these concerts contains the first critical study
of the music of Berg and Webern.
Feeling that he is finally ready to
compose a big piece, Korngold begins his
Sinfonietta in B-major a few weeks
before his 15th birthday.
Also during the spring, Schönberg composes
Pierrot Lunaire, featuring
sprechstimme ['speech-voice'] thru-out. It is premièred in Berlin
in October and is quite a success with the audience, while the critics
remain hostile. Stravinsky attends a rehearsal and is impressed;
his enthusiastic reception of Schönberg's progressive style will provide
much inspiration for his experiments in Le Sacre du Printemps
['the rite of spring'].
Schönberg's Pelleas und Melisande is published by Universal
Edition in Vienna as op. 5, and
Funf Orchesterstücke
['5 Pieces for Orchestra'] is published by Peters in Leipzig as op. 16; Schönberg
receives only 500 gulden as payment for the latter (in contrast to
the high fees that had been earned by Mahler and Strauss for their works).
Alma sets up the Mahler Foundation, to award prize money to worthy
young composers in Vienna, with Strauss, Busoni, and Walter as jurors.
The immediate reason for its existence is to continue Mahler's financial
support for Schönberg, and so the first grant is given to him.
After finishing his studies, 19-year-old Hába
gets a job as teacher in Bílovice,
a small town near the Hungarian border, and continues
his musical studies independently.
In August, 15-year-old Korngold completes the unorchestrated score of
his
Sinfonietta in B-major, op. 5,
a work that is on a much grander scale than its title implies
(really a full-blown late-romantic symphony),
and begins his Violin Sonata in G-major, op. 6.
Also in August, 27-year-old Berg announces the composition of the 3rd of his
Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg,
and the beginning of the 4th, and he finishes the whole set by late September.
48-year-old Strauss premières his latest opera
Ariadne auf Naxos (again in a more old-fashioned style)
in Stuttgart.
1913
In January, Walter becomes 'Royal Bavarian General Music Director'
in Munich.
|
In February, the Gurrelieder is finally premièred, in Vienna,
and is Schönberg's first big triumph in his native city;
the by-now-very-old-fashioned piece is a resounding,
even overwhelming, success, the greatest of his long career.
Schönberg, bitter over the scandals from the audiences and
hostility of the critics at the previous concerts of
his more progressive works, refuses to acknowledge the audience's
tremendous 15-minute ovation, turning his back to them,
bowing only to the performers, and exiting.
A month later, in a concert including works by Webern, Schönberg,
and Berg, fights break out, the concert is stopped, and lawsuits
result. The newspapers report on it not in the Arts section but rather
in the Urban Crimes section.
It is still today known as the worst riot in Viennese concert
history. The audience's ire is particularly inflamed by Berg's
Altenberg Lieder.
28-year-old Berg, who for 12 years has written only songs and chamber music,
writes 4 pieces for clarinet and piano, then
begins composing his Drei Orchesterstücke
['3 pieces for orchestra'], to satisfy his need to write
'something big'.
|
Schönberg: portrait of Berg
|
By this time Richard Strauss has regressed to a more old-fashioned idiom,
and altho he goes along with the other jurors (Busoni and Bruno Walter)
in awarding Schönberg
the Mahler Foundation grant for the second year in a row, he confides
to Alma that
[Strauss]
Schönberg 'would do better to shovel snow [the lowest-paying and most
menial job in Berlin] than to scribble
on music paper, but give it to him anyway...who knows what posterity
will think?'.
Schönberg finds out and writes a nasty letter about Strauss;
their friendship is over.
In the spring, Schönberg makes his first tentative contact with Hauer,
who will
later also claim priority as inventor of a 12-tone method.
During June and July, Webern finishes the 6 Bagatelles, op. 9 with
the composition of the 1st and the 6th, and during September and October he finishes the
5 Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10 by composing the 3rd, 2nd, and 5th.
38-year-old Franz Schmidt composes his 2nd Symphony.
