Critic’s Notebook: Eric(h) Zeisl’s Requiem Ebraico – An Exile’s Synthesis

Also published in two parts in Die Presse: Concert review: Begeistert und begeisternd: Zeisls „Requiem Ebraico“ im Musikverein & Zeisl-primer with exhibition notice: Ausstellung zu Erich Zeisl: Ein vertriebener, verlorener Sohn der Musikstadt Wien

A.Zemlinsky, Psalm XIII R.Chailly / RSO Berlin Decca

Eric(h) Zeisl et al., Requiem Ebraico ++ "Remembrance" J.Neschling / OSESP BIS

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No.1 P.Boulez / Chicago SO DG

Eric(h) Zeisl dropped the “h” fleeing the Nazis at Ellis Island — but at heart, he always remained a Viennese composer.

What would 20^th-century classical music have sounded like if it hadn’t been interrupted by the all-consuming catastrophe of the Second World War? We’ll never know. But there are traces. Among the lost currents of “disappeared” music is a post-Stravinskian branch: spiky but tonal. You catch glimpses of it in the works of Wolfgang Fortner, Boris Blacher, Viktor Ullmann, Werner Egk, Karl Amadeus Hartmann or Harald Genzmer. Alongside that stood a more romantic strain – one more in the tradition of Richard Strauss. That’s where you’d place Erich Korngold, Franz Schmidt, Joseph Marx – and Surprised-by-Beauty-composer Eric(h) Zeisl.

Some of these composers escaped physical destruction. But their works didn’t survive the postwar shift in listening aesthetics. State and institutional support overwhelmingly favored one very specific kind of modernism, cementing the divide between “safe” repertoire and contemporary music. Tonal composers were looked down upon – vaguely associated with Nazi-aesthetic tastes, even those the Nazis had labeled “degenerate” and persecuted. These composers were caught between two worlds. Zeisl especially.

Erich Zeisl was born in Vienna in 1905 to the owners of Café Tegetthoff, with Jewish-Hungarian roots. He began composing at 14, entered the Conservatory at 16, and won the Lili Boulanger Prize at 20. His early songs were picked up by the great bass Alexander Kipnis, among others. His opera Hiob – based on the novel by Joseph Roth – was submitted to the Austrian Music Council. The verdict was unanimous: not modern enough.

When the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938, Zeisl fled to Paris, then to the United States. In Hollywood, his career didn’t take off or crash – it just moved sideways. He worked as an arranger and composer for MGM and Warner Bros., writing uncredited music for films like Lassie Come Home, Money, Women, and Guns, and others. No breakthrough, no fame – California led Zeisl not to career heights, but to a musicological footnote.

ExilArte, the Center for Persecuted Music in Vienna, just between the Konzerthaus and the Akademietheater – is trying to nudge him back toward the repertoire. Help came from attorney Randol Schoenberg, grandson of Arnold Schoenberg – and of Zeisl. Schoenberg brought Zeisl’s papers and music back to Vienna, where they are now housed at ExilArte. The aim: to let young, unencumbered students at the MDW discover the extraordinarily fine music of Eric(h) Zeisl – who may have dropped the “h” in America, but who remained, in his musical heart, always a Viennese.

One chance to discover Zeisl’s music came on the following Sunday, when the RSO Vienna performed one of his best-known works, the Requiem Ebraico, at the Musikverein.

One of the RSO Vienna’s core responsibilities is to enrich Vienna’s concert scene with interesting programs – programs the other orchestras often lack the courage or will to offer. This includes music that, once introduced, audiences actively want to hear and possibly hear again.

