Notes from Thorofon ETHK 341/4: MUSIC BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS: A Berlin Documentation EDITOR'S FOREWORD This Edition represents an attempt to provide, in the limited space available, an overview of the vigorous musical scene in Berlin of the 1920's and 1930's, a time when Berlin was one of the focal points of the world. In the area of the arts this was the undisputed heyday of a great city, and it is the profusion of music that will be the subject of the musicological section of this booklet. An Edition such as this can merely select, hint at and perhaps whet the interest for those works not included here; it can only give an inkling of the diversity and vitality that made Berlin the exhilarating metropole that it was. The works have been chosen according to these criteria: the composer had to have lived in Berlin and the composition been written during the designated period; the composer had to have been of significance to the musical scene in Berlin; the work chosen should if possible be a first release on records, so as to enhance the presently meager supply of recordings from that era. The Edition has been structured according to chronology as well as to certain institutions: 1. The Twenties 2. The Thirties 3. The Academy of Music 4. The Prussian Academy of the Arts Horst Gobel ERNST KRENEK Symphonic fur Blasinstrumente und Schlagwerk op. 34 (1924/25) KURT WEILL "Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen" für Mannerchor (1929) GRETE von ZIERITZ Präludium und Fuge für Klavier (1924) FERRUCCIO BUSONI Elegie fur Klarinette und Klavier (1920) KAROL RATHAUS Sonate für Klarinette und Klavier op. 21 (1927) Allegretto; Recitativo; Allegro con brio HANNS EISLER "Palmstrom" (Studien über Zwölfton-Reihen) op. 5 (1926) Venus Palmström; Notturno; L'art pour l'art; Galgenbruders Frühlingslied; Couplet von der Topetenblume PAUL HINDEMITH Konzert für Orchester op. 38 (1925) FRANZ SCHREKER Kleine Suite für Orchester (1928) PAUL HINDEMITH "Langsames Stuck und Rondo" für Trautonium (1935) HANS CHEMIN-PETIT Drei Lieder nach Gedichten von Ricarda Huch (1928) "Die Harfe war besaitet ohne Ziel"; "ln jener Zeit, da ich Dich nicht mehr nannte"; "Eine Melodie singt mein Herz" HEINZ TIESSEN Zwei Ernste Weisen für Viola und Klavier op. 29/30 (1920) FERRUCCIO BUSONI Divertimento für Flote und Klavier op. 52 (Kurt Weill) (1920) ARNOLD SCHONBERG Klavierstucke op. 33a/b (1928/31) HEINRICH KAMINSKI Musik für zwei Violinen und Cembalo (1931) Präludium; Canon; Tanz; Finale HANS PFITZNER Sechs Liebeslieder nach Gedichten von Ricarda Huch für Sopran und Klavier op. 35 (1924) "Bestimmung"; "Ich werde nicht an Deinem Herzen satt"; "Wo hast Du all die Schönheit hergenommen"; "Schwill an, mein Strom"; "Eine Melodie singt mein Herz"; "Denn unsere Liebe hat zu heiss geflammt" MAX von SCHILLINGS Vier Klavierstucke op. 36 (1932) Helldunkel; Trotz; Invocation; Dies und das (als Epilog) MUSIC BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS: A Berlin Documentation I. At the Outset of the Twenties On looking back at the 1920's we seem to have imbued them with a certain aureate shimmer, for they were in fact not all that golden. After all, they gave us inflation and a world economic crisis. Culturally regarded, however, there was more gold in them for Berlin than in any year until then. Think of the flow of creative energy that was amassing in the area of New Music even in that initial year of the decade! It is exactly in January of 1920 that the first issue of a magazine called "Melos" is published. Its editor is Hermann Scherchen. He is a native of Berlin, has his roots in a corner pub in Goeben Strasse, learned almost everything he knew about music by himself, had played even as a teenager in the Bluthner Orchestra and as an auxiliary violist with the Berlin Philharmonic, and by the time he was twenty he was on tour with Arnold Schonberg conducting the latter's "Pierrot Lunaire". Working as a conductor in Riga at the outbreak of World War I, he was put in prison by the Russians, during which time he discovered an affinity for the cause of the Russian Revolution and later for the German Workers' Movement, for whom he translated the anthem "Brothers, to the Sun, to Freedom" from Russian to German and arranged it for chorus. He wrote in "Melos" in those days: "Neither is it the neo- classical, nor Schonberg nor Bela Bartok, nor in fact any of this sophisticated art, sick from mental strain; no, it is a new creativity of monumental simplicity, arisen from the depths of shared emotions, its roots in the music of the people - this will be the music of the future." Of course Scherchen cannot divest himself of Schonberg and the New