The Modern Era in Central Europe (Part 1)

Central European composers born in the latter part of the 19^th century faced significant aesthetic, cultural and political challenges.  Along with the continuing decline of the Habsburg Empire, which meant a continuing decline in aristocratic patronage of the arts, musicians were divided by the twin legacies of Romanticism: the progressive “music of the future” of Richard Wagner and his acolytes, and the relative conservatism of Johannes Brahms and the purveyors of “absolute music.”  Emerging out of this internecine struggle was a sense of the gradual exhaustion of the narrative and harmonic traditions of the 19^th century, and the awareness of a dawning crisis of tonality.  By the first decade of the 20^th century, three responses to this crisis appear: a syncretic approach, featuring a turn towards folk traditions as a means to revivify the European classical tradition; a revolutionary approach that seemed to abandon tonality entirely, in favour of a radically dissonant and deeply subjective “modern” mode of composing; and a middle road that sought to carry the post-Romantic tradition into the new century.  But, as the “arch-modernist” Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg would later insist, “the middle road is the only one which does not lead to Rome.”

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), among the best-known Czech composers in the classical music canon, was born in Hukvaldy (Hochwald)in Austrian Silesia.  Initially influenced by fellow Czech Antonin Dvořák, Janáček would become a proponent of folk music, at a time of burgeoning folk music revivals throughout Europe.  But Janáček—like Bohuslav Martinů, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály who would soon follow him—was more a folklorist than a revivalist, collecting and studying the folk music of his native country to forge new approaches to composition via an organic synthesis of classical and folk music.  While Janáček was trained in conservative institutions—the Prague Organ School and the Vienna Conservatory—and he was considerably older than the emerging generation of young modernist composers of fin-de-siècle period (indeed, older than the last generation of the late Romantics, including Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss), his music nonetheless demonstrates many of the sensibilities of the early 20th century, rather than the preceding one.  Janáček’s early folklorist investigations, beginning in 1888, culminated in his opera Janufa in 1904, which premiered in Brno.  In this work, two key elements of Janáček’s evolving style are evident: the increasingly free treatment of key and harmony, in which a somewhat contingent diatonicism is intermixed with modal and octatonic elements from Moravian folk music, and the introduction of Janáček’s concept of “speech melodies”—melodies created from and reflecting the expressive dynamics of the natural idioms of everyday speech.  Josef Suk (1874-1935) was, like Janáček, a Czech composer strongly influenced by Dvořák early in his career.  Unlike Janáček, Suk was not directly influenced by folk music, though he did compose “dumkas”—introspective, melancholy ballads or laments common in the folk traditions of Central Europe—and drew inspiration from popular Czech dance forms.  After a stylistic shift away from Dvorak in the late 19^th century, Suk’s music begins to show the influence of the harmonic centrifuge of late-Romanticism, with its chromatically altered harmonies, tonal ambiguity and use of polytonality. 

The music of Viennese composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) has only begun to be appreciated in the last few decades.   A reputedly modest and meek person, Zemlinsky and his works have long been overshadowed by the bigger personalities and reputations of late Romantics like Gustav Mahler, and by the nascent rebels of early modernism like his brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg.  But Zemlinsky was highly regarded by his contemporaries—indeed, he was a successful conductor, and is well-known for being Schoenberg’s only composition teacher—and his music is a compelling if mercurial blend of meticulous Brahmsian construction and powerful, effusive emotional expression.  His first string quartet, composed in 1896, is at once quintessentially Viennese in its vivacity and clarity, but its sometimes-audacious chromaticism also foreshadows the radical expressive innovations of the Second Viennese School in the early 20^th century.  Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was born the same year as Josef Suk, but the two composers could hardly be more different, with respect to their compositional aesthetic and legacy.  Schoenberg was born in Vienna, and while he moved back and forth frequently between Vienna and Berlin, and ultimately emigrated to the United States in 1933 after the rise of Nazism in Germany, it was his birthplace that left a lasting imprint on the composer.  Around 1900, Vienna was already a volatile, boiling pot of politics, ethnic and religious tensions, provocative modern art, and intellectual ferment across disciplines.  Musically, however, Vienna was extremely conservative and sought to preserve and protect its golden heritage from the ravages of an emerging aesthetic modernism.  This very resistance to progress, however, ultimately catalyzed a small group of composers, centred around Schoenberg, to develop what would be called “atonality”: music unbounded by the restrictions of key and functional harmony.  Schoenberg—whose early works, including perhaps his best known composition, the tone poem Verklärte Nacht op.4 offered a synthesis of Brahmsian counterpoint and lush Wagnerian harmonies—would describe his efforts in kind of politicized language, insisting that his approach exemplified the “emancipation of dissonance,” effectively unfettering the concepts of “consonance” and “dissonance” in a new kind of music, wherein which each note derived its meaning from its unique context and relationships with other notes in the composition, and not from an overarching hierarchical tonal system.  The composer’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 exemplify this “free atonal” and highly intuitive approach.  In the aftermath of the First World War, however, Schoenberg sought a way to achieve greater logic and coherence in atonal music, and in the early 1920s developed his “method of composing with twelve tones,” in which the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are pre-organized into a row, which forms the basis of the composition and is treated in serial fashion.  Schoenberg’s new method subsequently facilitated the creation of large scale instrumental and dramatic works, notably his Violin Concerto op. 42 and his unfinished opera Moses und Aron. 

