Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung
6 Uhr-Blatt
Nr. 8415 Wien, Dienstag, 10 April 1906
Seite 2 TAGESBERICHT Wien, 9 April
[Gustav Schönaich gestorben.]
Gestern nachmittag ist im Alter von 64 Jahren Gustav
Schönaich gestorben. Wir betrauern einen Mann von
ungewöhnlichen Talenten, einen Menschen, dessen hohe
Bildung und freier Geist zur Entwicklung für alle
wurden, die in seine Nähe kamen. Schönaich
war eine Persönlichkeit, eine überaus kultivierte
Persönlichkeit; an der Erweiterung und Vertiefung
seiner geistigen Welt arbeite er bis in die letzten Stunden
seines Lebens. Er gab seine große, künstlerische,
schöne Sache seiner Zeit, zu der er sich nicht in
innere Beziehung zu setzen wußte. Sein Urteil in
ästhetischen Dingen war außerordentlich sicher,
durchaus subjectiv, wie es sich bei einem Mann von so
ausgeprägten, persönlichen Geschmack selbst
versteht; die Form, die er diesem Urteil gab, war immer eine
glänzende. Die ungemein witzigen prägnanten Worte,
mit denen er das Wesen eines Menschen gleichsam in eine
kurze und klare Formel zu fassen wußte, machten die
Runde durch Wien. Schönaichs Literarische
Begrabung war eine große Arbeit und, hat er doch mit
vielen glänzend geschriebenen Essays und Feuilletons.
An der geistigen Entwicklung seiner Zeit redlich mitgewirkt.
In unseren Blatt, dem sein Mitarbeiterschaft zur Zier
gereichte, hat er das musikkritische Referat geführt,
in seiner witzigen, bei aller Schärfe graziösen
Art abgewehrt, was ihm leer, verlogen, kunstfremd schien,
und das Schöne, Echte, Zukunftsfähige mit
rücksichsloser Hingebung gepriesen. Er war ein wirklich
gütiger Mensch; und diese Güte floß ihm dem
reichen, unerschöpflichen, auch auf seinem Sterbelager
nicht verstiegenden Fonds von Humor, den Sein Treuer Herz
barg. Er hatte in einem bewegten, an grossen Eindrücken
und Empfindungen überreichen Leben den Höhenpunkt
aller praktischen Philosophie erreicht: Das milde
Lächeln über dem Lärm und die Aufregungen des
Daseins. Wir sind vom Tod des prächtigen alten Herrn zu
sehr erschüttert, um heute schon seiner schönen
geistigen und menschlichen Art die rechte Würdigung
zuteil werden zu laßen. Morgen nachmittag um 2 Uhr
wird Gustav Schönaich zu Grabe gebracht.
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Richard Wagner, My Life. Translated by Andrew Gay.
Edited by Mary Whittall. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
p. 732 [1863]: "...I returned to
Vienna on December 9th. While still at Löwenberg I had
been obliged to remit most of the Prince's gift, partly for
Minna [Wagner's first wife] and partly to pay fresh debts in
Vienna. With little cash in hand but with new firmly based
hopes for the future, I could now greet my few friends in
tolerably good spirits. Among these, Peter Cornelius began
dropping in every evening, and as we were usually joined by
Heinrich Porges and Gustav Schönaich,---we
constituted a customary little circle of familiar friends. I
invited them all to spend Christmas Eve with me, and under a
lighted Christmas tree bestowed an appropriate trifle on
each of them."
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Cosima Wagner's Diaries. Vol. I: 1869-1877. Edited
and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack.
Translated and with an Introduction by Geoffrey Skelton.
(New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
Sunday, April 16, 1876: "In the
afternoon, somewhat to our dismay [inserted later:
'surprise'] Dr. Schönaich; we ask him to stay
with us. When 1 am alone in the room, I feel an urge to go
to the piano, and my mood translates itself easily into
sounds. The departing rays of the sun greet me, I offer
thoughts to distant places, which those distant places will
not receive! R., returning, finds me in tears."
Tuesday, April 18, 1876: "Departure of Dr.
