Paul Hindemith was in the vanguard of the campaign to bring classical music out of its ivory tower in the 1920s. Despite his reputation as a musical firebrand, Hindemith’s bark was a good deal worse than his bite. Beneath his impulse to shock the stolid burghers of the Weimar Republic lay a deep-seated devotion to compositional craft and a conviction that music should do more than merely titillate the senses. His devotion to the utilitarian principles of Gebrauchsmusik, or “music for use,” and the so-called New Objectivity of the interwar years bore fruit in a steady stream of sonatas, Kammermusiken (chamber music), and concertos for a wide array of solo instruments, from viola d’amore and harp to English horn and bass tuba. Kammermusik No. 1 was a highlight of the 1922 Donaueschingen Music Festival, where Hindemith had established his avant-garde credentials the year before with his String Quartet No. 3. Scored for flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, harmonium (an accordion in this performance), piano, string quintet, and percussion, the work reflects the composer’s growing interest in pre-Classical forms and procedures, in particular the concertante-style interplay between solo instruments and full ensemble in the Baroque concerto grosso.
Audiences encountering Hindemith’s music for the first time in 1922 were struck by its radical departure from the plush textures and long-breathed phrases that characterized the overripe Romanticism of the prewar years. The first movement of Kammermusik No. 1, marked “very fast and wild” and based on a handful of repeating rhythmic and melodic patterns, culminates in giddy glissandos careening in opposite directions. But it’s in the Finale, with its relentlessly seething undertow in the strings, that pandemonium really breaks loose. The music sounds all the more chaotic after the deceptive calm of the third movement. Stravinsky, to whom Hindemith may have sent the score of Kammermusik No. 1, pronounced him “a sort of German Prokofiev, infinitely more sympathetic than all the others under Schoenberg.” The latter, meanwhile, was eager to set himself apart from Hindemith and his fellow trendsetters. “Measures are needed to stop any more aspiring composers from following me down my blind alley,” Schoenberg quipped around this time, “so I am henceforth shutting off the entry to it with a row of 12 tones.”
Johann Strauss II and his brothers, Josef and Eduard, reigned supreme in the fashionable ballrooms and dance halls of late–19th-century Vienna. Following in the footsteps of their father, Johann, whom Wagner hailed as a “demon of the Viennese musical spirit,” they turned out hundreds of waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other dance pieces. But it was the younger Johann, crowned the “Waltz King” by his adoring public, who was chiefly responsible for elevating Vienna’s signature dance from a lighthearted pastime to a form of high art. Over the course of his long reign, Strauss wrote some 150 concert waltzes, many of them culled from his own operettas. As a conductor, he championed the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Brahms, all of whom reciprocated his esteem. And in the 1890s, a young Schoenberg performed Strauss’s music with a chorus of male workers that he conducted in the Vienna suburb of Mödling.
Rosen aus dem Süden is one of four Strauss waltzes Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern arranged for a special concert to benefit the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. The mission of this short-lived organization was to promote contemporary music, the more advanced the better, but Schoenberg wasn’t averse to letting his hair down for a good cause: As a young man, he had worked as musical director for a Berlin cabaret and orchestrated operettas for Universal Edition in Vienna. A typically frothy Straussian medley, Rosen aus dem Süden (Roses from the South) recycled hit tunes from his 1880 operetta Das Spitzentuch der Königen (The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief). Schoenberg’s chamber version, for string quartet, harmonium, and piano, was first performed on May 27, 1921, by an ensemble that included Schoenberg himself on violin, Webern on cello, and Berg at the harmonium. Although the manuscripts of their four arrangements were auctioned off after the concert, the society fell victim to postwar hyperinflation and folded at the end of the year.
At the outset of his career, Hindemith embraced the late-Romantic idiom of Richard Strauss, but the enfant terrible in him grew restive as World War I drew to a close. In 1917, he confided to a friend that the music he had been trained to write at Frankfurt’s prestigious Hoch Conservatory reflected no more than sterile “craftsmanship,” and it was “high time” he “got free” of it. No sooner was he discharged from the German army than Hindemith struck off in a new direction, producing a series of attention-grabbing works that included three boldly expressionistic operas, a string quartet packed with dissonant counterpoint, the bitingly satirical piano suite 1922, and the hilarious Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played by Bad Spa Orchestra at 7 AM by the Well.
