This is a lecture I gave at Bath Spa University (21/10/21) based on a paper I gave at the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research’s inaugural conference (September 2021).
Why Friedrich Wildgans? Why an obscure Viennese musician? Even with a wonderful name like Wildgans – wild gans – in translation - wild goose. Apart from a book he wrote in the early 1960s on Webern, (this was the first published biography, with some music analysis, published in English and German) I hadn’t really clocked him either. It was only when I started doing some research (on a completely different topic - Radulescu) and visited the music archive at the International Music Institute in Darmstadt that I became fascinated by him.
The main thing that drew me in is that he was a clarinettist, he specialised in the new music of his day, and he taught clarinet at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in the early 1950s, where I also taught clarinet in the 1980s and 1990s – so I feel as though I have link to him. He might appear today, at first glance, to be an interesting but peripheral figure on the sidelines of European new music in the mid-twentieth century. He was a prolific composer, particularly during the 1930s, published by the Viennese publisher Doblinger: there are still forty or so pieces in their catalogue including some useful clarinet studies in new music styles using modes and 12-tone rows.
He also had his 'scandal concert' in 1954. The most famous is probably Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 (though this is as much to do with Nijinsky’s choreography as the music) and in the same year Schoenberg in Vienna – with the audience finally upset by Berg’s Altenberg Lieder. In the history of 'scandal' concerts provoked by this kind of advanced, unfamiliar music, Wildgans’s was for different reasons - the police were called to stop a brawl and quieten audience unrest at the first performance of his Eucharistic Hymns, subtitled a 'folksy cantata', which caused what some of the audience thought was the trivialisation and disrespect for the liturgical texts he'd set in a deliberately unconventional, rousing manner (echoes of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana perhaps). For a composer whose natural style moved from extended chromatic (like earlier Alban Berg) to 12-tone technique, this isolated example of popularism was unfortunate.
He was also one of the most prominent clarinettists of the period particularly in contemporary music - but he also played the classics, for example the Mozart Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Erich Leinsdorf in 1947 (a newspaper review of this concert mentioned, 'How strange that such an outstanding clarinettist can be an atonal composer at the same time!'). He was tireless in the promotion of new music in Vienna in the 1930s and for a decade after the War, playing many new works but also organising concerts as part of his involvement with the Austrian section of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM), eventually becoming their President.
He also wrote music journalism throughout his life (largely for the Österreicherische MusikZeitschrift, which started in 1946), but particularly in his last decade, up to his early death in 1965, when ill-health had prevented him from playing - it was during this time that he researched and wrote the Webern book.
He had a tough time during the Second World War - he was marked out as being married to a Jew, he was active in the Austrian Resistance and a member of the Austrian Communist Party - he was finally arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned from 1940 to 1942.
Despite still being published today his music is almost never played. But in Viennese musicological circles he is a significant part of their musical story because of his concert activity. There are, for example, quite a number of important publications from Viennese musicologists such as Reinhard Kapp, Markus Grassl and Hartmut Krones since the 1980s - they all teach and research at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, where Wildgans also taught and was, for a while, interim director after 1945 when it was the called the Akademie für Musik. There is also an important, but unpublished, PhD thesis from 1988 by the Viennese composer Leopold Brauneiss, which details his life and work but also analyses a number of his compositions.
Even though he never met Arnold Schoenberg, Wildgans was part of the Schoenberg circle of pupils. He was friendly with Webern. There was a city of Mödling link with Webern (Mödling is a suburb south of Vienna), Wildgans was born and died there, his father Anton, the Nobel nominated poet and dramatist, lived there most of his life (he died in 1932), and the Wildgans family are in fact still there - Anton's grandson, Dr Ralph Wildgans , who is a paediatrician, looks after the family archive and maintains a website. Schoenberg himself lived there from 1918 to 1925.
The Schoenberg circle included musicologists, music theorists and composer colleagues such as Erwin Ratz and Josef Polnauer. Ratz also taught at the Akademie. Polnauer became president of the IGNM after Wildgans and also, significantly, taught composition to many of the next generation of Austrian composers including Friedrich Cerha and Kurt Schwertsik. The Schoenberg circle also included performers: including violinist Rudolf Kolisch, pianists Olga Novakovic and Peter Stadlen. The Darmstadt Summer Courses began in 1946 and it is this Schoenberg circle of performers, particularly those who taught in Darmstadt in the 1950s, including Wildgans, Kolisch and Stadlen, that is my focus here.
