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New Music in Austria Since 1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
Vienna, they say, is synonymous with music. Worldwide public opinion, responding to the New Year's Day Concert and the Vienna Boys’ Choir, confirms it.
Confronted by the multifarious political and economic scandals of recent times, the Austrian Minister for Education and the Arts has declared that our art and culture is the only ‘export’ to have survived intact. But as far as 20th-century music is concerned, its ‘export’ has received little official encouragement. Apart from a 1972 ballet production by Aurel Miloss with music by Schoenberg, and a performance of Gottfried von Einem's Kabale und Liebe at the 1977 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, our National Opera has presented no contemporary work outside Austria since 1945, nor any work by the Second Viennese School. Nor does any contemporary Austrian music appear on the touring schedules of the Vienna Philharmonic, as it used to (on a modest scale) in the 1950's; and works of the Schoenberg school are only played when conductors like Abbado, Zubin Mehta, or Christoph von Dohnanyi insist.
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References
* It has remained so—witness the exodus of the well-heeled and rather elderly subscription public when Abbado dared to conduct Schoenberg's Erwartung in 1980.
* For more on Artmann and his activities in this period see ‘H. C. Artmann and the Austrian Literary Renaissance’ by Watts, Harriett in TEMPO 126. (Ed.)Google Scholar.
* Logothetis, among others, had been occupied with graphic notation as early as 1958, and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (b. 1919)—a Polish pupil of Schoenberg's pupil Joszef Koffler—entered this field in Vienna in another way, after a number of very subtle serial compositions. Besides paving the way for the creation of multifarious mobile forms, Haubenstock's prints have intrinsic value as graphics.
* That Schwertsik has remained faithful to, and developed, his original ‘Salon–Concert’ idea is evident from his muchacclaimed ‘Pierrot lunaire’ programme, of which he and his wife gave 10 consecutive performances for Vienna's Theater Gruppe 80 in September 1986 (production by Isabella Suppanz, scenery and costumes by Peter Laher). The programme consisted of 25 settings of Albert Giraud's poems by Joseph Marx, Otto Vrieslander, Max Kowalski, and Mark Lothar, interspersed with piano pieces by Szymanowski and Egon Wellesz (Ed.).