Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 3 ) Time with Schoenberg • The City Without Jews

The City Without Jews • PHACE • Olga Neuwirth

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Olga Neuwirths Musik hat zu „Die Stadt ohne Juden“ nichts zu sagen

ALL PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

The Good Austrian

The City Without Jews, a 1924 Austrian Expressionist film by Hans Karl Breslauer based on the novel of the same title by Hugo Bettauer, was first shown 100 years ago. For many years it was deemed lost, but after an intact copy was unexpectedly found some years ago, the Austrian Film Institute has stitched the film back together and made digital copies of it. While it’s good to have this rare film available and while it feels good (for Austrians, particularly, one reckons) to know that there were “good people” out there, who stood up against antisemitism, the quality of the film and the print – and its copies – is variable and dodgy.

Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain

Hugo Bettauer , The City without Jews

The Salzburg Festival screened the film as part of their “Time with Schoenberg” series – although there was little (none, in fact) Schoenberg involved in this project. The new soundtrack was composed by Olga Neuwirth and a little prelude came courtesy of Hanns Eisler. Very apropos for Salzburg, that work was the Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain. Well, as far as Salzburg is concerned, there are the impotent fat drops, that lazily plop from above, announcing an impending storm. There are middle-sized ones, that offer half trepidation, half hope, with a thunderstorm already or still being stuck behind one of the surrounding mountains. And then there are mean little needles of drops, that shoots down your neck from behind – themselves a prelude to the specific drizzle the locals call “ Schnürlregen”, a straight, light put consistent pour that has a dispiriting, it-will-never-end quality about it.

A Dearth of Ideas

Led by Nacho de Paz, the PHACE Ensemble performed the Eissler excellently (especially violist Petra Ackermann gave her best to make music out of Eisler’s quickly tiresome note salad) and the film music properly, along to their click-track. But the music was not particularly rewarding. Neuwirth's apparent dearth of ideas for the music to this film was baffling. At least half of it was smeared with a monotonously ominous, reverberant droning sound – quite regardless to what the film shows: Love scene: Droning. Singing in the synagogue: Droning. The only notable deviations are the interlacing of Austrian clichés (jodling, zither-music, and voice fragments of Hans Moser, a famous Austrian actor who had one of his first starring rôles in this film and whose apt physical comedy is already on display) into the soundtrack – and one telephone, that actually rings. The film’s banal depiction of the reasons for the economic and financial crisis in Austria is close to being an antisemitic trope itself; the actual antisemitism that the film ridicules is so over-the-top, it’s a bit too easy to be against it. And the “good Jew” of the film, Johannes Riemann might be a sympathetic proto-Mr. Bean, but nine years later, he became Nazi Party member No. 2641955. Well, we can’t all be on the right side of history, I suppose.

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Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Zeit mit SCHÖNBERG – Die Stadt ohne Juden 2024: PHACE

Picture No.2: Zeit mit SCHÖNBERG – Die Stadt ohne Juden 2024: Nacho de Paz (Dirigent), PHACE