Schönaich! Friend Richter takes his place, bringing
no good news from Vienna."
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Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf: A Biography. (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
p. 54 [1877]: "In 1877, however,
Goldschmidt's sunny nature was not overclouded by any
forebodings of failure to come. In his apartments in the
house on the Opernring a group of remarkable men used to
forgather regularly. They included the painter Julius von
Blaas, the well known sculptor Viktor Tilgner, music critics
such as Hans Paumgartner and Gustav Schönaich,
and the twenty-one-year-old Felix Mottl, at that time only
an assistant at the rehearsals at the Opera, but already
making a name for himself through his activities in
connection with the Vienna Wagner Verein. It was this
group of friends who were mainly responsible for bringing
the young Wolf back to Vienna."
pp. 56-58 [1877]: "Gustav Schönaich
(1841-1906) was the stepson of Dr. Joseph
Standhartner, with whom Wagner generally stayed when he
came to Vienna, and thus, as a member of the inner Wagnerian
circle,* he exerted great influence upon Wolf, and
became for a time his trusted adviser and friend. Wolf
compared him to Faust and himself to his Famulus
Wagner:
Mit Euch, Herr Doktor, zu spazieren,
Ist ehrenvoll und ist Gewinn.
Schönaich was keenly intelligent and a
remarkable talker, although unfortunately he never succeeded
in writing himself down. He left behind only a number of
articles, forgotten in the dusty files of musical
periodicals, and the legend of his own richly eccentric
personality. Gustav Schönaich's exceptionally
keen appreciation of the good things of this world had made
itself apparent in an almost Falstaffian corpulence, and his
devotion to the flesh-pots of Vienna led him all too often
to disregard the limitations of his income as a music
critic, so that he earned the reputation of a persistent
borrower from his friends. But when he had any money he
disposed of it royally. Wolf himself was undoubtedly often
obliged to him for 'loans,' when there seemed little enough
likelihood that he would ever be able to repay them; but it
is said of Schönaich that if he lent Wolf money
then he must have first borrowed it from someone else.
Schönaich played a not unimportant part in the
development of his young admirer, by encouraging his early
work as a composer, by introducing friends who were able to
find him employment in their households, and by sharpening
his wits and broadening his mind in conversation upon all
manner of literary, musical and philosophical themes.
*Wolf, however, in calling
Schönaich 'one of the most intimate of Richard
Wagner's friends,'
seems to have decidedly overstated the case. It is more than
doubtful whether Wagner would have taken any notice
of any one recommended to him from this quarter. The
following story, told to Albert Gutmann by Mottl,
undoubtedly refers to Schönaich:
Mottl visited Wagner at Bayreuth shortly
after 'a witty Viennese critic' had been there. Wagner
himself referred
to this visitor in these terms: 'Recently this dreadful man,
Sch . . ., arrived here. By chance I myself opened
the door to him,
and was horrified. I said to him at once: "Good God, have I
got to look at this face?" He came to me in bright yellow
boots,
this tasteless fellow! But naturally my wife had to invite
him to lunch, on account of his stepfather.
There he showed himself still more disagreeable. It was my
birthday. My good Siegfried made a speech about me;
it was really moving. But Sch . . . did not let it
interrupt his eating, and said to my wife: "I like this
asparagus;
give me some more of this asparagus." What a glutton! I
won't have anything to do with such gluttons.'
(From Aus dem Wiener Musikleben, by Albert Gutmann,
Vienna, 1914.)
"At Goldschmidt's house, in the company of these men, the
young Wolf, who still bore about him many traces of the
deficiencies of his early education, began to acquire a
little worldly polish. At his age it was natural that he
should adopt and repeat as his own many of the opinions
which he heard from the lips of his elders. Thus in his
letters he reflects their attitude towards Richter, who, as
we have seen, had been of some assistance to him earlier.
"With Richter I have nothing to do, because he is too
lazy to bother himself with me: I do without him perfectly
easily, as I have found a greater substitute in Dr.
