The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble
The Golden Twenties
Part of: Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice
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The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble: Also performing , and , and April 6, , and April 28, , and May 11, , and October 16, , and November 16, , and January 12, 2026, , and March 1, 2026, , and April 20, 2026, , and and May 18, 2026.
Performers
The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble
Program
HINDEMITH Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24a
J. STRAUSS JR. Rosen aus dem Süden (arr. Schoenberg)
HINDEMITH Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played by Bad Spa Orchestra at 7 AM by the Well
WEILL Little Threepenny Music
J. STRAUSS JR. Kaiser-Walzer (arr. Schoenberg)
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately 90 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission.Salon Encores
Join us for a free drink at a post-concert reception in Weill Recital Hall’s Jacobs Room.
Learn More
This Concert in Context
When Arnold Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna in the fall of 1918, the composer was pursuing new avenues for contemporary music to reach audiences. Though the society was devoted to composers from “Mahler to the present,” economic pressures prompted the creation of a concert of modern arrangements of music by Johann Strauss II, who was immensely popular in interwar Europe. Schoenberg featured works by the “Waltz King” as part of the concert series, with the autograph scores intended to help finance the society’s ongoing activities. Alas, the economic toll exacted by hyperinflation proved too great to overcome, and the society was forced to disband in December 1921. While Weimar is typically associated with modernism, the music of older masters continued to hold considerable sway among the concertgoing public, as evidenced by Hindemith’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played by Bad Spa Orchestra at 7 AM by the Well composed circa 1925. The work’s parodistic quality—plus his modern compositional style on full display in his Kammermusik—did not win Hindemith admirers among Nazi supporters, many who counted Wagner among their favorites. The same could be said of Kurt Weill’s suite Little Threepenny Music, which debuted in February 1929 under the baton of Otto Klemperer. Based on text by playwright Bertolt Brecht, the piece similarly satirized Weimar’s fractured political culture, causing the Nazis to eventually ban it. While Weill decided to flee Germany following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Hindemith’s international standing and support from cultural luminaries like conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler caused him to fall in and out of favor with the Nazi regime before his eventual emigration to Switzerland in 1938.
—Brendan Fay, author of Classical Music in Weimar Germany