Wildgans, and I don't mean in any way to underestimate or demean his achievements by making him into a 'case study', illuminates two research topics for me here. Firstly, evidence from the performer's point of view of a kind of debunking of what composer Christopher Fox calls the 'Darmstadt Myth', which is the emphasis on post-Webern integral serialism (Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen) that appears, and is perpetuated, in dozens of music history books to the exclusion of everything else that happened there. The work of Martin Iddon, in his book on Darmstadt, Fox, Ian Pace, Björn Heile and more recently Max Erwin have all detailed and unravelled the complexities, these myths or untruths, of those years.
The second area is a more general sidelining of the performers and performance, particularly here in this story of new music in these early and mid-century years, their history and influence, rather than the emphasis on composition. In Darmstadt in the early 1950s Wildgans performed the Second Viennese School, Berg, Webern and Schoenberg, but also played the clarinet sonatas by Hindemith, Milhaud and Honegger, and then, in 1952 played in the first performance of a very different kind of piece, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kreuzspiel.
First, beginning in the 1930s, a brief overview of Wildgans’s activities. He was largely self-taught, though he had some private theory and composition lessons with Josef Marx, who was a family friend. He played piano, organ and violin then taught himself the clarinet having a few lessons later with Viktor Polacek, the principal clarinet of the Vienna Philharmonic who Marx brought to the Wildgans’s house in Mödling for small concerts. Wildgans was already composing and showing interest in the new so-called 'advanced' music. He played three movements of the Berg Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano Op.5 in 1929 (aged sixteen). These were written in 1913, but only first performed in 1919, published in a short run in 1921 but then acquired by Universal Edition and published by them in 1923, so, in a sense, in 1929 they were still quite new.
In 1931 he played the first Viennese performances of the Reger Op. 49 no. 2 Sonata, written in 1900 and published by UE in 1904. There was a series at the chamber music hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, later called the Brahmssaal, called Modern Chamber Music which included the Reger, the Honegger Sonatine (written in 1921/2) and piano pieces by Wildgans himself. During the 1930s he organised a number of concerts of new music, including his own music, which drew attention from the press - his father had recently been made Director of the Burgtheater, so he was his famous father's son, something that proved useful but also perhaps hampered his early personal development. He was promoting advanced, atonal, though not yet serial music. His own music was based on the Viennese School, partly 12-tone, partly more expressive atonality. His song settings, like many of the art composers of the time, used texts by expressionist poets Georg Trakl and Guillaume Apollinaire, who had influenced the surrealist and Dada movements, as well as by his father (Richard Strauss also set texts by Anton Wildgans).
He organised and played in a concert in the small Musikvereinsaal in 1933 of new work by Swiss composers including Frank Martin, Honegger and Othmar Schoeck, a composer Alban Berg thought of very highly. In 1936 he played the trio version, for violin, clarinet and piano, of Berg's Adagio from the Chamber Symphony with violinist Felix Galimir and the Schoenberg pupil pianist Olga Novakovic. The following year he played Reger with Novakovic just a couple of months before the Anschluss. A remarkable concert was at conductor Felix Prohaska's house in May 1942, during the early years of the War. Remember that from 1938 the Nazis had organised public exhibitions of Degenerate art and music (not only including Jewish composers) so putting on this concert was a dangerous thing to do. Olga Novakovic played the Webern Op. 27 Piano Variations and she accompanied Wildgans in the Berg, the Hindemith Clarinet Sonata (recently written in 1939) and the Milhaud and Honegger Sonatines.
His political life is a complex and important story (too much to deal with here). He was busy in many Austrian communist party events including musical ones playing as a pianist and organist, writing and arranging music for political and utility purposes, involved with different resistance groups and, together with others including Erwin Ratz and Olga Novakovic, helping, housing, hiding Jewish colleagues and friends - all of which resulted in his arrest by the Gestapo and incarceration for two years.
