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Last night we had another treat as part of the on-going Berkeley Arts Festival at the abandoned Fidelity Bank building in downtown Berkeley. Local piano virtuoso and teacher Jerry Kuderna organized an evening's presentation of the early piano music of Arnold Schoenberg and some of his students, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hans Eisler and Victor Ullmann.
But the evening began with Brahms, the Intermezzo #1 from 1894, to set the stage. In chronological order, we also heard Berg's Sonata Op. 1 (1907), 5 lieder from Schoenberg's Das Buch der Hangenenden Gaerten (1908), Schoenberg's 6 Kleine Klavierstuecke (1912) and his 5 Pieces for Piano (1924), Eisler's 5 Songs on texts by Bertold Brecht, and the Andante for Victor Ullmann's Piano Sonata #5 (1943). A 50-year spread, and what a calamitous 50 years it was.
Mr Kuderna was joined by the amazing young soprano Nora Lennox Martin for the Schoenberg and Eisler songs. (We need to hear a lot more of Eisler.)
Speaking from the piano bench, Jerry Kuderna tried to set the stage for this fin de siecle tour, emphasizing Schoenberg's influence on his students, including Eisler who supposidly rejected Schoenberg later on.
But as the 50 or so of us sat in the abandoned Fidelity Bank Walter Ratcliff Jr. designed in the 1920's, I couldn't help thinking about how different a world Schoenberg's Vienna of 100 years ago must have been. And how difficult it is for us today to even imagine what cultural turmoil this music came out of. And where it all led.
The years from about 1890 to 1933 in Europe have always fascinated me, going back even to high school. (I wrote my senior English term paper on Webern's music -- my English teacher had to pass it on to the school librarian "who knew a little about music".)
It's hard even to embrace all the historical and cultural dynamics, and to follow the interactions between the arts, science, politics, psychology, etc that led the west out of the 19th century and into the so-called modern age of the 20th.
In a sense, Europe went thru a major psychotic break that erupted into the First World War. By it's end in 1918 the world was quite a different place and the 19th Century was finally over. But the chaos that followed in the 20's relapsed into total nightmare by the end of the 30's and total war into the 40's.
This is the landscape that scored last night's concert, beginning in time with the Brahms Intermezzo, that old man's nostalgic reverie of a world about to end (altho he couldn't have known that), reaching across to Victor Ullman's tragic Andante, composed in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
The raw hysteria in the Berg Sonata seems so over-the-top today, where "cool" is more than just being, and where being cool is everything. Those Viennese were far from cool. Listening to Schoenberg and Berg from the period up to World War I, reading Karl Kraus, and Arthur Schnitzler, one is reminded of Freud and how he made the Viennese acknowledge their nightmares.
Which is why, except for a few pieces, (the piano and violin concertos are the exceptions) the music of Schoenberg in Los Angeles in the late 30's into the 50's seemes so out of place and lost; perhaps a dead-end for the serialism experiment. L.A. was no Vienna. Too cool, much too cool.
What then are we supposed to do with this music? Without the historical context, it makes little sense. But framed by the cultural dynamics of that time, it starts making more sense -- we are hearing the final screams of a century being put to rest.
Which doesn't at all detract from the simple fact that this tragic music is (still) extraordinary.
Needless to say, Mr Kuderna and Ms Martin performed ecstatically, and the evening, despite the lack of heating in the hall, was far from cool.
Bravos all around!
