by Michael Haas
He even keeps faith with Wellesz after a performance of the Second String Quartet a few months later:
Newness in music is never the result of mixing and matching. […] Experimentation as an attempt at being different and writing music that addresses the ‘problematic’ is merely incompetent and not ‘new’ at all. And as for crowbarring old music into new: well, here in Vienna during the past fifteen years, we've heard quite enough of this gimmick, though I believe at long last we may have finally seen it off. The latest apostate of this movement is our young colleague Dr Egon Wellesz, who appealed recently for a return to the melodic element in the manner of earlier days – even suggesting a return to the folk song. His string quartet […] should not deceive us. It's a work that originates from over a year ago and cannot be attributed to this latest conversion. It's fundamentally a sin of the past and is best viewed as a clinical demonstration of all the problematic nonsense that this would represent.
We find ourselves confronted in this work with something I refer to as ‘negative composing’. […] Yet the movements (naturally, they're not laid out in any kind of traditional sequence) never actually lose sight of a fundamental idea, while at the same time giving no hint of what one might conceivably identify as (this reddest of red-rags to the extremists) a structural tonic. […] There is simply one essential fact that is impossible to get around: that which is artificially concocted and remains far from traditional tonality neither sings nor speaks to us. Otherwise, Wellesz offers us many interesting tonal combinations and instrumental effects.
Dr Wellesz […] has a very real talent for composing music. His technical facilities are convincingly well beyond most of his colleagues, regardless of whether they strike out towards the musical left or the musical right. He should perhaps consider forgetting his dead-end developments concerning music from antiquity and listen to the purity of his fundamentally unprejudiced and naive musical heart.41
Within a few years, Korngold's hopes for Wellesz had been dashed. Wellesz was a co-founder of the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1922, an organisation that Korngold dismissed as ‘German infiltration’ of Austria's musical heritage.42 Given that the other founding members – Rudolf Réti, Hugo Heller, Rudolf Bing and Emil Hertzka – were Austrians, this was obviously an absurd assertion.43
Wellesz offers a far more accurate account of the founding of the ISCM in his memoirs, explaining that it had started off as a suggestion made by Réti. Its immediate objective, however, was to be the first international music festival that drew the many national contemporary music festivals together.44 Heller was to sort out the finances and he brought along Rudolf Bing, who would take on the administration. Hertzka, as owner and director of Universal Edition, stood by as consultant. Wellesz travelled to England to discuss contracts with Robert Mayer and his wife Dorothy, and in Paris en route he met Milhaud and Honegger, who were also enthusiastic about the concept of an international contemporary music festival. Wellesz writes – and this is perhaps the ‘German’ reference that irritated Korngold – ‘thanks to the cooperation of all participants, particularly those from Germany, we scheduled the Salzburg contemporary music festival for August 1922 and it was a big success. It was the first time since the end of the war that musicians from Europe and America had participated in such an event together. Old relationships were renewed and new friendships were made. […] It was decided that the event should not be a one-off.‘45
A meeting was held in January 1923 in London, where it was decided that the organisation should be given a name. It was at this point that it was christened the International Society for Contemporary Music or ISCM. It would be based in London, and Edward Dent, who was British, would act as its President. There was to be an international jury of five selected members who would decide what was performed. The first jury members were Wellesz, André Caplet, Ernest Ansermet, Hermann Scherchen and Alexander Zemlinsky. The first official chamber music festival under ISCM auspices was held the following summer in Salzburg, with the orchestral concerts held later in the year in Prague. The third ISCM Festival, held in Venice, became one of the milestones in the relationship between Stravinsky and Schoenberg, both of whom were accompanied by their circles of respective acolytes: Stravinsky ignored Schoenberg, and Schoenberg was visibly rude to Stravinsky, establishing a pattern that would be maintained throughout the rest of their lives, including the years they jointly spent in exile in Los Angeles.
