Philharmonic Chamber Music Recital

And the expression here hints at more than just the impending shift in calendar date from the 19th into the 20th century. The mood at the turn of the century is a turbulent one: Romanticism is ending and with it comes the decline of a musical perspective that has dominated for the past 100 years. Suddenly, new perceptions, ideas and visions were emerging. And new styles and movements springing from these: Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Aestheticism and, last but not least, the Avant-Garde.

A period of contradiction – and surprises. Who would have thought that Anton Weber, one of the leading avant-gardists of his time, was a great refiner of salon music? His arrangement of »Der Schatzwalzer« by Johann Strauss was not just the result of his own musical interest. Arrangements like this were primarily intended to ensure the survival of Schoenberg’s »Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen« (»Society for Private Musical Performances«).

The fact that art is sometimes subject not only to artistic ideals but also to commercial constraints was something Arnold Schoenberg was forced to realise very early on. That is why he took his compositional destiny into his own hands with the founding of the »Musikverein«, where he found a kind of refuge for the ideology of chamber music after the First World War. Major orchestral works often flopped, not only because of changing public tastes but also because of feasibility in the face of reduced cultural funding.

It was in this climate that Schoenberg, Webern and Berg made a virtue of necessity and took on the works of Johann Strauss, for example. The result was waltz arrangements and their own compositions that were by no means music intended for a specific purpose. Quite the opposite in fact: a lightness of being and joy of experimentation spring from them. Their attempt to bring the sentimental heart of Vienna, the city of music, very gently into line with the heartbeat of modernity succeeded in a masterful way.