Music. He sets up a New Music Society, conducting anything that is at the time avant garde. Unfortunately he leaves for Leipzig already in 1921, but by that time there are enough people in Berlin to take up where he left off. There is Heinz Tiessen, who had come from Konigsberg to Berlin in 1905 and regarded the city - even then - as the "world metropole of music". He and Scherchen share a common interest not only in Schonberg's music but also in a broad music culture for the masses. From 1918 to 1921 he is conductor and composer-in-residence at the Volksbuhne Theater, conducts the University Orchestra from 1920 to 1922 and the Youth Chorus of the German Workers' Choral Union from 1922 to 1933. The venerable music society Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, established by Liszt and Brendel in 1861 for the "support and fostering of musical activity and its continuing development", was later subject to, "the effects of a certain senility and inbreeding" (H. H. Stuckenschmidt). After the First World War, however, the Society seems to take new wind in its sails. Tiessen is appointed to the jury, and he in turn brings along progressive-minded Georg Schünemann. And so it happens that the program for the 50th Composers' Festival at Weimar in 1920 includes Schonberg's Orchestral Pieces opus 16, Scherchen's String Quartet opus 1 and the First Symphony by Eduard Erdmann, a pupil of Tiessen's who numbers among the leading avantgarde composers in the 1920's. Even in the first issue of "Melos" there is a song by him. A brilliant pianist, having received the finishing touches from Liszt's pupil Conrad Ansorge, he is committed to the cause of modern music from the beginning. Not the least because of him, Tiessen refers to the Berlin concert season in 1918-19 as the "initial phase of the Golden Twenties". In a memorable concert on March 28, 1919, which marked his breakthrough as a pianist, Erdmann performs among other works Tiessen's half-hour "Trilogy of Nature", Schonberg's Piano Pieces opus 19 - which result in an audience brawl -, his own Piano Pieces opus 6 and Alban Berg's Sonata opus 1. II. The Busoni School 1920 - that is also the year that Leo Kestenberg, active as Music Consultant in the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education, embarks on a comprehensive revamping of Berlin music life. He retrieves his former teacher Ferruccio Busoni from his wartime exile in Zurich, once again to the city where he had variously lived since 1894. Kestenberg has Busoni appointed as successor to Richard Strauss at the Prussian Academy of Arts to instruct a master class in composition. Oddly enough, that same year Busoni's bitter archrival Hans Pfitzner is given the same appointment. Berlin has always had a penchant for thrusting extreme forces together and being able to endure them, indeed gaining its creative energy from just that tension. Busoni soon gathers an international coterie of new and former pupils around him at his home at Viktoria-Luise-Platz, e.g. German-Spanish composer Philipp Jarnach, Russian Vladimir Vogel and Kurt Weill. Vogel came from Moscow in 1918, where he was taken by the ecstatic, atonal music of the late Skriabin. He now develops a taste for Schonberg's expressionism of the middle period but soon endeavours to amalgamate it with Busoni's "classicism", thus gaining a profile of his own. In 1922 Vogel writes his "Spoken Songs" to lyrics by August Stramm, then using in 1930 for the first time a polyphonic spoken chorus in his oratorio "Wagadu's Downfall", based on a Berber story. Ernst Toch employs the same kind of spoken chorus that same year in his "Fuge aus der Geographie" ("Geographical Fugue"), and its use gains a certain significance as a form of expression, particularly in the culture of the working classes. A "Storm March" that Vogel writes two years later causes a sensation, but already the sound of the Nazis' storm march is blaring down the streets of Berlin. Vogel, who has been teaching composition and radiogenetic performance at the Klindworth Scharwenka Conservatory, must leave - as must his friend and fellow student with Busoni, Kurt Weill. After having composed a symphony, a string quartet and a violin concerto Weill turned to music theater, working in collaboration with Georg Kaiser ("The Protagonist"), Ivan Goll ("The New Orpheus" and "Royal Palace") and finally with Bert Brecht. The premiere of the "Dreigroschenoper" ("Three Penny Opera") on August 31, 1928 scored a meteoric success unequalled in decades: a new genre had been born. III. Schrecker and the Academy of Music 1920 - this was, last but not least, the year that would witness a complete shake-up at the State Academy of Music. It