Edward Dent offers his own version of events as reported in The Times in 1934:
One day Wellesz and I were invited to a local committee to consider the future of Salzburg as a ‘festival Town’. I suggested that they should run a six-week festival from the beginning of August to the middle of September inviting all sorts of musical and dramatic bodies from different countries to take part in turn, and publishing early each year a day-to-day diary of all the events including plays, concerts, operas, folksong and dance meetings, church music and the Marionette Theatre.
This was received with blank amazement, and it was evident that they all thought me only fit for a lunatic asylum. The local committee was interested mainly in Max Reinhardt and a project – for which it was assumed the Americans would pay, of course – to disfigure the beautiful park of Hellbrunn by building a theatre there for him in the shape of a monstrous wedding-cake. Prague solved our problem for us by inviting us to that most musical of all European cities in 1924, and in 1925 we divided the festival between Prague and Venice. Our French friends had always told us that the Italians would never form a national section, as they were all too busy quarrelling among themselves; but for once the French were wrong, and we have had three festivals in Italy (Venice 1925, Siena 1928, and Florence 1934) which have been among the most brilliant in our history.46
Other than Scherchen and the British (but German-born) Robert Mayer, Germans did not predominate in the ISCM in these early days – certainly not to the extent that Korngold could speak of an ‘infiltration of Austrian music’.47 Indeed, the ISCM appeared to be overwhelmingly Austrian in its initial membership even if its President was British. This did not deter Julius Korngold from founding, with the help of colleagues at the Neue Freie Presse, something called Der Österreichische Kulturbund,48 which from 1923 was holding alternative new-music festivals led by himself and Julius Bittner. The ‘Kulturbund’ festival for 1923 in Vienna (8–11 August) included works by Richard Strauss, Joseph Marx, Franz Schreker, Wilhelm Kienzl, Erich Korngold, Wilhelm Grosz, Julius Bittner, Max Springer, Egon Kornauth, Hans Gál and Bernhard Paumgartner, along with some early Schoenberg songs and Zemlinsky's First String Quartet, which, according to Alban Berg, were included as ‘fig-leaves’ to disguise the blatantly conservative strain of Austrian music being presented.49 Though the occasional mention of the Kulturbund is made right up through 1929, it never approached the prestige of the ISCM.
It was through his wife, the art historian Dr Emmy Wellesz née Stross, that Wellesz developed a deep interest in Byzantine music and, together with the English Byzantine scholar H. J. W Tillyard, deciphered middle-Byzantine Neumic notation in 1916. Wellesz would eventually become as highly regarded for his expertise on Byzantine music as for his work as a composer. Though this interest did not colour much of his own music – only his Festliches Präludium Op. 100 and Mirabile Mysterium Op. 10150 set out explicitly to make the connection – his fascination with Byzantine chant gives an indication of Wellesz's eclectic musical tendencies. If we look at his first fifteen opus numbers, we are confronted with a dizzying array of musical identities, seeming to represent entirely different musical personas. His earliest piano works and songs, the pieces that impressed Bartók, are nothing short of proto-minimalism akin to Satie. During the early days of the twentieth century, they must have sounded quite radical in their unremitting simplicity. Other works are sharp and aggressively atonal, while a number are closer to French Impressionism than to the Austro-German Impressionism that was so characteristic of Schreker, early Sch
oenberg and Zemlinsky.
In addition to his relationship with Balázs, Wellesz collaborated with other literary giants of the day such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Jakob Wassermann. Though he was a much more eclectic composer than Gál, another factor that united them was the distance they kept from New Objectivity. Wellesz, however, believed that atonality and twelve-note techniques were expressive devices that could be applied when conventional tonality no longer sufficed to communicate what the creative voice demanded. This was not a view shared by Gál, who explained in a concert interval broadcast in the context of a discussion on aleatoric music, ‘Music is a succession of clearly conceived, closely linked events in which every note has its organic function and its proper place, just as every word has in a well-built sentence and every sentence in a well-reasoned paragraph. This is what music as an ideal has been for the last 500 years and nothing has happened in my lifetime to shake my confidence in the fitness of this definition.‘51 He expressed himself even more clearly in an interview in 1971: ‘Well, I do believe in tonality as much as I believe, say, in gravity; I have it in my musical constitution, and I cannot imagine music without tonality. In my consciousness, tonality is as firm as a rock. But I have never theorized about it. We are subject to gravity, but we have learnt that weightlessness exists. So atonality may exist, but I cannot imagine it any more than I can imagine weightlessness. I am speaking of myself; I have accepted the fact that people can live without weight and without tonality. I am afraid I can't.‘52 Such statements obviously left no quarter for the musical abstraction afforded by atonality; nor would Gál be convinced by claims of coherency in Schoenberg's twelve-note system.
