The organizers of the Salzkammergut Capital of Culture 2024 are reviving a beautiful, old tradition: salon concerts.
These were once intended for the edification of selected summer guests in the villas of the noble family, today they are aimed at all interested parties who are invited to the old post office building in Bad Ischl. In a combination of music and text, the series is dedicated to various topics under the title “Stay or Go – Music from Hard Times” into the Capital of Culture year 2024. It starts on Saturday, October 22 (7 p.m.) with works and stories by and regarding forgotten composers from the first half of the 20th century, especially from the National Socialist era.
Displaced composers, forgotten notes
“The idea for the salon concerts came from Capital of Culture Director Elisabeth Schweeger,” says Benno Ure, who provides the historical background and the concept for the series of events, in the VOLKSBLATT interview. Ure dives deep into music history. “There are so many notes by composers and forgotten fates that you don’t know anything regarding,” he says. Ten years ago, Ure started such a concert series for the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie with the deputy concertmaster of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Marietta Kratz. She is part of the ensemble Forgotten Notes, which now also appears in Ischl in changing formations.
Ure has prepared texts for October 22, for example regarding Robert Dauber (1922-1945), who was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp because of his Jewish origins, where he worked as a musician in the opera “Brundibar”. 58 years following his death, his only surviving work turned up in the estate of his father, a well-known jazz musician: a serenade for violin and piano, which will be heard in Ischl. “Dauber’s father tried in vain to get his son out of the camp,” says Ure. He dug up correspondence, postcards that Robert Dauber sent to his parents while he was in prison. Dauber died in Dachau in 1945, “the father five years later of desperation over the fate of his son,” Ure is convinced. Another work from the program comes from Hans Gál (1890-1987): After the Nazis had banned him from working as a Jew, the composer emigrated to England in 1938 — and was forgotten for many years. The Irish woman Mary Frances Dickenson-Auner (1880-1965), who worked in Vienna, was also banned from her profession because of her Jewish origins and as a member of the Freemasons, but she continued to compose. After the war, she too found it difficult to gain a foothold once more.
Gustav Mahler was never forgotten, but his piano quartet in A minor had long since disappeared: “It was discovered in Alma Mahler’s estate,” says Ure, who wrote the history of the work, which Mahler himself probably premiered in 1876 on a trip to Russia was lost, reconstructed. The Frenchwoman Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was once the first knight of the Legion of Honor and, according to Ure, achieved great fame in the USA “in the first wave of the women’s movement”. “Chaminade was invited to Queen Victoria’s house, and she played music at the Queen’s funeral,” says Ure. During the First World War she founded a hospital — and following that she was unable to continue her earlier successes as a composer.
The continuation of the series on October 28 creates a connection to today with music from the present time that was created in countries where its creators are not at home: For example with a work by the Russian Sofia Gubaidulina, who lives in exile in Germany.
By Melanie Wagenhofer