Schönaich.... I have just come from the second
orchestral rehearsal of the 'Sieben Todsunden,' which
however went off no better than the first, for which Richter
is chiefly to blame, who, too lazy to study the score
thoroughly, doesn't know how quickly or slowly he ought to
set the tempo, when this or that instrument comes in, or
whether they play rightly or wrongly. In a word, it was
terrible to listen to and Goldschmidt himself says that if
people abuse this music they are quite right to do so....
With Hellmesberger Wolf hoped for a reconciliation,
through Schönaich."
p. 59 [1878]: "In February a project was afoot to
get some of Wolf's compositions printed. One of
Schönaich's friends, Emerich Kastner, was
bringing out a Wagner-Katalog through the
publishing house of Joh. André at Offenbach am Main.
It was thought that André might undertake the
publication of a group of Wolf's songs."
p. 61 [1878]: "Through Schönaich Wolf had
become acquainted with Kaiserlicher Rat Leopold Altmann, one
of the most warm-hearted and open-handed of all his early
sympathizers."
p. 160 [1884-87]: "From this attitude to
Bruckner's work Wolf's friend Eckstein and others long
strove to move him. At length Wolf confessed he had seen the
light. Eckstein arranged a meeting between the two
composers, which took place on Corpus Christi day, 1885, at
Klosterneuburg, and after that Wolf was an active adherent
of the Brucknerian faith. In March 1886 he greeted the
belated Vienna performance of the E flat Symphony, which had
already achieved success at Munich, Leipzig, Hamburg, and
Hanover, but reminded the Philharmonic Committee that in the
composer's desk lay half a dozen other symphonies which had
never been performed at all, the least of them, to his mind,
a Chimborazo compared with the Brahmsian molehills! When, in
the same year, Bülow hoaxed the simple-minded Bruckner
by sending three telegrams announcing that he had been
elected to the Bulgarian throne, that ten thousand
photographs of him were required at once, as the populace
were crying out for portraits of their sovereign, and that
the critics who had broken lances for him were to receive
places in the Cabinet, Wolf, along with Theodor Helm and
Gustav Schönaich, was named for ministerial
appointment."
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Cosima Wagner's Diaries. Vol. II: 1878-1883.
Edited and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich
Mack.
Translated and with an Introduction, Postscript, and
Additional Notes by Geoffrey Skelton. (New York, NY:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
Sunday, May 22, 1881: "R. slept well;
the Flower Greeting takes place at 8 o'clock and is very
successful, the clock presented by Fidi-Parsifal delights
R., and he is pleased with the flower costumes. The coats of
arms of the Wagner Society towns genuinely surprise him, and
he is pleased with the ceiling. In a mood of divine
happiness he strolls to the summerhouse with me in the blue
robe, and we exchange gold pens and little poems! Our lunch
table consists of: Standhartners 3 (with
Gustav!), Ritters (the parents), the Count, Jouk.,
Boni, Lusch, and Fidi; in the hall Eva, Loldi, Ferdi Jager,
Julchen and Elsa; the latter two have to slip away
unnoticed, so that the singing of the verse will float down
from the gallery. Siegfried speaks Stein's poem very well,
splendidly proposing the health of eternal youth, and then
in a full voice Elsa movingly sings 'Nicht Gut noch Pracht,'
etc., from above.---Over coffee Faf from the Festival
Theater appears with the program for this evening on his
back. The dear good children act out the little farces by
Lope and Sachs magnificently, and Lusch speaks Wolz's
linking epilogue particularly well. To the conclusion of the
Sachs play J. Rub. linked the Prelude to Die Msinger,
and when R. went into the salon, the children, in different
costumes, sang his 'Gruss der Getreuen'; at the conclusion
of the evening, after the meal, came the 'Kaisermarsch,'
with altered text. All splendidly done by the children,
though we are not entirely successful in sustaining the
mood. Before lunch R. was upset by the military band, which
he---somewhat to my concern---had allowed to take part, and
it required Siegfried's toast to raise his spirits again. In
the evening he was irked by the dullness of our friends, he
asked Standhartner to remain behind, without
considering that the stepson [Gustav Schönaich]
would also then remain, and the presence of this man whom he
cannot bear kept him from expressing all that was in his
heart, and that made him almost painfully unhappy. The
successful parts are what delighted me---the fact that
unbidden things intervene no longer bothers me, however much
it once used to pain me: I keep remembering that 'all
transient things are but an image.'"