had fallen into a state of cataleptic academism, with the Stern Conservatory being regarded as the more progressive institution. Now, however, Kestenberg names Franz Schreker as Director and Professor of Composition. The Viennese composer had come into high repute for his necromantic operas of opulently sensuous timbre, but is now developing more strongly towards a linear chamber-musical style as befitting the trend of the times. Schreker's assistant director and the actual driving force behind the Academy is to be Georg Schunemann, who emerges as a peerless champion of Kestenberg's innovative approach to music education. Schunemann enlists the services of outstanding artists and teachers for the institute, for example Busoni's pupil Egon Petri and Arthur Schnabel as pianists, violinists Carl Flesch, Max Postal, Gustav Havemann and Georg Kulenkampff and cellist Emanuel Feuermann. Schreker is joined by a number of his pupils, who come to artistic maturity in Berlin and present their works to the public: there is Karol Rathaus from Poland, already a composer of merit, who in short order turns out two symphonies of daring atonality and who himself begins teaching composition in Berlin in 1921. Then there is 20-year-old Ernst Krenek, prolific from the very first; a veritable musical chameleon, versed in every style ranging from necromantism to craggy atonality and even to jazz. By 1924 he is already working on his Fourth Symphony, and in 1927 scores a worldwide hit with his opera "Jonny Spielt Auf" - a peculiar amalgam of jazz elements and Schreker's richness of sound. The work was a prototype of the Zeitoper, or "opera of the times", and there was hardly a composer who remained impervious to it. Lastly there is the Czech Alois Haba, who had already begun using quartertones both melodically and harmonically in his 1921 Second String Quartet; in 1923 he would leave Berlin for Prague as a teacher of composition. In Berlin Schreker meets up with Paul Hotter, who after three years of study is himself employed at the Academy as a teacher, at first for piano, then for theory and composition. As a composer he tends more to the Hindemith school. In 1926 Grete von Zieritz joins up with Schreker, having completed her study of piano and composition with honors in her native city of Graz. She had lived in Berlin since 1917 and taught at the Stern Conservatory; in 1928 she wins the Mendelssohn Award. IV. Schönberg in Berlin 1924 is the year of Ferruccio Busoni's death. The Ministry responsible for finding his successor decides on no less a person than Arnold Schönberg, who is hired on extremely favorable conditions: he only has to teach six months a year. The list of his students in Berlin does not include talents of such outstanding profile as he had in his Viennese School with the likes of Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Hanns Eisler. Although the last of these had been in Berlin since 1924, and his music met with the approval of Artur Schnabel and his pupils, Eisler has already pursued the way of the workers' movement, which then results in a rift between him and his teacher. As early as the "Palmstrom Studies" opus 5 but even more so in the "Zeitungsausschnitte" ("Newspaper Clippings") opus 9, there is evidence of his new outlook, one of satire on the bourgeois attitudes and of total commitment to the proletariat. In 1926 Hermann Duncker, one of the founding fathers of the German Communist Party, engages Eisler for the newly established Marxist Workers' School as instructor of music. The first work written by Schönberg in Berlin is the Suite opus 29, in which he integrates the folksong "Annchen von Tharau" into twelve-tone structure. It is worth mentioning that, during his Berlin residence, he made folksong arrangements that were in pure and simple tonality, thus paying his own respects to that music of the masses which became so prevalent in the 1920's. The Orchestra Variations opus 31 are included in the program repertoire of the Philharmonic Orchestra under Furtwangler, but the premiere is booed on December 2, 1928. In his one-act opera "Von heute auf morgen" ("From One Day to the Next"), Schönberg makes a rather infelicitous tribute to the operatic trend of the day. He hopes that it will gain him popularity, make him "something of a better Tschaikovsky", but the twelve-tone style gets in his way. Following the radio performance which he conducts on February 27,1930 the opera sinks into oblivion. In June of that year there are stagings of two earlier works, "Erwartung" ("Expectations") and "Die glückliche Hand" ("The Felicitous Hand"), in the Kroll Opera conducted by Alexander von Zemlinsky and Otto Klemperer. The latter also