Three Banned Composers from the 20th Century

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

One week from today, BIS will release a new album of three virtuoso Viennese composers from the first half of the twentieth century. Those composers, in “order of appearance” on the album, are Franz Schreker, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Ernst Krenek. As many (most?) readers will expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. [added 10/15, 8:20 a.m.: I feel it important to note that I just received information from Presto Music. They have also created a Web page for this album, and the price is significantly lower than that on the Amazon Web page! The Web page also allows for preview listening through a free 30-day trial!]

I have no idea if any of the three composers encountered the others over the course of their composing efforts in Vienna. However, they were all banned by dictators during the Thirties; and, following the end of World War II, they were blacklisted by the emerging avant-garde composers. The best-known of them fled dictatorship by moving to the United States.

That was Korngold, who would enjoy a prosperous career of composing music for Hollywood films directed by Max Reinhardt. (Korngold used to joke that Robin Hood saved him from Adolf Hitler!) Krenek would make a similar move after the jazzy rhetoric of Jonny spielt auf rubbed the Nazi Party, which was just on the rise, the wrong way. Schreker was the only one of the three to remain in Europe. His music was also banned by the Third Reich, but that was probably more for his Jewish religion than for his music. He died in 1934, and Nazi authority prevented his music from being performed, not only in Europe but also anywhere else.

Ironically, the shadow of that blacklist prevailed over my own music education. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I had no trouble minoring in Music. I was particularly enthusiastic in signing up for the Music of the Twentieth Century course. The professor was a “new arrival;” and he led his pupils (myself included) on an engagingly informative journey from Gustav Mahler to post-Schoenberg composers, some of whom, such as Milton Babbitt, were obsessed with the relationship between serial composition and mathematics. (Full disclosure: I majored in mathematics!)

It that context, it should be no surprise that, over the course of my studies, I never encountered the music of any of the three composers on this new album. Indeed, the only one that was ever discussed was Krenek; but his efforts were more talked-about than performed. He concludes this new album with his Opus 54, “Potpourri.” This was composed in the year after he composed Jonny spielt auf; and, while there are suggestions of his jazzy rhetoric, they tend to be overshadowed by too many suggestions of schmaltz.

To some extent, the “wild card” on this album is Schreker. It has been quite I while since I last encountered his music. However, it is almost exactly seven years ago that I wrote about a Naxos release devoted entirely to his compositions. His contribution to this album is a “shortened version” of the overture he composed for his opera Die Gezeichneten, based on the play Hidalla by Frank Wedekind (best known for the two plays that Alban Berg incorporated in his Lulu opera.

I must confess that I know more about Schreker through my book of “memories and letters” by Alma Mahler than I do through my listening experiences. That was far from the best of sources! Fortunately, my first serious contact took place in Davies Symphony Hall when James Conlon visited the San Francisco Symphony in June of 2006. Sadly, that was a time when I was just beginning to focus on writing; so my account of that visit was somewhat modest.

The performances on this new album, however, are a far cry from any of my Davies encounters. The ensemble is the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire under the baton of Sascha Goetzel. There is no shortage of lush rhetoric over the course of the album, but Goetzel gives a clear and sympathetic account of all three of the contributing composers. Nevertheless, there is only so much of that rhetoric that I can take. In future listening, I shall probably confine my attention to a single composer!