Abstract
When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-year old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency … in this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed) another would come to take his place and nothing would change in the well-regulated order.
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Notes
S. Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London, 1943), 13.
See J. Brand, C. Hailey and D. Harris, The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence (New York, 1987), p.xxvii.
B. Walter, Theme and Variations (London, 1947), 256.
See M. Esslin, ‘Berg’s Vienna’, in The Berg Companion, ed. D. Jarman (London, 1988).
J. A. Smith, Schoenberg and his Circle (New York, 1986), 70.
Quoted in R. Stephan, Kieler Vorträge zum Theater, iv (Kiel, 1978), 19.
quoted in R. Hilmar, Austria Documentation: Alban Berg (Vienna, 1984), 17.
quoted in A. Bress, Hans Eisler, Political Musician (Cambridge, 1981), 41.
K. Weill, ‘Alban Berg: “Wozzeck”’, in D. Drew, Kurt Weill: Ausgewahlte Schriften (Frankfurt, 1975).
L. Dallapiccola, Incontri can Anton Webern, in H. Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: a Chronicle of his Life and Works (London, 1978), 537.
A. Schoenberg, Style and Idea (London, 1975), 336.
A. Berg, Letters to his Wife (London, 1971), 425.
See J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Documents on Nazism (London, 1974), 342.
See A. M. Morazzoni, ‘Berg and Italy in the Thirties’, Newsletter of the International Alban Berg Society (spring/summer 1985), 19.
Bibliographical Note
Among the general histories, K. Stadlen’s Austria (London, 1971), which deals with the period from the end of the Habsburg Empire to the present day,
and G. B. Shepherd’s Anschluss: the Rape of Austria (London, 1963), which deals only with the Nazi takeover of the country, are recommended as the most approachable expositions of the complexities of Austria’s political history during the period.
K. von Schussnig’s own account of the Anschluss in The Brutal Takeover, trans. R. Barry (London, 1971) has, of course, its own special interest.
On a more individual level Stefan Zweig’s autobiography The World of Yesterday (London, 1943) remains the most vivid account of what it was like to grow up during, and live through, the period before 1938,
though George Clare’s recent Last Waltz in Vienna (London, 1982)
and the three volumes of Elias Canetti’s autobiography (The Tongue set Free, The Torch in my Ear and The Play of the Eyes; London, 1990) also provide fascinating personal accounts of the years up to 1942 and 1938 respectively.
J. A. Smith’s Schoenberg and his Circle (New York, 1986) consists of transcriptions of interviews with many of those artists who lived in Vienna during the period.
Comprehensive and scholarly biographies of both Schoenberg and Berg remain to be written. H. H. Stuckenschmidt’s Arnold Schoenberg (London, 1959)
and W. Reich’s Schoenberg: a Critical Biography, trans. L. Black (London, 1978),
and Reich’s partial and highly selective biography Alban Berg (London, 1963),
are useful but H. Moldenhauer’s biography Anton von Webern: a Chronicle of his Life and Works (London, 1978) remains the only adequate biography of any member of the Second Viennese School.
The other major figures of the period are even less well served. There is, for example, no book on Zemlinsky, though P. Heyworth’s invaluable Otto Klemperer: his Life and Times, i (Cambridge, 1983), includes much information, and only books in German (most of them as part of the Österreichische Komponisten den XX. Jahrhundert) on Schreker, Bittner, Hauer and many other figures.
Useful material on these composers, however, can be found in a number of short booklets, pamphlets and newsletters. Thus the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien published a valuable booklet in 1963 to celebrate the centenary of J. M. Hauer’s birth (Hauer’s own theoretical writings are also published by Universal Edition, Vienna) while a flourishing Korngold Society produces a series of newsletters and booklets (the most substantial being B. G. Carroll’s Erich Wolfgang Korngold: his Life and Works, Paisley, 1984).
While there are many books on fin-de-siècle Vienna, there are relatively few on Viennese culture in the interwar period and almost nothing on the period after 1933. Unlike German cultural historians, who have produced important books on music and art under the Third Reich, Austrian musicologists and cultural historians, as Walter Pass complained in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, have hardly begun to come to grips with detailing, let alone explaining, what happened during the Nazi occupation. Two editions of the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (nos.3 and 4, 1988) on this topic were exceptional.
The most valuable sources of such general cultural as well as biographical information should be the letters and memoirs of the artists involved, but here, again, much work remains to be done. Of the letters of the three composers of the Second Viennese School only those between Berg and Schoenberg (which, of course, end with Berg’s death in 1935) have been published in anything like their entirety in J. Brand, C. Hailey and D. Harris, The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence (New York, 1987), an admirable book in which the editorial footnotes are as informative as the letters themselves (and indeed sometimes more so). A brief selection of 265 of Schoenberg’s letters from the period 1910–51 has also been published (London, 1964), but the bulk of the important Schoenberg—Webern and Webern—Berg correspondence remains unpublished.
Finally, two important and highly recommended books that, covering a much larger period than that dealt with in the present chapter, attempt to weave together the cultural, political and social history of Vienna, are W. M.Johnston, The Austrian Mind: an Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Berkeley, 1972),
and P. N. Hofmann, The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight and Exile (New York, 1988).
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Jarman, D. (1993). Vienna after the Empire. In: Morgan, R.P. (eds) Modern Times. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11291-3_3
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