Altenberg,
op
. 4’, he has called his piece in the best Pop Art style – performed by a huge orchestra and with great solemnity. It rouses the audience to a fury, there is hissing and laughter and rattling of keys, which everybody brought to Schönberg’s last performance in February but didn’t need. Then Anton von Webern leaps to his feet and shouts that the whole rabble should go home, to which the rabble replies that people who like such music belong in the Steinhof. The Steinhof is the mental asylum in which the poet Peter Altenberg currently resides. The diagnosis of the public: insane music to lyrics by a madman. (There is, it must be said, a photograph of Altenberg with his nurse Spatzek from the Steinhof in those days, Altenberg looking into the camera, cool and relaxed, creating the ery powerful impression that Spatzek, the nurse, is the one who is mad. Altenberg captions it: ‘The lunatic and the asylum attendant’, leaving it unclear which is which.)
Schönberg stops the orchestra and shouts into the audience that he will have any trouble-makers removed by force, whereupon pandemonium breaks out, the conductor is challenged to a duel and one man clambers over the rows of chairs from the back. When he has reached the front, Oscar Straus, composer of the operetta
The Waltz Dream
, boxes the ear of the president of the Academic Association of Literature and Music, Arnold Schönberg.
Next day in the
Neue Freie Presse
, the following report appears:
The fanatical devotees of Schönberg and the dedicated opponents of his often extremely alienating sound experiments have often clashed in the past. But hardly ever can we remember having witnessed, in any Viennese concert hall, such a scene as the one that occurred at this evening’s concert by the Academic Association. To separate the furiously arguing groups there was no option but to turn out the lights.
Four people were arrested by the police: a student of philosophy, a physician, an engineer and a lawyer. The evening went down in history as the ‘ear-boxing concert’.
But contemporaries, above all Dr Arthur Schnitzler, who attended the concert with his wife Olga, responded laconically:
Schönberg. Orchestral concert. Terrible scandal. Alban Berg’s silly songs. Interruptions. Laughter. Speech by the President. ‘At least listen to Mahler in peace!’ As if anyone objected to him! Intolerable – one voice in the auditorium: ‘Little scamp!’ The gentleman from the podium, amid breathless silence, smacks him one. All kinds of scuffling.
Life goes on. Schnitzler starts a new paragraph, and then writes: ‘Supper with Vicki, Fritz Zuckerkandl and his mother in the Imperial.’
The next day Arnold Schönberg travels back to Berlin, firmly convinced now that 1913 is an unlucky year and the Viennese areunfathomable philistines. As soon as he is back in Berlin, he receives the reporter from
Die Zeit
and explains to him in a wonderfully mean-spirited and self-righteous way:
A concert ticket only gives one the right to listen to the concert, but not to disturb the performance. The purchaser of a ticket is an invited guest who acquires the right to listen, nothing more. There is a great difference between an invitation to a salon and one to a concert. Contributing to the cost of an event does not grant one permission to behave improperly.
Herr Schönberg closes his interview with the following words for his future behaviour: ‘I have undertaken henceforth to take part in such concerts only when it is expressly stated on the tickets that disturbance of the performance is not permitted. It is obvious, after all, that the organiser of a concert is not only the moral but also the material holder of a right that is granted protection in any state based on private property.’ This interview is an unsettling document. The advocates of the new music are claiming an inalienable right to an undisturbed avant-garde. But even in this most unusual of years, that was
op
. 4’, he has called his piece in the best Pop Art style – performed by a huge orchestra and with great solemnity. It rouses the audience to a fury, there is hissing and laughter and rattling of keys, which everybody brought to Schönberg’s last performance in February but didn’t need. Then Anton von Webern leaps to his feet and shouts that the whole rabble should go home, to which the rabble replies that people who like such music belong in the Steinhof. The Steinhof is the mental asylum in which the poet Peter Altenberg currently resides. The diagnosis of the public: insane music to lyrics by a madman. (There is, it must be said, a photograph of Altenberg with his nurse Spatzek from the Steinhof in those days, Altenberg looking into the camera, cool and relaxed, creating the ery powerful impression that Spatzek, the nurse, is the one who is mad. Altenberg captions it: ‘The lunatic and the asylum attendant’, leaving it unclear which is which.)
Schönberg stops the orchestra and shouts into the audience that he will have any trouble-makers removed by force, whereupon pandemonium breaks out, the conductor is challenged to a duel and one man clambers over the rows of chairs from the back. When he has reached the front, Oscar Straus, composer of the operetta
The Waltz Dream
, boxes the ear of the president of the Academic Association of Literature and Music, Arnold Schönberg.
Next day in the
Neue Freie Presse
, the following report appears:
The fanatical devotees of Schönberg and the dedicated opponents of his often extremely alienating sound experiments have often clashed in the past. But hardly ever can we remember having witnessed, in any Viennese concert hall, such a scene as the one that occurred at this evening’s concert by the Academic Association. To separate the furiously arguing groups there was no option but to turn out the lights.
Four people were arrested by the police: a student of philosophy, a physician, an engineer and a lawyer. The evening went down in history as the ‘ear-boxing concert’.
But contemporaries, above all Dr Arthur Schnitzler, who attended the concert with his wife Olga, responded laconically:
Schönberg. Orchestral concert. Terrible scandal. Alban Berg’s silly songs. Interruptions. Laughter. Speech by the President. ‘At least listen to Mahler in peace!’ As if anyone objected to him! Intolerable – one voice in the auditorium: ‘Little scamp!’ The gentleman from the podium, amid breathless silence, smacks him one. All kinds of scuffling.
Life goes on. Schnitzler starts a new paragraph, and then writes: ‘Supper with Vicki, Fritz Zuckerkandl and his mother in the Imperial.’
The next day Arnold Schönberg travels back to Berlin, firmly convinced now that 1913 is an unlucky year and the Viennese areunfathomable philistines. As soon as he is back in Berlin, he receives the reporter from
Die Zeit
and explains to him in a wonderfully mean-spirited and self-righteous way:
A concert ticket only gives one the right to listen to the concert, but not to disturb the performance. The purchaser of a ticket is an invited guest who acquires the right to listen, nothing more. There is a great difference between an invitation to a salon and one to a concert. Contributing to the cost of an event does not grant one permission to behave improperly.
Herr Schönberg closes his interview with the following words for his future behaviour: ‘I have undertaken henceforth to take part in such concerts only when it is expressly stated on the tickets that disturbance of the performance is not permitted. It is obvious, after all, that the organiser of a concert is not only the moral but also the material holder of a right that is granted protection in any state based on private property.’ This interview is an unsettling document. The advocates of the new music are claiming an inalienable right to an undisturbed avant-garde. But even in this most unusual of years, that was
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