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Diss.--Musicologie--Kiel, 1988. / Bibliogr. p. 255-259.

Zugl.: Hannover, Hochsch. für Musik und Theater, Diss., 2009

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The Vienna Tonkünstler-Verein (1885-1929) was established for the sole purpose of providing extensive support to the music and musicians of Vienna. The society became renowned in Vienna for its outstanding performances of chamber music and counted among its members many of the city’s foremost musicians and composers. Johannes Brahms had a significant influence on the society as its honorary president and assisted in establishing its composition competitions, aimed at promoting and reviving under-developed chamber genres. Of particular interest to clarinetists is the Verein’s competition of 1896, which aspired to promote chamber music literature for wind instruments. Brahms’s recently completed chamber works for clarinet were clearly influential in fin-de-siècle Vienna; for of the twelve works chosen as finalists in the competition, ten included the clarinet in the chamber combination.The purpose of this document is to provide an English-language history of the Vienna Tonkünstler-Verein and a thorough account of its1896 competition based on my study of the society’s annual reports. In addition, this document will provide the first published account of the anonymous submissions for the 1896 competition. It is my hope that this paper will serve as a springboard for future endeavors aimed at uncovering the identities of the anonymous finalists for this competition.

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This study centers on a 1907 collection of art songs for voice and piano composed by Alexander Zemlinsky. Although his small cycle of five songs was not published during the composer's lifetime and has not been given the scholarly attention that other pieces in his oeuvre have, it is well crafted and carries a high degree of expressive and emotional weight. The cycle sets the poetry of Richard Dehmel; a contemporary of Zemlinsky and the inspiration behind works of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Richard Strauss as well. In these 1905 settings Zemlinsky experiments with an extremely chromatic language while exploring themes of love and betrayal in the poetry of Dehmel. This study examines this chromatic style and how it relates to the themes in the text. Through the detailed analysis of each of the songs the reader will see how, in spite of the free succession of harmonies that often obscure the tonal orientation, a central underlying tonic/dominant relationship is at the core of each song except the first. In this manner the songs display a subtle yet powerful exploitation of tonal ambiguity that brings out many of the nuances of Dehmel's poems. / School of Music

Die Unterschiede zwischen der Klavierfassung von Zemlinskys Opus 13 Nr. 1 nach einem Gedicht Maurice Maeterlincks und der Fassung für Orchester sind darauf zurückführbar, dass der Komponist in extremer Weise auf die klangfarblichen und ästhetischen Ansprüche der jeweiligen Genres reagiert. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, welche Eigenschaften des Orchestersatzes ein emphatisches Gattungsverständnis transportieren. Mit seiner Orchestration gehört das Lied einer Gattung an, die, als die Lieder Nr. 1–4 des Zyklus’ in dem ›Wiener Skandalkonzert‹ 1913 uraufgeführt wurden, auf der Höhe der Zeit stand. Nach 1918, mit den in ihrer Existenz bedrohten Riesenorchestern der Vorkriegszeit, ging das ästhetische Interesse an Orchesterliedern mehr und mehr verloren (vgl. Bork 2004). Zemlinsky vertrat mit der Orchesterfassung dezidiert die Position symbolistischen Komponierens am Fin de Siècle. Bevor Ähnliches in Besetzungen der Wiener Schule üblich wurde, fügte er der gewöhnlichen Orchesterbesetzung Instrumente wie das Harmonium und das Klavier hinzu. Mit der Harfe bilden diese einen eigenen Strang akkordfähiger Orchesterinstrumente. Dieser Strang offeriert drei unterschiedliche Einzelfarben und drei Weisen ihrer Kombination: Sämtliche oder je zwei von ihnen lassen sich verbinden. Die Koloristik bietet neue dramaturgische Möglichkeiten. Die drei Orte des Textes – Wald, Meer und Stadt – werden als drei Zeiten gefärbt: Mit jeweils anderem Instrumentarium schreibt Zemlinsky der Zukunft eine relative Nähe, der Vergangenheit Ferne und der Gegenwart vieldeutigen Rausch zu. Untersucht werden im Detail die Begleittexturen, die Zemlinsky für die Orchesterfassung des Liedes neu erfand, warum er Abschnitte der Singstimme oktavierte und ergänzte und welchen Sinn die mehrtaktigen Passagen erzeugen, die er hinzufügte. So vermittelt das neue Vorspiel mit den leeren Flageoletten der hohen Streicher eine Ahnung davon, wie exquisit der Tod ist, dem Maeterlincks drei Schwestern zustreben. / The differences between the piano version of Zemlinsky’s Opus 13 No. 1, based on a poem by Maurice Maeterlinck, and the orchestral version can be traced back to the fact that the composer responded in an extreme way to the timbral and aesthetic demands of the respective genres. This contribution examines which properties of the orchestral set convey an emphatic understanding of the genre. With its orchestration, the song belongs to a genre which was at its peak as the songs nos. 1–4 of the cycle were premiered in ›Vienna’s Skandalkonzert‹ in 1913 but lost its aesthetic interests with the existence of gigantic orchestras of the pre-war period after 1918 being at stake (cf. Bork 2004). Zemlinsky, with his orchestral composition, determined the position of symbolistic composing at fin-de-siècle. Before similar things even became customary in the orchestral settings of the Viennese school, he added the usual scoring instruments such as the harmonium and the piano. With the harp, they form an individual strand of orchestral instruments capable of playing chords. This strand offers three different individual colors and three modes of their combination: all or two of them can be connected. The colorfulness offers new dramatic possibilities. Three places in the text – the forest, the sea and the city – are colored as three times: with different settings in each case, Zemlinsky gives the future a relative closeness, the past a distance, and the present an ambiguous intoxication. This paper will explore in detail the accompaniment textures, which Zemlinsky reinvented for the orchestral version of the song: specifically, why he octavated and supplemented some sections of the singing voice and what the sense is of the multiple bars of passages he added. Thus, the new prelude with the empty harmonics of the high strings conveys an inkling of how exquisite death is to which Maeterlinck’s three sisters strive.

