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Kreisler & Schoenberg: Vienna’s Odd Couple

Fritz Kreisler, the sweet-toned confectioner and purveyor of violin bonbons, and Arnold Schoenberg, the dour high priest of twelve tone music. Vienna’s fin-de-siècle odd couple reunite on this week’s “Music from Marlboro.”

Both artists were born in Vienna, only five months apart – Schoenberg on September 13, 1874, and Kreisler on February 2, 1875. Kreisler’s father was a doctor. Schoenberg’s sold shoes.

Both had Jewish parents. Kreisler, whose mother was Catholic, was baptized into the faith at the age of 12. Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism at 24. However, just when it would have been most dangerous to do so, he roared back to Judaism and – with the rise of Hitler in 1933 – defiantly embraced his heritage.

In general, Kreisler seems to have enjoyed the easier life. He had a more comfortable start and a happier disposition. As a musician, he was content to entertain.

Schoenberg was a revolutionary and probably a bit of a hard-nosed contrarian. He had a turbulent marriage, seldom smiled for photos, and indulged in expressionist painting. Also, he was superstitious. He especially suffered from triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13.

On the other hand, he did orchestrate his share of Viennese operettas, arranged Strauss waltzes for performance with his friends, played tennis with George Gershwin, and was a fan of Hopalong Cassidy.

Both men came to be regarded in some circles as mountebanks. Kreisler ruffled a few feathers when he let slip that many of the 18th century “rediscoveries” he had used to charm audiences, critics and musicologists were not in fact rediscoveries at all. Nor did they date from the 18th century. When the professionals complained, Kreisler made like Vinnie Barbarino. Wha-? Schoenberg triggered kneejerk reviews and outright hostility with his dismantling of tonality.

Nevertheless, both also acquired some serious musical credentials. Kreisler gave the world premiere of the Elgar Violin Concerto and became a favorite recital partner of Sergei Rachmaninoff. Schoenberg blossomed into one the most influential composers of the 20th century.

In 1941, Kreisler was hit by a milk truck, which fractured his skull and put him into a coma. Like something out of an early Woody Allen comedy, when he awoke he could only communicate in Latin and Greek. Thankfully, the effect was only temporary.

It is Kreisler’s music that continues to communicate most effectively. We’ll hear his String Quartet in A minor, from 1922, performed at the 2013 Marlboro Music Festival by violinists Danbi Um and Nikki Chopi, violist Sally Chisolm, and cellist Lionel Cottet.

That will be followed by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 of 1906, a pre-serial work that nevertheless pushes harmony to the brink. It was presented at Marlboro in 1982 by an ensemble of fifteen players directed by Leon Kirchner.

Was the glass half empty or the milk truck half full? Kreisler lived a good long life. He died in 1962 at the age of 86. Schoenberg died on his 76th birthday, Friday the 13th, 1951. Earlier in the day, he had been informed by his astrologer that 7 plus 6 equals 13.

No matter how you tally, the performances will be top-notch on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTO: Fritz Kreisler (second from left) and Arnold Schoenberg (cello) in 1900

October 9, 2019
Korngold Rediscovered Vienna to Hollywood

For the first edition of “The Lost Chord” for 2016, we revisit the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold, of course, was one of the great film composers. A two-time Academy Award winner, he provided music for such classics as “Captain Blood,” “The Prince and the Pauper,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The Sea Hawk” and “Kings Row.”

But before he settled in Hollywood, Korngold was the toast of Vienna, one of the most lauded of contemporary composers, and the city’s brightest hope for maintaining its fin de siècle supremacy in music.

Korngold was a child prodigy who had amazed audiences with such works as the ballet-pantomime “Der Schneemann” (or “The Snowman”), composed at the tender age of 11 (first performed at the Vienna Court Opera in the presence of Emperor Franz Josef); his Piano Trio, composed at the age of 13 (given its premiere by Arthur Schnabel and members of the Vienna Philharmonic); and the “Sinfonietta,” a symphony-in-all-but-name, composed at the age of 15 (first conducted by Felix Weingartner, Korngold sharing a box at that performance with an admiring Richard Strauss).

With the premiere of his opera “Die tote Stadt,” in 1920, at age 23, Korngold’s reputation seemed assured. He wrote a piano concerto for Paul Wittgenstein, undertook a revival of the operettas of Johann Strauss II, and was publicly honored by the president of Austria.

However, the trajectory of his career took an unexpected turn with the rise of Hitler. To escape the creep of fascism, Korngold embarked on a second career, settling in Hollywood to write film scores for Warner Brothers.

The first of these was composed at the invitation of famed impresario Max Reinhardt, with whom Korngold had collaborated on the Strauss revivals. Reinhardt was in the process of adapting Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the big screen, and he enlisted Korngold to rework Felix Mendelssohn’s famous incidental music.

In true Korngoldian fashion, the composer went well beyond what was expected, weaving in passages from Mendelssohn’s symphonies and “Songs Without Words,” writing his own connective material, and sprinkling the whole with fairy dust.

Korngold’s work on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” led to an exclusive contract at Warner’s, where the composer revolutionized the language of film music, applying the kind of opulence, pageantry and romance characteristic of his operas to silver screen historical dramas and swashbucklers.

The result was kind of a pop cultural immortality, but to the detriment of his reputation as a serious composer. The center of European musical culture was off-limits, indeed severely limited by Nazi strictures, and the language of musical modernism, as exemplified by the output of his contemporary and compatriot Arnold Schoenberg, made Korngold seem positively old-fashioned. It would be decades before his reputation would recover, and unfortunately by then he was long dead.

From the same year as his greatest triumph, “Die tote Stadt,” 1920, comes an earlier foray into Shakespeare, written for a stage production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” “Much Ado” contains some of Korngold’s most charming music. A concert suite of some 20 minutes has been in circulation for decades.

However, what we have for you this evening is the first COMPLETE recording of the score, with spoken dialogue. A 2013 release, on the Toccata Classics label, it features actors and musicians of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, conducted by John Mauceri.

I hope you’ll join me for “Much Ado About Korngold,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.

January 3, 2016

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