Hába writes his first compositions, displaying
an unwillingness to 'follow the rules' that he will maintain all his life.
Korngold as a teenager, around the time of the Sinfonietta
|
In August, 16-year-old
Korngold completes his Sonata in G-major for violin
and piano, op. 6, and in September, finishes the orchestration of
his
Sinfonietta in B-major for large orchestra, op. 5,
a work whose title fails to convey its true size and scope: it
is in every respect a large late-romantic symphony, sounding like
the work of a man far older than a teenager. The
theme of the
Scherzo's Trio is very much like the music Korngold will later
write for the movies in Hollywood, and which will set the tone
of film-scores for decades. Meanwhile, since the summer Korngold
has also been composing his first opera,
Der Ring des Polykrates, op. 7; he completes the piano
score around Christmas.
|
After working on it on-and-off for 5 years, Schönberg
finally completes his music-drama Die glückliche Hand.
This score's careful coordination of text, music, action, and
lighting makes it perhaps the closest realization to Wagner's
Gesamtkunstwerk ['total-art-form'] idea to be achieved
up to this time.
1914
Schönberg is making arrangements to produce a film version
of Die glückliche Hand (silent, of course, with
live orchestral or organ accompaniment),
but the project never reaches fruition.
In the Spring, 16-year-old Korngold completes the orchestration
of his first opera, the 1-act Der Ring des Polykrates, op. 7,
and begins sketching the music for his second,
Violanta,
op. 8, on which he will work for the rest of this year.
In May, 29-year-old Berg attends several performances of the play
Wozzeck in Vienna; it is unknown today whether it is the
version of Franzos or that of Landau. Berg is immediately inspired
to write an opera based on it.
In June, Webern composes the 3 Little Pieces for Violoncello and
Piano, op. 11, some of the shortest pieces ever written.
Europe in 1914
|
At the end of June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
the heir to the Austrian throne, is assassinated in Sarajevo
(then part of the Austrian Empire),
and the fragile system of European political alliances breaks down.
World War I begins on July 31,
changing life in Europe for everyone, forever.
|
Hába, dissatisfied by small-town life, moves
to Prague and becomes a pupil of Novák at
the Conservatory. Here he analyzes Debussy, Reger, Scriabin, and Strauss,
and studies non-functional harmonization of Moravian folk-melodies.
By the end of August, Berg has finished his
Drei Orchesterstücke.
During World War 1
Schönberg will serve on active duty twice during the war,
and his major work during the next decade is on Die Jakobsleiter
['Jacob's Ladder'], which will remain unfinished. Berg composes
much of his first (and only completed) opera Wozzeck.
The teenage Korngold finishes the orchestration of his second
opera, the 1-act
Violanta, op.8,
which is produced on a double-bill with Der Ring des
Polykrates in Munich on 28 March 1916, under Bruno Walter.
In 1915 Möllendorf has another
quarter-tone
harmonium built, this time with a special keyboard.
In 1917 he gives a presentation in Vienna that is so
succesful he repeats it.
Hába is drafted into the Austrian Army and sent
to the Russian front, to the Italian front in 1917,
and then to Vienna in early 1918,
where he is assigned the collection of Slovakian soldier's songs.
Inspired by recitals given by Möllendorf,
Hába writes his first quarter-tone piece,
Suite in the quarter-tone system,
for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart.
He studies with Jan Brandts-Buys, then Richard Stöhr,
and becoming dissatisfied with these strict counterpoint lessons,
in the spring of 1918 becomes a student of Franz Schreker,
who brings out his more radical tendencies.
The 2nd German edition of Busoni's Sketch of a New Aesthetic
of Music, further revised and enlarged,
is published in Leipzig in 1916. Picked up by
a book club, it achieves much wider distribution this time.
After World War 1
Schönberg returns to live in Vienna for the third time,
and founds the Society for Private Performances
in order to rehearse and perform difficult contemporary music
properly.