performs the "Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene" ("Incidental Music for a Motion Picture Scene") at the Kroll Opera in 1930. The Piano Pieces opus 33a and b are written in 1928 and 1931, illustrating his commanding knowledge of twelve tone technique. Schönberg grows more and more acutely aware of his being a Jew, no doubt as a result of the increasing antisemitism: it was not to be forgotten how, after a performance of "Pierrot Lunaire" by Scherchen in 1922, someone jumped up onto the stage and launched into a tirade of antisemitic slogans. Schonberg had in 1926 approached the poem "Der biblische Weg" ("The Biblical Way"), which on one hand took up the idea of a Jewish State and on the other hand was a preliminary study for his opera "Moses and Aaron", the largest project Schonberg deals with at the beginning of the 1930's - and is never to finish. On March 1, 1933 at a meeting of the executive board of the Academy of the Arts, its president Max von Schillings announces that the government wishes to cut down the Jewish influence in the Academy. Schönberg replies that he has no intention of staying where he is unwelcome, and leaves the meeting. On March 20th, "deeply offended in his personal and artistic pride", he resigns from his position, leaving Berlin on May 17th for Paris, where he converts to the Jewish faith. V. Hindemith and his Circle Paul Hindemith manages to hold out in Berlin somewhat longer. Kestenberg had engaged him in 1927 for the Music Academy, and that with great forethought: many of Schreker's and Busoni's pupils tended more in the direction of Hindemith than of their teachers. Hindemith had already gotten over his "Sturm und Drang" period as well as pseudo-jazz inclinations with his opera "Morder, Hoffnung der Frauen" ("Murderer, Hope of the Women") and "Sancta Susanna"; he had consolidated his style in the direction of the "New Objectivity" and its baroque-based polyphony. In the course of his teaching activity in Berlin he now also develops the theoretical substructure of his music in his "Lessons in Composition". Hindemith is a born teacher. One of his first pupils is Siegfried Borris, who himself is soon (at the age of twenty-two) hired as instructor at the Academy. Another worthy of mention is Harold Genzmer, who likewise soon became a teacher. Hindemith's and Genzmer's educational ardor extends well beyond their academic field, encompassing also the musical guidance of amateurs. Both of the men give courses at the City Music School in Neukölln - where the young Dietrich Erdmann was a pupil -, both compose instrumental and vocal music for amateur groups. Hindemith as an educator temporarily also has some contact with Brecht; the two collaborate on a school play about consent, in which the audience is required to participate. Together with Brecht and Weill, he writes the "Lindbergh Flight", which is conceived as a connecting link between radio and amateur musical performance. When Brecht resolutely turns to communism, their paths inevitably diverge. And when Brecht/Eisler's "Measures to be Taken" are submitted to the Program Committee (of which Hindemith is a member) of the Festival of New Music in Berlin 1930 - an extension of the Donaueschinger and Baden-Badener Musiktage - then the schism is complete. A musician as pragmatic and relevant to the times as Hindemith could hardly escape the fashionable genre of the aforementioned Zeitoper. "Those were times in which the 'contemporariness' of an opera was measured according to the number of machines and hotel bars named in it", writes Hindemith's pioneer and biographer Heinrich Strobel. Following a sketch called "Hin und Zurück" ("There and Back"), Hindemith and cabaret writer Marcellus Schiffer co-author the opera "Neues vom Tage" ("Newest of the Day"), a drama of jealousy centered around a lady who sits in the bathtub singing of the merits of warm water heating - it is a scene that prudish Hitler never forgave Hindemith. The world economic crisis of 1929, however, soon dampened any such pleasure in that sort of playfulness, and that "from one day to the next", as it were. "It seems that the time is once again coming for great and serious music", writes Hindemith while working on his oratorio "Das Unaufhörliche" ("That Which is Unceasing") after a text by Gottfried Benn. Otto Klemperer conducts the premiere with the Philharmonic Chorus, even as he had earlier assisted at the birth of "Neues vom Tage" at the Kroll Opera. A person like Hindemith who - unlike Schönberg ("my day will come") - was incapable of retreating to his ivory tower, who indeed depended on audience response to his music, could not help being concerned by the issues which