Sunday evening’s concert was a textbook example. Granted, Gustav Mahler’s First isn’t exactly a revelation – but hey, even the Golden Hall doesn’t fill itself. Mahler draws a crowd, Alsop loves to conduct him, and programmatically it all dovetailed with Alexander Zemlinsky and Eric(h) Zeisl. And you can’t really go wrong: Just play loud enough and fast enough and the audience will be awed into laudatory submission by the sheer force of sound. The shrill strings? Forgotten. . The out-of-sync basses? Forgiven... The absence of any dynamic below mezzoforte? Well, that was a pity. But even within this gleeful sonic bludgeoning, there were fine moments: the rustic launch of the second movement, the tipsy staggering towards the fourth movement. The audience pre-emptively gave Marin Alsop a standing ovation – a warm-up for her farewell appearance this Thursday, when she’ll conduct her final program as RSO Chief Conductor (Mahler 2).

Zemlinsky’s grand, even glorious setting of Psalm 13 for chorus, organ and large orchestra opened the evening with weight and passion. Doubt and resistance rendered into stirring – but never shallow – music. But the secret centerpiece was Zeisl’s Requiem Ebraico. Zeisl wrote more immediately appealing and coherent works, but none that so deftly fused the different strata that exile imposes – Vienna and California, modernism and romanticism, secularism and Judaism – into one frame, without stooping to the lowest common denominator. The sharply articulated solos and the Singverein – unintelligible, but enthusiastic – gave the piece the intensity it needs.

Stripped of his cultural German identity and his Austrian homeland, Zeisl’s Requiem is an attempt to situate his European, Jewish, and American self in music. The synthesis was, in 1944, ahead of its time: too European for Americans, too American for Europeans, too Jewish for Christians, too Christian for Jews, too modern for conservatives, too conservative for modernists – and yet always beloved by audiences. The Musikverein was no exception. A moving, compelling, and captivating glimpse into a world that never got to exist.

From May 14, the ExilArte Center presents the exhibition Erich Zeisl – Vienna’s Lost Son in Exile.

Follow @ClassicalCritic

Fleming and Emerson Quartet's Austrian Evening

A. Berg, Lyric Suite / E. Wellesz, Five Sonnets, R. Fleming, Emerson Quartet (Decca, 2015)

Charles T. Downey, Renée Fleming, Emerson String Quartet present a rapturous recital of Austrian songs (Washington Post, June 3)

Renée Fleming will soon draw the curtain on her mainstream operatic career, as productions of “Der Rosenkavalier” at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera next season will be the American soprano’s last. On Thursday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Fleming teamed up with the Emerson String Quartet to reprise pieces by Austrian composers Alban Berg and Egon Wellesz they recently recorded for Decca.

A musicologist and composition student of Arnold Schoenberg, Wellesz composed his “Five Sonnets” for soprano and string quartet in 1934, before the Nazi annexation of Austria forced him to flee to England. Set to selections from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets From the Portuguese,” these songs are strikingly dissonant and violent... [Continue reading]

Renée Fleming, soprano
Emerson String Quartet
Fortas Chamber Music Concerts
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Ionarts-at-Large: Involuntary Exclusivity At Mozart’s Home

Violist Julia Rebekka Adler and pianist Axel Gremmelspacher presented a program—and their latest CD—in the sub-basement of the Mozart House in Vienna, just in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The program and disc are titled “Viola in Exile”, concocted of composers, threatened, prosecuted, and eventually forgotten, that they all huddled at the very back of the alphabet: Leo Weiner, Karl Weigl, Mieczysław Weinberg, and Erich Zeisl.

K.Weigl, E.Zeisl, H.Gál Viola Sonatas, J.R.Adler / A.Gremmelspacher Gramola M.Weinberg, Complete Sonatas for Solo Viola, J.R.Adler / J.Nemtsov Neos M.Weinberg, Complete Works for Violin & Piano, L.Roth / J.Gallardo Challenge

I’ve followed the projects of Mme. Adler (assistant principal viola of the Munich Philharmonic, in her day job) with keen interest ever since writing a feature interview about her and her Weinberg solo viola project for the pages of Fanfare, some years ago. As part of that project, she had found and arranged Weinberg’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano for the viola, one of the catchiest piece of this often thorny composer and the opening work of this evening’s proceedings.

