Bringing Schreker to Salzburg

[Ralph]

From The New York Times:

August 14, 2005
The Sound and the Fury
By JEREMY EICHLER

SALZBURG, Austria

CULTURAL festivals do not get much more glamorous than the one that takes place every summer in this immaculately preserved Baroque city. At the opera here two weeks ago, the audience included men in sleek tuxedos and women in gowns that evoked the splendor of imperial ages past. You might have imagined that they were streaming in for some music by Mozart, the local hero, but this summer Salzburg opened its festival on a different, more complex note. Austria's elite was turning out for a dark opera called "The Branded," by Franz Schreker.

In a way it was as much a political event as a cultural one, a gesture of musical reparation. Schreker, an Austrian-Jewish composer whose career suffered under the Nazis, died in 1934 after a stroke. His music was later banned and mostly forgotten. This year, the festival has tried to restore some honor to his name and to remind the public of what was once in its midst.

"Salzburg had a very strong Nazi movement," Helga Rabl-Stadler, the president of the festival, explained in a recent interview. "We think it is very important and necessary to bring the music we have never heard because of the Third Reich." The audience response on opening night was duly respectful but also somewhat tentative.

Schreker is not the only one receiving new attention. In both Salzburg and Vienna, the music of exiled composers like Erich Korngold and Alexander Zemlinsky is again being brought before the public. In Germany this year, there have been dozens of performances of works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a German composer who responded to his dark times with music of fierce protest.

Sixty years after the end of World War II, across German-speaking Europe, classical music has been invoked as a medium of public memory, an accompaniment to the fitful process of reckoning with the past. In these countries, as firsthand memories of the war dwindle, music is serving as a kind of proxy allowing postwar generations to approach a difficult history. But why, other than the convenience of an anniversary, is this music being called to speak now? And what exactly can it remember?

In Germany, the effort to showcase the music of composers who suffered under the Third Reich has been under way for a decade or more as part of a broader imperative to confront the Nazi past. It has even spurred a small recording boom in "degenerate music," to use the name by which the Nazis referred to modernism and jazz. But this year in Germany, the 60th anniversary of the war seemed to be met with a palpable sense of guilt-fatigue, despite the opening of the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The German president, Horst Köhler, has sympathized with the suffering of German victims, including those who experienced the allied bombing of the cities. The strategic wisdom and basic morality of that campaign has also been questioned anew. Meanwhile, those born after the war have other pressing problems, including the vexed aftermath of unification.

Austria is a different case. Encouraged by the prevalent postwar myth that it was not an aggressor but rather the first victim of Nazism, the nation was slower to face its wartime legacy. Since the revelation in 1986 that the country's president, Kurt Waldheim, had whitewashed his Nazi connection, apologies and national soul-searching have ensued, but it is a work in progress. Even as music by the nation's once-banned composers is returning, a politician from the Freedom Party recently questioned the existence of gas chambers.

Both countries have used classical music more than any other art as a conduit and a repository of memory. There are good reasons for this: since the 19th century, music has been a staging ground for the region's political and ideological battles, and an echo chamber for questions of cultural and national identity. Music also tracked the great German downfall. The orchestras played almost every day in Auschwitz.

And then there is the medium of music itself: a symphony or a string quartet, with its abstract musical language, can communicate powerful emotions while remaining mute on the details of meaning. Thomas Mann called it "that spoken unspokenness given to music alone." Behind these emotions, however, lie the composers who produced them. And their stories, particular, temporal and thoroughly human, speak in ways all their own.

THE hundredth anniversary of Hartmann's birth in in Munich is this month. The centenary celebrations have included more than 60 performances of his work, mostly in Munich but also across Germany. A new exhibition on his life and music is at the Munich City Museum, and the summer festival of the Bavarian State Opera opened in June with a successful performance of his opera "Simplicius Simplicissimus."

On musical terms alone, the attention to Hartmann is long overdue. He was a master German symphonist whose work drew deeply from almost three centuries of Austro-German tradition, from Bach to Webern, and distilled these influences in his own deeply personal style, which spoke with abundant power and emotional urgency. The centenary may well give his music a lasting lift within Germany; it deserves to be heard more in the United States as well, where it turns up only rarely.

But Hartmann's output is almost never cited without its dramatic context. He was a great believer in the moral possibilities of art precisely at a time when it was being so profoundly debased. Hartmann chose to stay in Germany but was one of the disturbingly few composers who did not collaborate with the Nazis. He withdrew from public musical life and channeled his opposition into his music.

The works he composed under the Third Reich are indeed a powerful testament. Perhaps the most famous is his searing "Concerto Funebre," written in 1939 to protest the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Subversive Czech tunes and Russian songs of revolution are smuggled into the music, the memory of Hartmann's protest inscribed into the texture of the piece.

On other occasions, Hartmann declared his allegiances in the inscriptions of his work.