The IGNM (Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik) was banned in 1938 but reformed by the Schoenberg circle, including Wildgans, in 1945. Their purpose was to promote the Schoenberg School and pupils, but also the broadest selection of contemporary composers. Their first concert in June 1945 in the Brahmssaal had an Hanns Eisler premiere, Wildgans played the Hindemith, then Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto (written in 1923-6) and finally Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. Webern was supposed to be President but after his death (in 1945) composer Hans Erich Apostel took this role with Wildgans as his deputy. These early concerts were very successful, with good audiences.
In 1945 Wildgans played his modern repertoire pieces together with the recent Bernstein Sonata (written in 1942), Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (1941) and Bartok's Contrasts, written in 1938. They were helped by the Viennese concert halls, the Musikverein and the Konzerthaus, as well as the publisher Universal Edition and each Monday the Austrian radio RAVAG broadcast an hour of new music from many of these concerts, often introduced from the stage by Wildgans. The 1949/50 season was probably the most active and successful for the IGNM with some large-scale concerts by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Felix Prohaska and Herbert Häfner, including Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, for soprano and orchestra, sung by Ilona Steingruber.
Wildgans married Ilona in 1946. She was an extraordinary soprano who was partly influenced by Wildgans to sing new music. She had a dramatic musical personality, very wide range and perfect pitch. During the next fifteen years or so she sang Webern (she recorded the two Cantatas Op.29 and 31 with Boulez and the Domaines Musicale in 1956), Schoenberg (she recorded Pierrot Lunaire, Moses und Aron, and a disc of songs with piano) and, perhaps most famously the title role of Berg's Lulu. The first recorded performance, with her in the title role, was in 1949 conducted by Herbert Häfner, released on Columbia Masterworks in 1952. There is also a live recording from Rome conducted by Bruno Maderna.
1955 marked the anniversary of the tenth year of the Darmstadt Summer Courses with a series of commissions going to the younger generation including Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono. Wildgans didn't really approve of this strong focus on these well-known representations of the avant-garde and wrote a strongly worded rejection of the new serial 'school' in the Austrian Music Journal - an article called '10 Years of the Summer Courses'. He wrote: 'Of the ten commissions given one takes into account the infinitely poor, youthful, precocious and decadent level presented here - the works of the young Frenchman Boulez, the German Stockhausen and the Italian Togni...so ugly...while the Italians Nono and Maderna with forebearance for all the compositional/constructive activities and 'proportional calculations' at least suggest something original through which technology has not yet completely overtaken talent'.
He attended the IGNM in Köln in 1960, an important event with three major new works: Boulez's Pli selon pli, Stockhausen's Kontakte and Ligeti's Apparitions. He wrote in the Austrian Journal about the 'old garde' finding it difficult to identify with the new music's, 'known sterility and opaqueness, without touching any musical strings in us'. Later, in 1961, Wildgans resigned from both the IGNM and as President after the 35th Festival which was in Vienna that year. His letter of resignation follows a similar vein about the 'a-musical quality of today's generation', but it was mixed with bad health, worry over Ilona Steingruber's health (she died the following year) as any aesthetic considerations. Despite his criticism, however, he was prepared to play in performances of some of these new pieces, and Stockhausen's Kreuzspiel, in 1952, is an example.
Each year from 1951-55 he and Ilona performed, taught and lectured at the Darmstadt summer courses. He played his repertory (Berg, Hindemith, Milhaud, Honegger and the Stravinsky solo pieces) as well as contemporary Austrian music (Apostel, Hauer, Schollum and his own pieces), together with major chamber music pieces (Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Bartok’s Contrasts) as well as chamber works by visiting composers played as part of the course’s ensemble, made up of teacher's and other professional players. Both of them gave performance classes, and felt comfortable and stimulated by the Darmstadt work and atmosphere. He wrote to his mother Lilly in 1953, 'I have never had such success as here! Now the courses will soon end, I will stay in Germany for a while to earn a little money and possibly look around for a permanent existence.' They thought quite seriously about moving from Vienna to Darmstadt.
He gave solo concerts each year. What you hear, in the live performances preserved in the IMD archive, is a very particular expressive, vocal style of playing - he's playing wide bore Austrian instruments, with the German Oehler key system, but it is a warmer more open sound than the German style at the time. What is significant is his use of vibrato, which Austrian and German players would never use and still don't use, that is part of his expressive aesthetic but is also tied up with the violinist Rudolf Kolisch's idea of the 'Wiener espressivo'. Kolisch became a kind of spokesperson for Schoenberg's strong views on performance.