Franz Schmidt (1874-1939) was another exact contemporary of Schoenberg and Suk.  Born in Pressburg (now Bratislava), Schmidt also came of age in Vienna’s heady fin-de-siècle period, playing cello in the Court Opera Orchestra under Mahler, and working alongside fellow composers like Zemlinsky, Franz Schrecker and Schoenberg.  Schmidt never adopted the radical aesthetic of Schoenberg and his acolytes, and continued to compose tonally, in the tradition of the later 19^th century.  His music, especially his four symphonies, reject the dark and often pessimistic tone of his modernist peers, hinting at neo-Baroque and neo-Classical elements and remaining uncompromisingly committed to the symphonic tradition as it was passed down through Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.  Schmidt—who was apolitical and friendly with many Jewish musicians and composers in Vienna—was unfortunate to have had his music co-opted by the Nazis in the late 1930s following the annexation of Austria.  The taint of this association caused lasting damage to his reputation and legacy.  Ernst von Dohnányi (1877-1960) was also born in Pressburg, but lived and worked for most of his life in Budapest.  A contemporary and close friend of Béla Bartók, Dohnányi devoted himself to the development and flourishing of musical culture in Hungary, as a pianist, conductor and composer.  While he is perhaps best remembered as a world-class concert pianist, influential teacher, and relentless promoter of young, talented composers such as Bartok, Dohnányi also composed a substantial amount of music in a wide variety of genres, especially works for solo piano, chamber music, and orchestral works.  Stylistically, Dohnányi is regarded as a conservative composer, eschewing the nationalistic approach of Bartók and Kodály and taking cues instead from late Romantics like Brahms.  Among his most frequently performed works is his light-hearted Variations on a Nursery Tune, op. 25, based on the French folk song “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman”—better known as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—which Mozart also famously used in a set of variations. 

Austrian composer Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was born in Monaco, and lived abroad for several years before his family finally returned to Austria, settling first in Linz and then in Vienna.  Schreker studied violin and composition at the Vienna conservatory, but aspired to be a conductor: he formed and conducted the Philharmonic Chorus from 1907-1920, a successful ensemble that premiered works by Mahler, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg (with whom he had a life-long friendship).  As a composer, Schreker enjoyed early successes with his operas in Germany and Austria: at one point, the German music critic Paul Bekker famously heralded him as a natural successor to Wagner.  His reputation as a composer began to decline, however, following his move to Berlin in 1920 to assume the role of director of the Hochschule für Musik.  There, he found himself caught between antipodes: he was insufficiently radical for the new generation of young, modernist composers—Schreker remained largely rooted in a tonal, post-Romantic style, never adopting atonality but exploring chromaticism, polytonality and the lavish orchestration heard in the music of Debussy and the French Symbolists—but was regarded as a “degenerate” avant-garde Jewish musician in the eyes of the emerging Nazi movement.

Introductory Essay by Professor Alexander Carpenter, Chairman of the Wirth Institute Academic Advisory Board

(N.B.: The composers in this posting are listed in chronological order by date of birth)