Skandalkonzert: The Rite, before The Rite
The Musikverein is a gorgeous old concert hall in the heart of Vienna, where the capital Philharmonic plays. It’s in a Neoclassical style; its columns, arches, sense of balance and symmetry, give the illusion of age and rich tradition, even though it was built in the 1860s. The Great Hall on the inside is a simple rectangle, adorned with gorgeous chandeliers. Behind the stage for the orchestra, a decorative organ, the King of Instruments, towers overhead. The hall is luminous with gold. This is where orchestras would play the great works of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and even the catchy waltzes by Johann Strauss II. It’s luscious, lyrical, and heavily Romantic.
And if we want to make a poetic statement out of history, we could say that it symbolizes the old. Or at least, the love of the familiar. Built in the 1860s, but it tries to emulate the spirit of antiquity, and it follows a trend that was popular two centuries prior. Vienna was the seat of Brahms, and the music critic Hanslick. In the 1790s, it was the hot spot for Haydn’s final days, and Mozart’s mature period. And from the 1790s to 1827, it was Beethoven’s home. And at the turn of the century, the music of Brahms, Bruckner, and Strauss II dominated.
Schoenberg was the controversial figure of that city. He had been writing in the late-Romantic style that everyone loved, but he was following too many Wagnerian gestures. Too much chromaticism, wandering into keys that “didn’t exist”. But lately, he seems to have lost his sanity. He is writing music that is completely atonal. At the premiere of his second string quartet, someone had called out “Enough! Enough!”. Most recent was a song cycle he wrote the year before, “Pierrot Lunaire”, with “blasphemous” and “provocative” lyrics being half-sung, half-spoken by a soprano over chamber music that doesn’t seem to be in any key whatsoever. Can we even call this music?
But then, on February 23, 1913, he premieres Gurre-Lieder, a gargantuan post-Romantic cantata. The audience fell in love. Critics who heard his Five Orchestral Pieces and Pierrot Lunaire and thought he wasn’t writing “real music” were finally won over. They thought he was the next great genius of German music. But Schoenberg as not appreciative of the praise. Gurre-Lieder is everything that Pierrot Lunaire is not; it has a large orchestra writing lush music in conventional tonality with lyrical singing. While it is a wonderful piece of music, it was, to Schoenberg, a regression of his compositional aesthetics. He did not want to write music that depended on public taste. After the cantata, during the roar of applause, he came to the stage, and bowed for the musicians, his back to the audience. He didn’t turn and bow, didn’t even wave or smile. He left the stage.
This contempt for public approval insulted the audience. And this small gesture would carry over into the next concert in the same theater one month later.
March 31, 1913. Schoenberg is conducting a concert of music by him, and a few of his disciples. He would conduct one of his strange early works published a few years prior, then new music by Anton Webern, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Alban Berg. Webern and Berg were his most promising students. Zemlinsky was his brother-in-law, whose music for the program would turn out to be representative of “conservative” tastes [even then, the songs still indulge in the murkiness of obscure tonality and heavy chromaticism].
The program was as followed:
Webern – Six Pieces for Orchestra, op.6
Zemlinsky – Four Orchestral Songs on Poems by Maurice Maeterlinck (would later be published as his op. 13. Songs nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5 were performed here)
Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony no. 1
Berg – Two Songs from Altenberg Lieder (nos. 2 and 3)
Mahler – Kindertotenlieder
Webern’s orchestral pieces are short, sparse, nothing is in ‘harmony’, the score shows instruments seemingly playing irrespective of each other, its sonorities are startling, sometimes the brass shoots out in growls, the winds shriek, and other times the silence that is paired with them is deafening. The audience started making noises of disapproval. Most were baffled by what they heard. As “controversial” as Schoenberg was, Webern was already writing sound-worlds that he wouldn’t yet imagine.
Zemlinsly’s songs acted as a palate cleanser. The music was still dense and hard to follow along with the first listen, but they were, at least, tonal. They followed expectations, luscious chords moving up and down chromatically as the soprano sings mournful songs. They were received well.
Schoenberg’s first Chamber Symphony was not new, and it also was not in his current atonal style. But it was still “Modern”. Chords are built out of fourths. The textures are bizarre. The melodies are nothing singable. It isn’t “new” for the concert, but it is the “new” Schoenberg style that the audience didn’t like, and clearly voiced their preference at the Gurre-Lieder concert. Preferences which Schoenberg outright insulted.
Berg’s Altenburg Lieder was the breaking point. “Do you see the forest after the rainstorm?” asks a soprano without the orchestra. Then when it enters, we get an eerie soundscape, some hints of tonality but vague, distant. “Beyond the Boundaries of the Universe” opens with a massive chord with all 12 pitches playing at once. It is quiet, but a tone cluster. If “chromatic” means coloring, then this chord is as colorful as possible. As expressive as possible. We are now beyond the universe as we know it. And the audience had enough.
Laughter grew louder than the chord. Those who thought the music was stupid were ready to voice their opinion as it happened. Those who wanted to listen yelled back. A fist fight broke out, which took over everyone’s attention. Because of the chaos, the police had to be called to break up the fights. The concert was shut down before Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder could have been performed.
The fight caused a lawsuit, and one of the witnesses, an operetta composer Oscar Straus, testified “The public was laughing. And I openly confess, sir, that I laughed too, for why shouldn’t one laugh at something genuinely comical?”. Straus also joked that the sound of the fight was the most harmonious moment in the evening.
Had the audience listened to the late Mahler’s song cycle, contextualized after the new music, maybe they would have a chance to reflect on how what they’d heard had been influenced by ideas that were being pushed forward in music writing. Strange tonalities, new textures, pushing beyond the limits of tonality. Of course Mahler isn’t nearly as adventurous, but still, it could have helped understand the process. I lined up the program in my iPod, with Zemlinsky’s and Berg’s song cycles completed, and it has a run time of 1 hour, 28 minutes. I think that so much “new music” could be a bit exhausting on the ear. Engaging with the unfamiliar for so long, you might want a break with something familiar. And of course, this is me speaking over a century after the concert.
It was the shock of the art music world at the time. It seemed to mark a new age of composer-artist against a misunderstood public. That’s a false dichotomy, though, and not historically accurate. More aptly the concert helps demonstrate the point of the Modernist motto, “Make it new!” as Ezra Pound said, follow your own vision regardless of what the public might think.
Two months later, on May 29, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring would premiere in Paris with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, choreographed by Nijinsky.