Monday, May 23,1881: "The children's giggling
draws me into their room. 'Yesterday Papa had 12 surprises:
(1) the Flower Greeting, (2) the coats of arms, (3) the
military band (!), (4) the toast, (5) the song, (6) Faf, (7)
Lope, (8) the epilogue, (9) the Prelude, (10) the 'Gruss,'
(11) the 'Kaisermarsch,' (12) U-August (Gustav
Schönaich). I report this merry notion to R., and
it makes us laugh heartily. But he again flies into a rage
when he is obliged to say goodbye to this man whom he
detests."
Wednesday, November 22, 1882: "At lunch, however,
after our walk together to the Piazetta, he is very
cheerful, his defense of Tesarini and his character sketch
of G. Schönaich arouse much laughter, as also
his attitude toward the Societies."
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Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler. Vol. 2.
Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904). (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
pp. 79-80 [1897]: "Anna von Mildenburg
had finally been invited to sing at the Vienna Opera in
December....
"Mildenburg's guest performances started on December 8
with Die Walküre, which Richter conducted, and
continued with Lohengrin on 14 December, and Fidelio,
again conducted by Richter, on 17 December....Gustav
Schönaich, in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung,
praised Mildenburg's dramatic temperament and intelligent
acting; her engagement would fill an important gap in the
Vienna ensemble, which at the moment possessed only one
dramatic soprano.*
*Schönaich, the most devoted 'Wagnerite' of all the
Viennese critics, noted that the 'joyous' interpretation of
Brünnhilde's cry was completely new, even contrary to
tradition. Gustave Schönaich (1840-1906) was the
son of [Franz Schönaich,] a court official who
had been the Austrian Minister of Education, and whose death
had left him an ophan at an early age. Frau
Schönaich subsequently married a famous doctor,
Dr. Standhartner, director of the largest hospital in
Vienna. She received in her salon the principal artists and
greatest musicians of the time. Schönaich
studied law at the Univ. of Vienna and for some years
held the post of legal consultant to the Bodenkreditanstalt.
He was 34 before he became a writer and critic. He first
joined the Wiener Tagblatt, then the Die Reichswehr, and
finally the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, of which he
was now editor-in-chief. A friend and intimate of Wagner
until the latter's death, he remained close to the Wagner
family and regularly visited them at Bayreuth, so that he
came to be regarded as their semi-official spokesman in
Vienna. He was renowned for his wit, culture, and
conversational gifts as well as his gourmandise and
corpulence. He died of heart disease in 1906."
pp. 114-115 [1898]: "According to Heuberger, 'an
unprecedented suspense' held the audience spellbound during
the whole performance of Götterdämmerung....
...
"After some hesitation Mahler suppressed the rope in the
Norn scene, using a real rope for rehearsals and then
removing it at the last moment. So the Norns only mimed
throwing the rope in the air and catching it, and the fact
that there was no rope was hardly noticed. He nevertheless
received a letter of protest from Cosima Wagner, to which he
replied that he had taken this step 'at the dictates of his
conscience as an artist and man of the theatre'. Gustav
Schönaich, who dined frequently with Mahler and
Natalie, brought the matter up again on behalf of the Wagner
family. 'Spare yourself this trouble, I beg you!' replied
Mahler."
p. 123 [1898]: "For Gustav Schönaich,
Mahler's conducting of the [Mozart] Symphony No. 40 was
'beyond all praise'. 'Never had one been more blissfully
aware of the winged, light genius of this masterpiece. A
spirit of grace and delicacy breathed through the
performance.'"
