Otto Zweig News
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2024-04-25
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2024-02-05 15:57:39
Alban Berg, Part I, Early Years, 2024
[…] the pre-WWI years in Vienna were a period of tremendous cultural development; despite the overall antisemitism of the Austrian society, many of the leading figures were Jewish, and sexuality was explored deeply for the first time. In music, it was Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Egon Wellesz, Ernst Toch, and of course, Webern and Berg, with many younger composers to follow. Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig were important novelists and playwrights (Frank Wedekind, their German contemporary, was the source for Berg’s opera Lulu). The painter Gustav Klimt was Berg’s friend, and so was the architect Adolf Loos. And we shouldn’t forget Sigmund Freud, who was not just a psychoanalyst famous around Vienna but a leading cultural figure. A characteristic episode happened in March of 1913 when Schoenberg conducted what became known as the Skandalkonzert ("scandal concert") in Vienna’s Musikverein. Here’s […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2023-08-24 13:25:23
Music Remembers Wartime Trauma
[…] their countries, their times and their religious and political choices. A huge swath of European, Russian, and American luminaries made indelible appearances and alliances. Little seems to end well for most of these walk-ons—particularly writers and librettists—who paid a huge price for describing the “murderous contradictions” of their worlds. Philosopher Theodor Adorno fled into exile. The critic Walter Benjamin took his own life while trying to flee Nazi-occupied Europe, as did the writer Stefan Zweig while living as an exile in Brazil. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova suffered through war and revolution. The novelist Vasily Grossman died with his crowning masterwork unpublished and, as he put it, under permanent “arrest” by the KGB. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who invented the entire concept of collective memory, perished at Buchenwald. Eichler’s magisterial tome is further distinguished by two distinct things, one of which is the extraordinary grace and beauty of […]
2022-09-19 13:45:51
Arnold Schoenberg, part II, 2022
This Week in Classical Music: September 19, 2022. Schoenberg, Part II, 1905 to WWI. We ended our first entry about Arnold Schoenberg around 1905. It a the time of great flourishing of the Austro-Jewish culture – think of Gustav Mahler, Zemlinsky and Erich Korngold, the writers Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and numerous other scientists, artists and intellectuals – but parallel to that, also a time of rising antisemitism: Karl Luger, for example, was the mayor of Vienna, a famous antisemite and the founder of the Christian Social Party, often viewed as a proto-Nazi organization. Schoenberg would not be able to avoid it. Schoenberg was struggling financially, as his teaching classes were bringing in very little money. Mahler, a staunch supporter, lent him some money, and his student, Alban Berg, collected funds on Schoenberg’s behalf. All along, his music was developing in more […]
2020-07-15 08:01:40
Vienna 1910: the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien in sophisticated and vibrant accounts of works by Mahler, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss
Mahler Adagio - Symphony No. 10, Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No.1, Strauss Der Rosenkavalier: Suite; Alban Berg Ensemble Wien; Deutsche Grammophon Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 6 July 2020 Star rating: 5.0 (★★★★★) Three contrasting works from Vienna just before the First World War in chamber versions which bring out both the contrasts and the commonalities between these works, in sophisticated and vibrant performances The decade before the First World War can often be portrayed as some sort of Golden Age, Stefan Zweig portrayed it as such in his memoir The World of Yesterday, written however whilst he was in exile in America during the Second World War. And historian Barbara Tuchman, having written a book exploring the first month of the First World War, The Guns of August (published in 1962), proceeded to write another book The Proud Tower (published in 1966) to explore exactly that, […]
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