Vienna Philharmonic
Part of: Franz Welser-Möst and Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice
Performers
Vienna Philharmonic
Franz Welser-Möst, Conductor
Program
HINDEMITH Konzertmusik für Blasorchester, Op. 41
R. STRAUSS Symphonic Fantasy from Die Frau ohne Schatten
SCHOENBERG Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31
RAVEL La valse
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately 90 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission.This Concert in Context
While Richard Strauss began composing Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1911 before the outbreak of World War I, the work was not completed until the middle of the war years and would have to wait until the cessation of hostilities for its premiere in Vienna in October 1919. While Strauss would oscillate between feelings of patriotism and revulsion towards the German war effort, the same could not be said for Maurice Ravel, who enthusiastically volunteered to join in the fighting on the French side, ultimately enlisting as a lorry driver in an artillery regiment. Like Strauss’s opera, La valse was composed only after the war; while several contemporaries would later claim that the work represented the loss of a pre-war European civilization as embodied by the Viennese waltz, Ravel himself rejected such claims.
Paul Hindemith’s Konzertmusik für Blasorchester was composed in 1926 at a time when the Weimar Republic enjoyed a period of relative stability and calm. With the introduction of the Rentenmark in November 1923, the shock of Weimar’s disastrous hyperinflation receded ever further from view while the signing of the Locarno Treaties in October 1925 held the promise of restoring relations between Germany and its former enemies Great Britain and France. The much-needed reprieve from crises on the domestic and foreign policy fronts did not always extend to new works appearing every day within the cultural sphere.
The 1928 premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31—the composer’s first 12-tone composition for large orchestra—was a complete fiasco, owing to the demands the work placed on musicians and audience members alike. While the press derided the work as “soulless musical arithmetic,” the technical difficulties of the piece proved too much even for the world-class Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler. While the maestro would later protest the Nazis’ revocation of Schoenberg’s professorship from the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933, he would conduct Schoenberg’s music only once more for the remainder of his life.
—Brendan Fay, author of Classical Music in Weimar Germany