p. 204 [1900]: "Robert Hirschfeld hailed Mahler's
version of the [Beethoven] Fifth Symphony as 'moving by its
very novelty', for the conductor saw in Beethoven not the
ultimate perfection of classical development, but a 'mighty
prophet of the new style in music'. At this time Hirschfeld
was prepared to accept most of the instrumental
retouching,* except for the audacious doubling of the
bassoons in the Finale, which he regarde as 'intolerable and
contrary to the nature of Beethoven's music'. Schönaich
was also opposed to this** and certain other
'surprising ans unusual' features, such as the fast pace of
the first movement*** and the slowness of the next
two.**** He conceded that the 'triumphal jubilation'
of the Finale, with its 'noble pride and blinding
brilliance', was 'eminently typical of Beethoven'. In
another article in the Wiener Tagblatt, the same critic, in
a more liberal mood, declared that it was ridiculous to be
put off by the new tempos, even if they were contrary to
tradition, and to refuse to recognize Mahler's feeling for
Beethoven's 'grand style'. His powerful accentuation, his
imposing crescendos, and the radiance of the final hymn of
victory indeed revealed 'a magnificently talented conductor,
who is entirely familiar with the work'.
*Particularly the use of a piccolo in
the Finale. However, he objected to the muting of the horns
at the beginning of the Scherzo and the doubling of the
bassoons by the horns in the Finale: although he had tried
to subdue their tone, Mahler had in fact altered their
actual sound.... Schönaich, on the other hand,
claimed that such doubling was 'accepted by all the famous
conductors in Germany'.
**According to Karpath [Lachende Musiker
(München, Germany: Knorr & Hirth, 1929)],
Schönaich always opposed Mahler's instrumental
changes because he was afraid that Vienna would regard him
as a 'desecrator of Beethoven'.
***Wagner and Bülow had played it slower, he
claimed.
****In his view, the slow tempo of the Scherzo had
had 'particularly curious' results in the famous double-bass
passage in the Trio."
p. 230 [1900]: "However, when Gustav
Schönaich wrote that nothing remained in these
compositions [of Lieder] either of Knaben or of Wunderhorn',
Mahler was hurt, since Schönaich had always professed
to admire him whole-heartedly and had, so to speak, been
raised and educated (heranwuchs) in Bayreuth."
p. 288 [1900]: "Fifteen months later, Mahler again
conducted The Magic Flute. ... Gustav Schönaich
[in the Wiener Allgeneine Zeitiung (27 Nov. 19000]
found the casting perfect, particularly Gutheil-Schoder, who
was making her début as Pamina:
"Her appearance recalls an antique figure by
Raphael. Her singing and acting go together, intermingled in
chaste sweetness. All was artistically felt and interpreted,
yet without a shadow of exaggeration in the subtleties of
the dynamics. To give just one example: when Serasto,
appearing unexpectedly, terrorizes Papageno and Pamina who
are attempting to escape, Papageno asks, 'But what shall we
tell him?' and Pamina replies, 'The truth, even if a crime!'
The established custom has been that Pamina declaimed these
words in accents of heroic determination. With Frau
Schroder, on the contrary, there is an inimitable mixture of
embarrassment and slight, affectionate reproach aimed at
Papageno, as if the very idea of telling anything other than
the truth were being suggested to her for the first time in
her life. A stroke of genius, not isolated either, and for
me, at least, a handsome recompense for the lack of softness
in the middle register of her voice."
p. 309 [1900]: "Even Gustav Schönaich,
who until then had shown considerable fairness in his
assessment of Mahler, and had found his Second Symphony
'pleasing and intensely personal', could perceive no links
between the movements of the First and declared the 'tome
structure' completely irrational. "Is it a weasel, a cloud
or a camel?' he asked, paraphrasing Shakespeare [Hamlet, iii
ii, 390-400]. The 'auditory pleasures' had irritated him as
much as the dissonances, for all had seemed equally
unmotivated. Mahler had been a master of orchestration
sixteen years before, but his personality had still not
asserted itself. Recalling that Wagner had feared that
Berlioz would end up being 'buried beneath his own
orchestral machinery', Schönaich remarked that
Mahler had also succumbed to the hazardous joys of using a
hitherto unprecedented orchestral language, and that,
without fully realizing it, he had attached more importance
to 'the glittering outer garment of the thought than to the
thought itself'. Moreover, his humour merely grated, for
'Callot's manner was unsuited to music. It was impossible to
discern the slightest link between the catasphrophic fourth
movement and the rest. Mahler should never have risked his
reputation as a composer by performing such a work."