Wellesz maintained a unique position among opera composers of the day. His desire to recreate the splendour of the high Baroque is explained in an article he wrote entitled ‘Das Problem der Form’ (‘The Problem of Form’) for the magazine Von neuer Musik in 1920 and it is quoted by his wife Emmy in her completion of his memoirs:
During the years of the First World War it became more and more evident that outward events should not impose demands on the contemporary musician. Rather, the artist should lift his gaze to his surroundings and search for a firm footing on something solid and sacred that is totally enclosed by a wondrous tradition. The dramatic artist need not speak of himself or of his own destiny, or even of individual destinies. Instead, he should speak of the things that are interconnected within this world and the outer-world. I have a vision of a dramatic work in which song is combined with dance in a near cultic fashion so that aspirations of our time which have been absent from the operatic stage can be revealed in the context of something with which we are already familiar. This form is best revealed using material that is timeless and detached from period. It is placed in a distant world that speaks to our world today and from where we are offered a view into a higher plane. The secret of great art is thus found in the recognisable from our own world combined with the incommensurable. 53
According to Emmy, this was an idea that came to Wellesz following lengthy conversations with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was enthusiastic about returning to antiquity as a source of reinterpreting material for contemporary audiences. The hybrid dance-opera, a continuation of Baroque practice, became very much a Wellesz speciality and – apart from the familiar collaborations with Richard Strauss – their libretti remain the only other texts supplied by Hofmannsthal to a composer.
Wellesz further exploited the chorus as a dramatic device that comments on the action, while at the same time moving rhythmically in such a way as to provide additional narrative illustration. This idea of movement generated Wellesz's further interest in dance, and probably no other composer of note from this time apart from Stravinsky wrote so much music specifically for ballet. Wellesz's Persisches Ballet (Persian Ballet) of 1920, his one-act Achilles auf Skyros (Achilles on Skyros) from 1921, based on a scenario by Hofmannsthal, and his exclusive use of percussion in Die Nächtlichen (Those of the Night, 1923), were considered pioneering in German contemporary dance. In discussions with the choreographer Kurt Jooss, Wellesz developed the opera-ballet Opferung des Gefangenen (Sacrifice of the Prisoner) in 1924–5, based on a scenario by Eduard Stucken. It was to be the third part of Wellesz's ‘Heroic Trilogy’ which already consisted of two works to texts by Hofmannsthal: the short opera Alkestis and the ballet Achilles auf Skyros. Opferung des Gefangenen was a further hybrid of theatrical genres in that each character was accorded both a dancing and a singing persona, a device employed nearly a decade later by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in The Seven Deadly Sins.
Apart from his short comic opera from 1927, Scherz, List und Rache54 based on Goethe's libretto for the composer Phillip Christoph Kayser (1755–1826), Wellesz remained during his interwar years wedded to the world of antiquity. Die Bakchantinnen,55 1929–30, would be the culmination of this experimentation with dance, movement, chant and pageantry.
Wellesz's previous operas had enjoyed success in German opera houses. Ernst Toch was taken with Alkestis following its premiere in Mannheim, and the two composers became friendly despite their very different aesthetic ideas: Wellesz's highly individual style was, if anything, extraordinarily subjective, propelling him beyond the conventional boundaries of new-objective Modernism, while steering clear of Expressionistic excesses.
