Viennese perspectives
Amal Choucri Catta on an Austrian inspired event
Twentieth Century Music Festival: Cairo Symphony Orchestra, cond. Ahmed El-Saedi; soloists Harald Ossberger, piano, Christian Altenburger, violin. Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 15 March, 8pm
Austria was the guest of honour at Cairo Symphony's Twentieth Century Music Festival, presented last Saturday at Cairo Opera's Main Hall, under the baton of Ahmed El-Saedi. The concert was as surprising and extraordinary as it was stimulating, leading local audiences undeviatingly into the lion's den of the New Vienna School, originally the product of three musicians: Arnold Schonberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, each of whom featured in the concert programme. Sadly, as at previous concerts, it was possible to count a larger number of musicians on stage than listeners in the hall. Once again nothing had been done to promote the concert -- surely one of the most interesting of the entire festival since it had set itself the task of introducing listeners to music the very raison d'être of which was to set new polyphonic horizons, dynamic levels and technical innovations.
The concert opened with the strings' Pianissimo Pizzicato of Anton Webern's Passacaglia for Orchestra, Opus 1, of remarkable orchestral transparency. The interrelationship of symmetrical structures, sound effects, string effects, the entire atonal style and the unusual musical language, based on non- repetitive sequences, demanded the audience's attention. The orchestra had a heyday playing this demanding composition, written by Webern in 1908, towards the end of his musical studies with Schonberg.
Born in 1883 in Vienna, Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern received early tuition from his mother, a pianist. He studied in Klagenfurt and in Vienna before taking up his lessons with Schonberg in 1904. He was operetta conductor at Bad Ischl, Teplitz, Danzig, Stettin and Prague, before returning to Vienna in 1918 where he conducted the Vienna Workers' concerts, giving private performances and working as conductor and musical advisor for Austrian Radio between 1927 to 1938. He visited London five times to conduct for the BBC but in 1936 his music was proscribed by the Nazis as "cultural Bolshevism". During World War Two he worked as a publisher's proofreader and was accidentally shot by an American sentry in Mittersill, near Salzburg, on 15 September, 1945, at the end of the war.
Largely ignored, except by the BBC, in his lifetime, Webern's music became a rallying point for the post-1945 generation of European composers, including Stockhausen or Boulez. But Webern maintains his place is in the romantic tradition and his homage to classical forms, such as the Passacaglia, is an unwavering feature of his work.
The Passacaglia closed as it had started, on a pianissimo of the strings.
The second musical surprise was the celebrated Chamber concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments, in three movements, composed between 1923 and 1925 by Alban Bergand dedicated to Arnold Schonberg on the occasion of his 50th birthday. Born in Vienna in 1885 Alban Berg's musical output, though relatively small, is among the most important of the last century. One of four children of a well-to-do family he had little formal musical education, but did write romantic songs at 15. In 1904, however, he started taking private composition lessons with Schonberg, and decided to concentrate henceforth on music. With his friend and fellow pupil Anton Webern he entered Vienna's bubbling musical avant-garde life, dominated at the time by Gustav Mahler. Having attended a performance of Buchner's drama Woyzeck he decided to turn it into an opera. It was finally performed in Berlin in December 1925, causing a furore and despite critical polemics its success with the public was never in doubt. His second opera, Lulu, which he started composing in 1929, was always successful. Berg has become, to European audiences, the most acceptable of the so-called "12-note" or "dodecaphonic" composers, probably because he never really seemed to be an orthodox atonalist.
Berg's Kammerkonzert, a chamber concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments belongs to his earliest dodecaphonic music and counts among his strongest compositions. The first movement, thema scherzoso con variazioni, unites the winds with the piano, the second movement, the violin with the winds, while the third rondo ritmico con intro-introduzione, unites all instruments. This extraordinary chamber concerto is built, as are all Berg's larger compositions, around elaborate, intimate episodes from his life, using musical codes to represent the people closest to him, and relying on numerological legerdemain to dictate formal structures. Thus, in a brief prelude, Berg cites the names of the three members of the New Vienna School: Schonberg, Webern and himself. These three musical figures form the structure of the entire concerto. While the first movement unites the sonata form to the Variations the second movement adopts the ternary-form to the "Lied" and the third associates the sonata-form to the rondo. The solo parts were interpreted with superb virtuosity by the Austrians Harald Ossberger on the piano and Christian Altenburger on the violin. The latter was, however, at times drowned by an overdose of sound from the winds while the keyboard never hesitated to pursue its boisterous adventure under Ossberger's vibrant touch. He turned the instrument into a turbulent, violent source of sound, his expressive fingers exuberantly executing their Mephistophelean dance on the keys, mesmerising the entire audience. This is a difficult piece of music: it gives everyone a hard time though it went off beautifully. The soloists, the 13 instrumentalists and the maestro were cheered. The concert was turning into a musical event.
The final part was Schonberg's. Arnold Schonberg's music, full of melodic and lyrical interest, is extremely complex, taking every element to its furthest limit and making heavy demands on the listeners. His greatness lies not only in his own music but in his artistic courage and in his powerful and continuing influence on 20th century music. He is likely to remain, always, a controversial, revered and revolutionary musician.
His symphonic poem, Opus 5, Pelleas and Melisande, is of a strong polyphonic density. Based on Maurice Maeterlinck's drama, the first part opens on a mysteriously slow introduction, symbolically representing the forest where the lovers are destined to meet, while the clarinet simply represents destiny, the oboe Melisande, and Golaud -- Melisande's husband and Pelleas' father --- is symbolised by the horn. The trumpet has been chosen for young Pelleas. The second part, a scherzo, is divided into three themes, the first evoking Pelleas and Melisande meeting at the fountain in the park, the second evoking the scene in the tower and the third the scene underground. This last, dominated by a vast melody "sung" by the violins, is reminiscent of the love scene and of the couple's last goodbye. This scene is, however, brutally interrupted by Golaud's arrival: he kills his son Pelleas, while the fourth part is reminiscent of Melisande's death. The end is not violent, it is symbolically under destiny's influence: its silence screams with terror and it is in tranquility that the pain and sorrow are most eloquent. Pelleas and Melisande have sinned, they have been duly punished and have accepted their punishment: Maeterlinck's drama is brutal and so is Schonberg's music. Unforgiving and powerful, violent and pitiless, with rare moments of meditation, it is filled with unending beauty.
Schonberg was born in Vienna in 1874, and died in Los Angeles in 1951. He began composing as a youth, earned his living scoring other composers' operettas, and in 1901 became conductor of a satirical cabaret. His Gurrelieder allowed him a scholarship and a teaching post in Berlin where he wrote his symphonic poem Opus 5. His first atonal works were met with as much praise as hostility, though in later years, after having emigrated to the States, he composed in tonal styles, dismaying his followers but not himself for, all composers, he insisted, "had varied their styles to suit their creative needs and purposes". He left a large number of symphonic works, music for the stage, chamber music, pieces for the piano and songs. A large repertoire, then: we can only hope that more will come to Cairo.