pp. 31i8-319 [1901]: "Carried away by his
enthusiasm for this labour of re-creation [a new production
of Wagner's opera Rienzi], he dumbfounded one of the
Viennese critics by asking 'whether he didn't agree that
Rienzi was Wagner's most beautiful opera and the greatest
musical drama ever composed'. The unidentified critic may
have been Schönaich for, according to Max Graf,
he had long since noticed this peculiar trait in Mahler's
character: "I'll tell you what your enthusiasm reminds me
of,' he said to Mahler one day in the Café
Impérial, 'foie gras'. Mahler asked him what he
meant, and Schönaich replied, 'Because geese are
force-fed until they develop a liver disease which produces
the succulent foie gras. You, when you prepare a new
production, stuff youself with enthusiasm and this results
in a marvellous performance.' Thereafter, when staging an
opera that required a great deal of effort, Mahler would
often announce, 'the foie gras will soon be ready', and
later on, when the critics began to attack each of his
innovations, 'die Herren Vorgesetzten once again consider it
a liver disease....But we think the foie gras will be
excellent!'"
p. 715 [1904]: "In an obituary [for Eduard
Hanslick] whose tone alternated between the strongest
criticism (notably concerning Hanslick's hostility towards
Wagner) and respectful admiration, Schönaich
acknowledged that Hanslick 'never wrote a boring article'
during his sixty-year career."
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Richard Strauss And His World. Edited by Bryan
Gilliam. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
p. 317-319: "The critical essays
chosen for this section document three stages in Strauss's
relationship with Vienna. The first two reviews from the
influential Vienna-based periodical the Neue Musikalische
Presse help to delineate Strauss's reputation in Vienna as a
young modernist composer in the tradition of Liszt and
Wagner. The reviews from the late 1890s by Robert Hirschfeld
and Gustave Schoenaich of two tone poems grapple with
the aesthetics of program music and musical form. The battle
lines in Vienna were drawn in part by the familiar
Brahms-Wagner conflict and a Brahms-Bruckner rivalry.
However, as the Hirschfeld review makes clear, Strauss's
notoriety in the 1890s derived as much from a sense of
Strauss's post-Brucknerian modernity. His use of harmony and
orchestral color and his formal ambitions in terms of
narration and representation through instrumental means
placed him at the head of a controversial new musical
movement....
The authors of these selections were all leading figures
in the intellectual and artistic life of Vienna.
"Gustav Schoenaich (1841-1906) wrote primarily for
the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung and the Wiener Tagblatt.. He
was a native Viennese. A well-known Viennese Wagner
advocate, he became acquainted with Richard Wagner
personally through his stepfather, Joseph
Standhartner, the distinguished Viennese physician, who
was Wagner's close friend. Standhartner was also
(together with Brahms) a longstanding member of the hoard of
directors of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. A
connoisseur of things Wagnerian, Schoenaich, who also
was equally notorious for his prodigious appetite and wide
girth, was for a time an intimate friend of Hugo Wolf."
pp. 321-323:
Opera and Concert Reports
Gustave Schoenaich
"Vienna (Philharmonic concert). The program of the
Philharmonic concert that took place last Sunday seemed to
have been put together with the expectation that every
listener would bring a revolving chair with him in his head.
There is no other way we can explain the requirement of
hearing music from such rapidly changing, varied points of
view. A Mozart symphony from Arcadia, Strauss's Till
Eulenspiegel from Cayenne, Mendelssohn's Hebrides
Overture in faultless elegance, striding by like Bulwer's
Pelham, and Bruckner's E b major symphony, with genuine
ermine peeking out from under the Tyrolean peasant's jacket
and held together by buttons crafted in part from
contrapuntal twenty-cent pieces and in part from genuine
diamonds! And all this at 12:30 P.M., the zenith of human
sobriety.
