Ernst Krenek—Briefwechsel mit der Universal Edition (1921-1941) (review)

Abstract

CORRESPONDENCE(S), CATALOGS, COLLECTIONS Ernst Krenek-Briefwechsel mit der Universal Edition (1921-1941). Edited by Claudia Maurer Zenck. Cologne: Bohlau, 2010. [2 vols. (997 p.) ISBN 9783412205706. euro120.] Illustrations, bibliography, indexes. Music publishing in Central Europe reached its apogee during the first half of the twentieth century. From about 1910 to 1960, a period that encompasses the last massive scores of late romanticism and the now classic graphic eccentricities of the postwar avant-garde, publishers were the indispensable midwives of multiple revolutions- in musical syntax, notation, and performance practice, as well as in the dissemination, marketing, and reception of new music. At the heart of it all was the score, a workaday performance roadmap that nonetheless hovered somewhere between a well-designed book and a work of art. Today, this era is receding into memory as photocopying, computer-generated scores, synthesizers, and MIDI technology have undermined the privileged authority of the printed page and gradually liberated composers, performers, audiences, and cultural institutions from their reliance upon its purveyors. But there was a time when composers were uniquely dependent upon publishers to print their works, guide their careers, proclaim their successes, secure their performances, and sustain them through the vicissitudes of fashion, politics, and economic turbulence. And all this was documented in another relic of that earlier age: a body of written communication-letters, postcards, telegrams, memoranda of meetings and conversations-that was the record of a relationship based on trust, artistic solidarity, and the cool calculation of business interests. Such relationships between composers and publishers still exist, of course, but they are increasingly rare and, in the age of e-mail and Twitter, documented with considerably less texture. This edition of the correspondence between Ernst Krenek and his Viennese publisher covers twenty years of an association that coincided with a dramatic rise and precipitous fall for both parties. Universal Edition (hereafter UE) was founded in 1901, but it was not until 1909 that its director, Emil Hertzka, began to branch out from standard classics to new music and signed his first contracts with Gustav Mahler, Franz Schreker, and Arnold Schoen berg. By 1919 the firm's stable of composers ranged from Bela Bartok to Alexander Zemlinsky, Alfredo Casella to Karol Szymanowski, Frederick Delius to Leos? Janacek, and in the decade that followed its roster was considerably expanded as a younger generation came of age and flourished in an inflationary surge of new music festivals and theatrical experimentation. Foremost among the composers of that younger generation was Ernst Krenek (1900-91), whose meteoric rise culminated in the wildly successful opera Jonny spielt auf (1927) and his magnum opus, Karl V (1938). But in the eleven years between those two premieres Krenek and UE felt the brunt of the changes that would bring them both to their knees. The vibrant musical culture of the 1920s was dealt a severe blow by the stock market crash of 1929. Thereafter economic depression, rising unemployment, and cutbacks in cultural funding took their toll and inaugurated a fatal lurch to the right that would equate most new music with Bolshevism and cultural degeneracy. It is telling that Karl V had its premiere not in Vienna but in Prague ( just as Alban Berg's Lulu was premiered not in Berlin but in Zurich in 1937). Krenek, like so many others, was eventually forced into exile and UE, much of whose vast catalogue now consisted of banned works, went into a kind of winter hibernation that would not end until the rebirth of the avant-garde in 1945. It is a dramatic story that offers many correctives to unilinear notions of modernist evolution (fostered, in part, by postwar narratives of that revived avant-garde) for it reveals an interwar cultural landscape of enormous complexity and diversity, readily exemplified by Krenek's own dizzying stylistic trajectory from expressionism through neoclassicism, neoromanticism, and the eventual embrace of twelve-tone serialism. …