had become urgent since the impending advent of the Third Reich. What is the artist's standpoint on "the people", the broad masses? Are they capable of, or even justified in, judging a work of art? These are some of the issues raised by Hindemith in his opera "Mathis der Maler", which he begins in the summer of 1933. In a pivotal scene, books are burned on the market square in Mainz. This was no doubt highly relevant to the times, with 1933 the year that Alfred Rosenberg began with the burning of books, and Hindemith was soon among the outcasts. Even at the 1932 premiere of his "Philharmonisches Konzert" on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Party newspaper "Völkischer Beobachter" complained: "What realy amazes us is the fact that this First Commemorative Concert has been used as an excuse to premiere one of those contestable, questionable attempts at composition by Paul Hindemith, who as a protege of the Jews could hardly be further removed from all that is German". It is Fürtwangler who conducts the Philharmonic Orchestra in the March 12,1934 performance of the "Mathis der Maler" Symphony, with resounding success. In November he writes an article on behalf of Hindemith in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, bringing Goebbels into action: in a December speech at the Sportpalast he derides Hindemith as an "atonal noisemaker", whereupon Fürtwangler temporarily resigns from his position in Berlin. Hindemith transfers more and more of his activities to countries abroad. In 1936 his works are officially banned from performance; in March of 1937 he quits his position at the Music Academy and leaves Germany. He is not to be forgotten during the next years in Berlin, however; many of his followers and pupils remain to "ride out the storm" in the city, and his music is privately fostered. VI. The Department of Experimental Radio In one aspect of his work at the Music Academy, at least, Hindemith has an effect far into the future. The Academy, which at that time was receptive to any and every experiment, had in 1927 set up a department of experimental radio - a logical idea in a city that was pioneering in the area of electroacoustics and radiotechnology. Schünemann outlined the objectives of the new department thus: it was to examine the problems inherent in the broadcasting of music, and contribute to the development of musical forms and electronic instruments specific to radio. Hindemith had long since tried his hand at the new media, having written some music to a silent film even in 1921. Now, together with students and colleagues, he draws up a dramaturgy of film music, and he himself writes the music to the film "Felix the Cat", for mechanical organ. After mechanical instruments he now becomes interested in electronic producers of sound. Friedrich Trautwein develops the Trautonium, Hindemith and Genzmer compose for the instrument, Hindemith's pupil Oskar Sala performs on it and develops it further. Hindemith even works toward a "gramophone-specific" music by having sound-carriers with recordings of xylophones and voices run at different speeds - thus anticipating musique concrète. VII. Music Theater The venerable State Opera, which until the First World War had been highly conservative, now gets new momentum. In 1923 the young Erich Kleiber is taken under contract as General Music Director and conducts (in 1926) the premiere of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck", which along with its undisputable success was also given venomously derisive reviews from the right-wing press. They become so abusive by the Lulu Suite in 1934 that Kleiber quits his position and leaves the city. However, it is the Kroll Opera under the leadership of Otto Klemperer that shows itself to be the most imaginative among the music theaters. It is here that audiences can hear literally "The Newest of the Day", and along with the Hindemith opera there is Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex" in a scenic premiere, as well as operas by Janacek, Schönberg and Krenek. Unfortunately the company only lasts from 1927 to 1931, then falling victim to the intrigues of cultural politics. In May of 1936 Werner Egk, who already in 1928/29 had been in contact with Berlin's most progressive circles, becomes Conductor of the State Opera Unter den Linden. There he is able to stage his opera "Peer Gynt" in November 1938, upon which a planned Nazi campaign against it is promptly unleashed. Egk terminates his contract with the State Opera in 1940. The war which is to bring lasting destruction to Berlin's thriving culture - long since ravaged by Hitler's regime - has already begun. Gottfried Eberle English: Clement Calder