"Among the young composers, most of whom have already
been crushed under the weight of the phenomenon of Richard
Wagner and can only stammer out their own sounds if they
bring forth anything at all, Richard Strauss occupies a
prominent place. Everything of his that has come to the
attention of the public until now, even the unfortunate
things, reveals a personal element, unmistakable attempts at
an individual language. The great confidence that Hans von
Bülow, who hated every epigonal art, placed in the
talent of this young man---he is now in his thirty-first
year---seems entirely justified to us. Richard Strauss's
musical education is profoundly thorough. Not until he had
acquired quite astonishing knowledge in the center of music
making, in all the technical matters, did he begin to become
eccentric. But the solid connection, which he can never
lose, with this good foundation prevents him from flying off
completely. His newest composition, Till Eulenspiegels
lustige Streiche, gives very good sounding and hardly
controvertible evidence of this. The piece is program music
only in the sense in which it always has and probably always
will be considered permissible. Strauss has expressly
declined to bring the events of the Eulenspiegel story into
direct relationship with his score. He could have chosen the
overture form and would have been no less justified than
Reinecke with his Nutcracker Overture or innumerable others
who have given [their works] whatever titles they fancied.
Strauss, wittier and more distinctive, cast his piece in the
form of an expanded rondo. This form, which is filled with
lively content, provides the listener with a solid point of
departure. We do not have to trouble ourselves with relating
individual parts of the piece to spccific external events,
and the firm structure allows us to absorb and enjoy the
underlying mood of the whole, as it is laid out in the
themes and fully exploited by variations, undisturbed by
programmatic suppositions. We do not know, if the piece had
been sent out into the world without the title, whether the
name Eulenspiegel would have been attached to it by someone
from among the circle of listeners; but [its] fundamental
character, oscillating between humor, sarcasm, and irony,
radiates from every measure, here and there perhaps even too
garishly. The piece is dazzlingly clever, does not break
down into its individual parts, and captivates the intellect
of the listener perhaps more than his sensibility---but with
its convincing logic and skillfully measured length it never
for a moment leaves him without stimulation. It is eminently
amusing. The means that are used are, admittedly, very
opulent. But when one considers that from the death of Gluck
until the creation of the Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz
not even fifty years went by, one might, for a change,
express a certain satisfaction with the fact that the means
of musical expression have undergone so little
intensification, relatively speaking, in the longer period
that has elapsed since then. That a work of music whose
effect aims more at the intellect than at the heart should
find more willing listeners today cannot be surprising at a
time when every "truth" gives birth, as though through
self-generation, to the worm of the question mark. Perhaps
that will change someday when a profound but generative
error once again exerts its one-sided but sufficiently
powerful formative influence on the world of culture.
Today's errors are too paltry far that. We are expressing
our pleasure at Strauss's work not in the name of any
'principle' or 'tendency.' When one grows old, one learns to
understand the devil to mean that laws are followed best by
those whose spirit has engendered them and tendencies
pursued most successfully by those who have already set out
upon their path. We think Eulenspiegel is a very personal
piece and a stroke of genius. That Strauss is not someone
one should take lightly is something of which anyone can
convince himself with the help of the score. A cheap effect,
based for example on a few cleverly thought-out tonal
effects, it is not. Nevertheless, it has that drastic and
plastic quality that is one of the indispensable
characteristics of every significant piece of music. Let us
cultivate in ourselves some of Goethe's tolerance for
individual peculiarity and personality and we will recognize
that nowadays we are permitted to enjoy such exotic products
with complete impunity. The flaming sword of the
aesthetician who would bar the way to such phenomena does
not singe the person who courageously bares his breast to
it---and if one examines it more closely, it has precious
little to distinguish it from the schoolmaster's cane...."
[Source: Neue Musikalische Presse. 2 (1 December
1896)]
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A Vienese critic on Gustav Mahler's youthful work:
"A harmonic effect that is a real stroke of
genius is the seven-part choral entry m part one over the
sixteen-bar-long pedal point on F ( O Spielmann).
Mahler's music never fails to make a significant impression
when it succeeds in keeping itself within bounds. But when
he composes 'a joyful noise', it's a corybantic hubbub...."
Gustav Schönaich, Wiener Allgemeine
Zeitung, 20 February 1901.
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