Hindemith’s attitude toward Wagner was a complex mixture of admiration and disdain, an ambivalence he shared with many composers of his generation. As early as 1916, he had written incidental music for a puppet satire based on Lohengrin, and his 1921 opera, Das Nusch-Nuschi, featured a scandalously salacious quotation from Tristan und Isolde. Disillusioned by his country’s ignominious defeat on the battlefield, Hindemith turned away from the idealistic hero worship of his youth. His wildly irreverent sendup of the famous overture to Der Fliegende Holländer was written around 1925 for the Donaueschingen Music Festival, a showcase for contemporary music where Hindemith had earned a reputation as a musical parodist in his performances as violist of the unimpeachably avant-garde Amar Quartet. To describe this ear-splitting, finger-twisting romp in detail would require a plethora of spoiler alerts. Suffice it to say that the loopy quotation near the end from the popular Skaters’ Waltz, by French composer Émile Waldteufel, must have had the Magician of Bayreuth turning in his grave.
After cutting his musical teeth in German opera houses as a precocious teenager, Kurt Weill scored his first big popular success in 1928 with Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), transplanting the trenchant social satire of John Gay’s 18th-century Beggar’s Opera to the fertile soil of Weimar Germany. The equally acerbic opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny soon cemented his reputation as a leading light of Germany’s avant-garde cabaret and musical theater scene. With his wife, Lotte Lenya, who shared his left-wing political views, he emigrated to Paris shortly after the Nazis seized power in 1933 and pursued his career there with indifferent success. In France, Weill struck up a relationship with Max Reinhardt, with whom he collaborated on a historical epic of the Jewish people titled The Eternal Road. In 1935, this ambitious project took him to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life developing the hybrid genre of musical theater that came to be known as “American opera” or “Broadway opera.” His last completed work, Lost in the Stars, based on Alan Paton’s anti-apartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country, opened on Broadway in 1949.
Die Dreigroschenoper owed its broad appeal as much to Bertolt Brecht’s capitalism-bashing libretto as to Weill’s avowedly low-brow, cabaret-style music. But that didn’t deter the composer from extracting a textless concert suite from the score at the behest of Otto Klemperer, then the conductor of the enterprising Kroll Opera in Berlin. In adapting his music for wind ensemble (supplemented by percussion, keyboard, and plucked strings), Weill assured his publisher that it would find a ready market, since it was “just what conductors are looking for: a snappy closing piece.” Clocking in at a third the length of the stage show, Little Threepenny Music (Kleine Dreigroschenmusik) comprises eight of its 21 numbers—though not in the original order—including the iconic moritat, or street ballad, of the murderous antihero, Mack the Knife. The rhythms of the foxtrot, tango, and other popular dances enliven the score, which was just edgy and dissonant enough to set it apart from echt popular music. Schoenberg, who had recently codified his revolutionary 12-tone technique, accused Weill of squandering his talent, predicting that “in the end all those communally oriented artists will have addressed their idiocies only to each other.” Even so, he regarded Weill highly enough to nominate him for membership in the prestigious Prussian Academy in 1929.
Composed in 1889, Strauss’s Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz) had long been a staple of the symphonic repertory by the time Schoenberg transcribed it for chamber ensemble in 1925. Originally designed to complement performances of Schoenberg’s atonal melodrama Pierrot lunaire, the chamber version calls for a Pierrot-like ensemble of flute, clarinet, string quartet, and piano. Schoenberg evidently hoped that the Waltz King’s popular appeal would make his own work more palatable to contemporary audiences. Yet Strauss’s genius as composer and orchestrator wasn’t lost on the inventor of 12-tone music. The Kaiser-Walzer epitomizes the complexity that Strauss packed into his concise and relatively formulaic compositions: a sequence of thematically related dances sandwiched between an introduction and coda. Schoenberg skillfully adapted the work for reduced forces without sacrificing its variegated colorations or intoxicating swing.
—Harry Haskell