Viola in Exile

It was an unusual concert in that it took place before an audience of seven or—deducting the record producer, his wife, the music critic, friends of the performers and the page turner—zero: Empty chairs to the right of them, empty chairs to the left of them, empty chairs in front of them, was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the artists knew… someone had blunder’d.

Weinberg, so injected very directly into the ear as in the intimate acoustic of the little Bösendorfer Saal (it used to be Mozart’s wine cellar, almost guaranteeing that the vibes are good!), is always an ear-opening, not to say ear-splitting experience. A fragile-looking pale and ginger wisp of a woman, Julia Rebekka Adler’s sound is—for all the dance it contains—like a giant redwood falling on your roof: Big, and anything in its way better watch out. It’s just the thing for Weinberg who must be able to disturb as much as he must occasionally smile.

Karl Weigl’s Viola Sonata has more Shostakovich in its first movement than all of Weinberg (who is routinely, if lazily, accused of being a pocket-size Shostakovich, due to his close friendship and collaboration with the iconic Soviet composer). Smokey, throaty beauty with edges, it was given a terrific and intense performance here and in the folk-music embracing second movement and the lyrical third movement, and thanks to it, was able to convince as music as I hadn’t known it could. It is also included on the two artists’ recording (and I have to re-listen), but my ears were opened to the very considerable quality and beauty of the work only on this occasion.

Also included on the CD and present on the program was Eric Zeisl’s Violin Sonata. Eric Zeisl, like Weigl and Weinberg, is a 20^th century composer who has a chapter dedicated in the upcoming second edition of Robert Reilly’s “Surprised by Beauty (A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of 20^th and 21^st Century Music)”. He’s one of those fascinating neglected minor-yet-wonderful composers I love to write about (I contributed that particular chapter to Reilly’s book). Insiders know that his daughter married Arnold Schoenberg’s son, and that they two men were close, but that is about the closest Zeisl’s music gets to Schoenberg’s in a sentence. Zeisl’s music is post-romantic, sometimes naïve, and perfectly Austrian (though after 1940 increasingly imbued with Hebrew overtones, as he watched the horrors from California, having escaped Hitler-Europe himself). It lacks all pretensions and this viola sonata is one of the more astounding, powerful and tensely melodious pieces of 20^th century chamber music. A jewel, not only within the viola repertoire, and haunting with its shivering slow movement that never fails to get under my skin or that insistent, forceful and exotic edge of the modal third movement. Leo Weiner’ Csárdás Peregi Verbunk, which was wedged into the program, is a uplifting mix between a variation-movement viola sonata and a send-up of Brahms’s Hungarian dances. A little soufflé to lighten the mood.

If a concert takes place and there is no audience to hear it, does it make a sound? Most certainly, as it turns out. And what a sound, indeed. It was a performance to end all viola jokes (if that were possible) and caused such a surprising amount of clapping noise from the 14 enthused hands, that the performers indulged the 14 attached ears in an encore of Paul Ben Haim’s Sepphardic Melody.

MORE MIECZYSŁAW WEINBERG ON IONARTS.

Best Recordings of 2007 / These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: II - Concerto

For 2007 I wrote something similar to the "Best Recordings" list for WETA's long-defunct blog, naming it: "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things", which ended up being divided into eleven parts:

I - Crossover


This is the second part, restored to ionarts:

Read more »

A Job Well Done: Zeisl's Hiob Premieres in Munich

Eric(h) Zeisl’s unfinished opera Job had languished unperformed for 55 years. Now, as part of the Munich Opera Festival, it was revived by the Orchestra Jakobsplatz in collaboration with the Bavarian State Opera. To that end, the opera commissioned Jan Duszyńsky to finish the work by providing acts 3 and 4—the “America” bit of the Jewish-life-and-exile-saga based on Josef Roth’s play of the same name.