Writing in 1924 Kolisch says that 'For Schoenberg all instructions are contained in the works themselves - one only has to read them properly'. ...and again, 'Schoenberg's manner of performing is guided by the mind and not by sentimentality - it is full of ideas and not of feelings.' But the performance style of the Schoenberg circle draws on 19th century musical expression. Pianist Peter Stadlen, who played and taught at Darmstadt, talks about Webern's 'fervently lyrical mind bent on expressiveness'. Kolisch in describing 'Wiener espressivo' talks about a manner of using rubato and dynamics to expressively shape musical phrases into 'gestures'.
But there is a difference between pre War and post War styles. Schoenberg in 1926 complains about too much flexibility, but in 1948, after tempi become more rigid, argues for greater flexibility and against a style that 'suppresses all emotional qualities and all un-notated changes of tempo and expression'. For him pre-War was too focused on the beauty of tone, expression and rubato at the expense of structural connections, but that post-War style and Boulez’s early performances and recordings, as well as Robert Craft’s Webern complete recordings, are an example of this, are too dry, mechanical and concerned with accuracy.
The Viennese School and the Schoenberg circle of performers are central to early Darmstadt in the 1950s and their performances dominate the concert programmes. These players also played the new works by the younger generation composers as part of the Course's ensemble. The Schoenberg old school, were confronted by the new style and approach. Kolisch, in an article talking about Luigi Nono, whose music he played in Darmstadt, talks about 'totally determined music' and trying to grasp compositionally what had previously been the responsibility of decisions by the performer – things to do with interpretation. He says that the music is easier to play because it no longer needs to be interpreted - one simply plays what is on the page - so the performer's task of realising musical material is taken by the composer. This becomes clear with Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel.
The 1952 Kreuzspiel performance was in the so-called 'Wunderkonzert', the third of the young generation programmes. This was to be the first concert that featured Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna and Nono, together, although Boulez's Structures 1a wasn't played. This was also a 'scandal’ concert. The audience were vocal and disruptive - a tradition in Darmstadt. Wildgans, playing the bass clarinet part, was criticised for apparently sabotaging the Kreuzspiel performance by playing the bass part too loud in parts. He is, I think, playing what's in the score and it is mostly accurate in rhythm and dynamics, unlike the oboist Romolo Grano. It isn’t a very good performance, despite being conducted by the composer, and is much too slow. It is an example of the ‘new style’ of both composition, that Wildgans disliked so much, and the ‘new style’ performance that it created where cool accuracy is what is intended - again something Wildgans and the older Schoenberg school were against - pointilisme, single notes, articulated (even against notated phrase marks) with no sense of line or shape.
Bibliography
Brauneiss, L. (1988) Friedrich Wildgans. Leben, Wirken und Werk. PhD, University of Vienna.
Cerha, G. and Nolan, D. (1987) 'New Music in Austria since 1945', Tempo, (161), pp. 36-51.
ERWIN, M. (2021) 'An Apprenticeship and Its Stocktakings: Leibowitz, Boulez, Messiaen, and the Discourse and Practice of New Music', Twentieth-Century Music, 18(1), pp. 71-93.
Erwin, M. (2020) Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grassl, M. and Kapp, R. (2002) Die Lehre von der musikalischen Aufführung in der Wiener Schule : Verhandlungen des internationalen Colloquiums Wien 1995 / Markus Grassl, Reinhard Kapp (Hg.). Wien: Böhlau Verlag.
Haefeli, A., 1946- (1982) Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM) : ihre Geschichte von 1922 bis zur Gegenwart / Anton Haefeli. Zürich: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag.
Iddon, M. (2013) New music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pace, I. (2017) 'The New State of Play in Performance Studies', Music and Letters, 98(2), pp. 281-292.
Quick, M. (2012) Performing Modernism: Webern on Record. PhD, King's College London University.
Webern, A., 1883-1945 (1979) Variationen für Klavier. Op. 27. Webern's ideas on the work's interpretation set out for the first time by Peter Stadlen with the aid of the facsimile of his working copy containing Webern's instructions for the world première. Wien: Universal Edition.