The premiere of Die Bakchantinnen under Clemens Krauss at the Vienna State Opera in 1931 was an unqualified success, not just with new-music enthusiasts, but with the general public. Its position as one of the most successful experiments in musical theatre from the interwar years was thwarted by the Nazis when they forced the cancellation of a planned 1933 Munich production. Its high energy, a result of an often relentless syncopated rhythmic drive combined with a declamatory and sometimes Monteverdian treatment of text, is perhaps only matched in originality by the two operas of Wladimir Vogel, Wagadus Untergang durch die Eitelkeit56 of 1930 and Thyl Claes from the 1940s, both of which combine rhythmic spoken chant with a mixture of often seductive harmonic lyricism. Neither of these extraordinary works, however, enjoyed the critical recognition of Die Bakchantinnen.
Wellesz wrote over 40 articles for Anbruch and he features as the subject in nearly as many again. It is surprising that Die Bakchantinnen, which uniquely among Wellesz's stage works was not published by Universal Edition, is not singled out for a dedicated essay, as previously with his major works. The most substantial review came from Julius Korngold in the Neue Freie Presse, spread over the first four pages of the newspaper. The critic astonishes first of all with his understanding of Euripides as a historian, author and poet. The breadth and depth of his classical education informs his review of Wellesz's treatment. He mentions the history of classical subjects and opera, and he correctly identifies Gluck as Wellesz's model. He also sees Die Bakchantinnen as part of a larger trend that includes Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and admits to a certain bemusement that contemporary operatic fashions appear to offer up various versions of the Zeitoper and its diametrical opposite: works that hearken back to antiquity. He praises the way Wellesz solves dramatic problems, and mentions that the best bits of the opera are those involving the chorus, and that ‘fortunately, there are a lot of scenes with chorus’.57 He goes on to write that Wellesz's connection with Schoenberg's circle and his association with the ISCM will guarantee no shortage of admirers and positive publicity. From here, however, the review goes downhill, but not in the way one might expect. And as is often the case with Korngold, it is the very points he criticises that make the work so remarkable.
The tragedy of an opera such as Bakchantinnen is its lack of emotional expression.
[…] After letting this first hint of the work's most fundamental flaw slip out, something not remotely compensated for by the cacophony of semi-atonality and heterophony, let us at least hasten forward to praise the restless industry of the composer and his courage in risking what amongst his colleagues would be seen as a bathetic retrospective into antiquity. In point of fact, he goes
all the way back to – dare we mention the name? – Monteverdi. And along with fellow Viennese composer Alban Berg, we must also emphasise the seriousness, character and the artistic idealism of Wellesz as well.
Since we have mentioned Alban Berg, perhaps a comparison with Wozzeck will inform the reader as to the style and manner of Bakchantinnen. Wellesz is not as intransigent in his atonality as Berg and when he does resort to it, it is on a totally different level. There are triads in Bakchantinnen, even C-major triads: allegiances to a key-signature! This is indeed a man with whom we can do business! Atonality and polytonality crash against one another in vertical directions, in other words, in the notes heaped together as chords and the layering of voices. Horizontally, the lines are generally tonal and the ability to comprehend and follow a melody is not as limited as with Wozzeck, in which much of the singing is not singing at all but is in fact, non-melodic speech. […] As this work, however, misses its fundamental harmonic power, one cannot get away from the thought that much of it is merely worthy, or over-eagerness to score points with party dogmatists. Alban Berg's methods are more organic and thus – a surprising conclusion – more tolerable, as they are rooted in colour and polyphony in a more orthodox ‘Schoenbergian’ style. […] The predictable atonal avant-garde devices are employed also by Wellesz: a lot of secessionist movement-choruses, escaping into an ostinato bass that hammers away like the Russians, Stravinsky or Prokofiev. This constant reminder of how he can compose wrong-sounding music, the scrupulous avoidance of anything that might possibly sound like a natural cadence; in a word: this negative composing.58