In amateurish hands—as can be seen in excerpts in Herbert Krill’s documentary Eric(h) Zeisl - An Unfinished Life, where Viennese students butcher some scenes—Job sounds terrible and Hans Kafka’s libretto makes the affair feel like a highfalutin production of Fiddler on the Roof gone wrong. Under the highly professional guidance of the State Opera, performed in the old military Riding Arena in Munich, and played by the Orchestra Jakobsplatz—in as large a formation as I’ve ever seen them and in good form under their founding conductor Daniel Grossmann—the result was very considerably more pleasing.

E.Zeisl et al., Requiem Ebraico, OSESP / J.Neschling BIS E.Zeisl, Piano Concerto; Pierrot, G.Wallisch / RSO Wien / J.Wildner cpo

Judging upon first and only hearing bears its pitfalls, but for all the enthusiasm to have seen this work performed at last, I reckon it isn’t Zeisl’s strongest. Had he lived to finish the work and revise it again, the inclined listener can’t help to think he would have turned around and made significant cuts in the score: There are too many repetitive elements in the music. The libretto, thus treated, drags on. Still, much can be had from hunting down goodies amid the largesse. The first one is easy: After a meta-prelude (in which adult-Menuchim-cum-The-Composer sings, haltingly: “I. have. been. asked. to. finish. an. opera…”), Zeisl’s bitter-sweet overture rang out in the riding hall and it’s primo late Viennese romanticism, charming and enchanting. Completion of the first two (of four projected) acts took Zeisl, on and off, ten years, and the music seems to reflect his artistic change. Increasingly the music becomes more consciously Jewish. As his daughter, Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg said: “Forced to leave his beloved Austria, [Zeisl] felt that he was no longer an Austrian, and also, in 1939 and the early forties, when the composition of Hiob was first conceived, he did not feel like an American, nor ‘belonged’ to America… That is why in America his music took on a more Hebraic mode.”

Apart from the overture, a few musical highlights stuck out. A few duets throughout, but especially the chorus that prepares Mendel’s family’s departure to America—executed by the two well-trained choruses, kids and regulars—and the parting lullaby for Menuchim (a splendidly acting little boy!) by his mother Deborah (the strong and regal-voiced Christa Ratzenböck). Then Jan Duszyńsky’s music takes over, set to remnants of the libretto vigorously altered by the composer and director Miron Hakenbeck to suit their dramatic line.

When Duszyńsky was approached with the task of finishing the opera, he didn’t know

Read more »

Mathias Hausmann

See my review of the Vocal Arts recital by Mathias Hausmann:

Vocal Arts DC Debuts With Mathias Hausmann Performance (The Washingtonian, October 13):

H. Eisler, Hollywood Songbook, M. Goerne, E. Schneider

The new season of Vocal Arts DC finally opened on Wednesday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater with a recital of early-20th-century German songs. The honor of opening the season fell to Austrian baritone Mathias Hausmann after bass-baritone Eric Owens canceled his September 10 Vocal Arts recital at the eleventh hour. Hausmann’s voice is a pleasure to listen to -- full-bodied, round, and well formed in tone. It joined beautifully in all registers, from resonant lows to ringing but still smooth heights, even a sweet crooner’s head voice heard in some of the popular-style songs that concluded the concert. At the same time, his performance had a coolness, a detachment that gave the impression of expressive possibilities left unexplored once a certain contentment in the beauty of sound had been reached. It’s a quality that recalls his mentor, Thomas Hampson, another uniformly rich and powerful voice.