This dissertation investigates how German-language critics articulated and publicly negotiated ideas about music and expressionism in the first five years after World War I. A close reading of largely unexplored primary sources reveals that "musical expressionism" was originally conceived as an intrinsically musical matter rather than as a stylistic analog to expressionism in other art forms, and thus as especially relevant to purely instrumental rather than vocal and stage genres. By focusing on critical reception of an unlikely group of instrumental chamber works, I elucidate how the acts of performing, listening to, and evaluating "expressionist" music were enmeshed in the complexities of a politicized public concert life in the immediate postwar period. The opening chapters establish broad music-aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts for critics' postwar discussions of "musical expressionism." After the first, introductory chapter, Chapter 2 traces how art and literary critics came to position music as the most expressionist of the arts based on nineteenth-century ideas about the apparently unique ontology of music. Chapter 3 considers how this conception of expressionism led progressive-minded music critics to interpret expressionist music as the next step in the historical development of absolute music. These critics strategically—and controversially—portrayed Schoenberg's "atonal" polyphony as a legitimate revival of "linear" polyphony in fugues by Bach and late Beethoven. Chapter 4 then situates critical debates about the musical and cultural value of expressionism within broader struggles to construct narratives that would explain Germany's traumatic defeat in the Great War and abrupt restructuring as a fragile democratic republic. Against this backdrop, the later chapters explore critics' responses to public performances of specific "expressionist" chamber works. Chapter 5 traces reactions to a provocative performance of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, op. 9 (1906) at the Berlin Volksbühne in February 1920. Chapter 6 examines the interplay of musical-aesthetic and sociopolitical issues in critical reception of several postwar concerts that juxtaposed Schoenberg's "expressionist" Chamber Symphony with Franz Schreker's "impressionist" Chamber Symphony (1916). Chapter 7 considers how critics situated performances of Alexander Zemlinsky's Second String Quartet, op. 15 (1916) in relation to ideas about "expressionism" in music. Finally, Chapter 8 considers critical reception of performances of Béla Bartók's Second String Quartet, op. 17 (1917) in the context of two concert series sponsored by "expressionist" journals: the Anbruch-Abende in Vienna (1918) and the Melos-Abende in Berlin (1922 and 1923). Each of these final chapters uses contemporary criticism as a vehicle for a close reading of the relevant musical work, resulting in a portrait of "expressionist" music that is both contextually and musically nuanced.