Remaining in Vienna, Hába attends Schönberg's
Private Society concerts and studies Schönberg's works, becoming
particularly influenced by the 'athematic' style used by Schönberg
in Erwartung. He works as proof-reader at Universal
Edition, which enables him to study many of the most recent scores
by Schönberg and his students, and results in the first publication
of his compositions (including the
2nd Quartet,
his first major quarter-tone work). Hába follows Schreker to
Berlin in 1920, finds his first success as a composer there,
and begins publishing theoretical treatises.
In 1923 he meets Busoni, who had advocated the
sixth-tone (36-tET)
system (altho he never composed in it himself),
and who encourages Hába to continue his work in
microtonality. Hába attempts the establishment of a school
of microtonal music, only acheiving it in the 1930s in Prague.
In 1924, Ivan Wyschnegradsky
takes Möllendorf's
quarter-tone
harmonium (with the special keyboard) with him to Paris.
Microtonality enjoys a certain vogue for a few decades largely
because of the efforts of Hába and Wyschnegradsky,
but the rise to power of the Nazis and then the Communists
brands it as a 'decadent' practice, and
only in the 1980s and 1990s does it begin to
become a major trend in music.
Berg completes the composition of Wozzeck in late 1921
and the orchestration in April 1922. Thanks to Alma Mahler's
intervention, Universal Edition accepts it for publication in
March 1923. There is a good deal of positive press, and in the
fall of 1923 the conductor Erich Kleiber accepts it for the
Berlin Opera; the première finally takes place
14 December 1925 and Wozzeck is by far the biggest
success of the entire 'Second Viennese School'.
The big musical development in Viennese circles
after the war is Schönberg's publication of his '12-tone-method'.
From the popularity of Wozzeck and the critical debate
over the 12-tone method, Schönberg and his circle obtain
quite a bit of recognition in the 1920s.
World War 2 and later
The coming to power
of Hitler and the Nazis causes the emigration of many Jewish musicians
from Europe, including Schönberg and Korngold, who settle in
Los Angeles, and Walter, who goes to New York.
Schönberg converts back to Judaism in 1933 and vehemently reaffirms
his Jewish ancestry; he also changes the spelling of his name to
Schoenberg because of the lack of umlauts on American typewriters.
Korngold's chief occupation in America is composing film scores
for such 1930s Warner Brothers classics as The Sea Hawk
and Captain Blood -- his style sets the tone for the sound
of Hollywood soundtracks into the 1950s, and enjoys a big revival
again after 1977 with John Williams's Star Wars, whose main
theme is almost a carbon-copy of Korngold's King's Row.
Berg dies in 1935, and Webern is accidentally
killed by an American soldier during the occupation of Austria just
after World War 2 ends; Schoenberg thus outlives both of
his most famous students.
Schoenberg has an influential teaching career at UCLA, even
counting George Gershwin among his students and friends; still,
he has much difficulty obtaining both recognition from his colleagues
and much-needed financial stability. He suffers a 'temporary death'
in 1946, and composes two of his
most powerful works after his revival: the String Trio, which
he said was specificially meant to depict his 'death', and
A Survivor from Warsaw, based on a story related to him
by an actual survivor of the Nazi extermination policy.
Schoenberg dies in 1951 and Korngold in 1957.
Pierre Boulez's notorious obituary Schoenberg est mort ['Schoenberg
is dead'] heralds an era from the 1950s to 1980s,
centered mainly in Paris and New York but affecting academic
musical circles all over the world, during which
Webern is the most admired of modern composers.
Boulez's
Le Marteau sans Maître ['the hammer without a master']
is widely considered to be one culmination of this movement.
Major trends in music after the 1950s originate mainly in America,
particularly rock'n'roll, minimalism, and rap, and by the end of the
millenium, with the recycling of 'samples' of previously-recorded
music in new pieces, it is hard to find anything 'new' outside of
microtonality.