The program brought together lieder from my favorite period in song composition, the early 20th century, focusing on German and Austrian composers who immigrated to the United States. Hausmann began with selections from the collection known as the Hollywood Songbook, the collaboration of composer Hanns Eisler and poet Bertolt Brecht (among other writers), created during Eisler’s short stint writing film scores in Los Angeles. These pieces -- a series of quirky miniatures -- are steeped in the sense of alienation experienced by World War II refugees, and reinforce the feeling of non-resolution and quietly anxious internal monologue. Hausmann relished careful attention to diction in every song without allowing it to become overdone or affected. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Anne Midgette, Hausmann recital shows potential (Washington Post, October 14)

Holzmair's Viennese Recital

Co-sponsored by the American-Austrian Society and the International Club of DC, the Austrian Embassy again hosted one of the finest baritones of our generation, Wolfgang Holzmair – accompanied by his trusty North Dakotan collaborator Russell Ryan. The program was one of eclectic and delectable rarities from 20th-century Austria: Eric Zeisl, Franz Mittler, and Robert Fürstenthal. Musically, Zeisl, of whom I have only heard piano trios and a string quartet, is more or less in Lieder No Man’s Land. Post-Mahlerian, not yet of the acerbic, hard-edged, and angular language of Hartmann, Fortner, and Braunfels, Zeisl and Mittler are perhaps best described as the Francis Poulenc of Entartete Musik. For one, they also share Poulenc’s delight in the whimsical. Particularly enjoyable for me was the encounter with texts from a slew of my favorite literary figures whom I have cherished since youth and adolescence. Wilhelm Busch, father of the cartoon (try to imagine 19th-century Asterix or Tintin with the didactic finesse of the original Grimm fairy tales and the dark and occasionally gory humor of Roald Dahl), is priceless and so dear to most German speakers (at least those who grew up before the cultural shift of the 80s) that every attempt at trying to convey what he meant and continues to mean to us, how funny and original he is, must end in frustration for lack of words and examples.

F.Mittler, Lieder, Wolfgang Holzmair & Russell Ryan Preiser

If Wilhelm Busch is difficult to translate and convey, Karl Kraus makes it impossible altogether. He personifies the quintessential Viennese coffee-house philosopher and was the (more or less one-man) organization that published the critical and literary magazine Die Fackel, which was with Ficker’s Der Brenner the unofficial epicenter of what made the Vienna of the time a cultural and intellectual antipode to Berlin. His observations – appropriately likened to H. L. Mencken's in the program notes – are wistful at times, often funny, always biting, satirical, and scathing. Nietzsche and Rilke were the men behind "Das Trunkene Lied," "Lösch mir die Augen aus...," and "Herbst." The songs were dramatically accentuated – if not always enhanced – by Holzmair’s ever animated presentation. His singing is emotional, not too text-based, is entertaining, and has a natural quality that contrasts well with that of those singers who still struggle to escape the shadow that looms over every singer who has tackled German art song in the last 50 years – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, that is. Still, I prefer to hear Holzmair over watching him – his funny-man contortions don’t always work in support of the song at hand (at least not for me), and the squinting and mimicking makes this very attractive man look rather silly.

Other Reviews: Joe Banno, Wolfgang Holzmair (Washington Post, December 3)

The Nietzsche ditty “Ecce Homo” (mistitled in the program notes as “Ja! Ich weiss woher ich stamme!”) should have been a humorous little thing but turned out to be a far too somber affair. The culprit, however, was probably not Holzmair but the composer (Zeisl) himself. Nietzsche, unfortunately, suffers from being seen through ‘Nietzschesque’ eyes, even when he is just being tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating, or even plain silly. Between some of these songs there was time for Russell Ryan to entertain with the Franz Mittler Nikolaus-und-Krampus Fantasia, Theme & Variations in A-minor mode, mood and tonality. It was delightful and enjoyable enough to non-native speakers who had to make due with Russell's short but insightful introduction to the context of this work – but the Austrians in the audience could barely contain their laughter as the two themes progressed inexorably towards the state of slurring drunkenness of the German-speaking people’s version of St. Nick and his dark, threatening counterpart.

The Viennese political rants of J. N. E. A. Nestroy and Kraus, melodified by Mittler, had qualities, too, that were discernable to all in the diverse and young audience – but it was really an affair that was the prerogative of the present members of various Bavarian tribes to enjoy.