Luxurious and painful, capricious and grand: Music by the ostracized composers Wellesz, Weigl, Ullmann and Korngold at the Linz Bruckner Festival.
“Intoxication and need, delusion and happiness: Oh, that’s Gaukler’s fate,” sings Pierrot in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Toter Stadt”. On the day following the celebrated Linz opera premiere, people in the Brucknerhaus think regarding the composer’s own talent as a juggler – on the occasion of his “Baby Serenade”. In his early 30s, the young father wrote a kind of miniature version of Richard Strauss‘ “Symphonia Domestica”, admittedly less pompous, but gentler, with a loving wink: Ravel, Gershwin and others peer in at the window of the children’s room. It may well be that Schönberg has just presented his first twelve-tone orchestral work. at Corngold Nothing happens to the carefree tonal melodies when they are whirled around in the cushioned centrifuge of the Circle of Fifths. And when the baby is well-behaved, it initially sounds like a story from the Vienna Woods, told by another bouquet: the wealth of allusions is as enormous as it is enjoyable. The ostracism by the Nazis, the luckily successful emigration, the career in Hollywood – and then precisely because of this the labeling as a musical “juggler”: All of this was still to come for Korngold, who with his scores Rausch und Not, Wahn und Glück of the dream factory is exemplary in knew how to dress tones.
Co-emigrant Karl Weigl also dreamed of a waltz past à la Strauss in 1939 in his “Tänzen aus Wien” (Tances from Vienna): couples not only rush across the stalls in the imperial Hofburg, but also in the manner of scherzi from Bruckner or Mahler -Symphonies heartier to . . .