He composed a piano sonata at the end of the war, after witnessing 20,000 inmates marching from the concentration camp at Dachau shortly before its liberation. The score read, "Endless was the stream - endless the misery - endless the sorrow."

These political commitments made his music unplayable at home. As the war intensified, Hartmann, buried his manuscripts deep in the mountains for safekeeping. But he survived the war through his wife's family's wealth and through a delicate dance with the authorities.

In a way the Hartmann centenary could not have been better timed with the national mood in Germany. Hartmann was the textbook "inner emigrant," one who remained in the country physically but spiritually withdrew from his surroundings. His experiences of suffering under the Nazis while retaining ethical integrity have all the makings of a perfect musical resistance myth.

This is not to dismiss Hartmann's protest. His wartime record was courageous, not to mention his outstanding postwar service in restoring Germany's contemporary-music culture by founding the series Musica Viva. But his example also resonates conveniently well with elements of the country's new historical self-image. It makes for a certain reciprocal appeal: Hartmann needs to be heard in Germany today, and today's Germany needs its Hartmann.

Finally, Hartmann's example raises larger, difficult questions about the very category of the inner emigrant, a status that was claimed after the war by many German artists and writers far less deserving than Hartmann. At its core, the concept is suffused with a troubling ethical ambiguity, as if one could be present at the scene of a crime and yet morally absent. Was it possible to live quietly through the Third Reich without being partly implicated in what occurred?

THE Austrian composer Schreker was at the other pole of musical memory this summer. The new production of "The Branded" ("Die Gezeichneten"), which tells the eerily prescient story of an artistic utopia that mutates into a nightmare of corruption, decadence and murder, capped the Salzburg Festival's four-year series of operas by repressed composers.

Schreker was a major musical casualty of the Third Reich. His half-Jewish ancestry and his progressive affiliations made inner emigration impossible, and he was planning actual emigration in 1934 when he died. He had already been forced out of prominent teaching positions in Berlin after Hitler rose to power.

Unlike some composers who left behind only glimpses of their potential, Schreker achieved demonstrable brilliance. A string of wildly successful operas featured a kind of shimmering, intoxicated music that breathed deeply of the Viennese Art Nouveau but brought its lushly textured sensuality into an era of probing Expressionism.

During his heyday, Schreker was something of a contradiction in terms: a truly popular modernist whose music was performed almost as often as Strauss's. He was hailed by his champions as the true heir to Wagner or, as one American publication called him, "the messiah of German opera."

And yet artistic careers don't map neatly onto political timelines. Schreker's star faded even before the Nazis arrived, when he failed to keep up with the shifting fashions of the Weimar Republic. After the war, the musical avant-garde had no time to look back. It was too busy forging ahead with the legacy of Schreker's peer, Arnold Schoenberg, creating difficult serial music that promised a break with the seemingly tainted traditions of the past. Schreker's life's work was simply left behind, buried beneath the rubble.

Now with old prejudices about musical progress having fallen away, Schreker's work is ripe for another shot at posterity. As his biographer Christopher Hailey has argued, Schreker's lavish utopian sound-canvases offered an alternative vision of modernism that was later lost in the shuffle, a path not taken into the future of music. We may finally be ready to appreciate Schreker's work on its own terms and, in so doing, reclaim a broader founding vision of modernism. Indeed, whether or not the recent performances can help Austrians remember their past, they should certainly help music remember its own.

And yet, there may be a tension between these two uses of music. As long as these works continue to serve as memorials, they remain sequestered from the repertory of which they were once a vital part. From a strictly musical perspective, the question is whether composers like Schreker can be unburdened from the task of so much symbolizing. This might allow them to re-enter the Austrian musical pantheon as one of the country's own, long after the "degenerate art" tributes have ended.

But from the perspective of a collective grappling with the past, the questions grow more complicated. In some ways, classical music is perfectly suited to the task of public memory in Austria and Germany, precisely because of its privileged place in these societies. The Salzburg Festival itself was conceived as the "noble confession" of the Austrian soul. Giving Schreker pride of place there this summer sends a powerful symbolic message.

But the broader limits of using music this way are also painfully apparent. These programs reach only a limited part of an educated elite. There is also the risk of offering an easy out: grappling with the past, whether personal or collective, should entail more than an enjoyable night at the opera. Music can be a beginning to this process, but surely not an end. To suggest it would clearly be an evasion, an outsourcing of difficult public-political work to the genteel corridors of culture.

And finally, the role of the listener is typically too passive for music to serve as a fully successful vehicle of public memory. In the end, memorials are about much more than just their contemplation; they are about how that renewed memory is brought back into the world. The scholar James Young has written about public monuments, but his words of caution apply equally to this music: "Were we to passively remark only on the contours of these memorials, were we to leave unexplored their genesis and remain unchanged by the recollective act, it could be said that we have not remembered at all."