Clemens Zoidl
“An artistic person with a main emphasis on the visual”
“An artistic person with a main emphasis on the visual,” a musical
person with a literary subsidiary accent, and a sculpturally talented
person with an awe-inspiring musical heritage meet …
This elaborated description of a meeting between three people with
different talents is presumably not particularly appropriate as the
introduction to a joke. However, this is not really an attempt to prepare
a humorous punch line, but rather the actual encounter of three people
whose life paths crossed at one point and allowed a remarkable
document to be created.
Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), who was known above all for his
expressionistic painting, repeatedly overstepped the borders of his
central artistic medium of expression even before he became known as
a painter. He wrote his first stage play (Sphinx and Scarecrow: A
Comedy for Automata) in 1907, when he was studying at the Vienna
School of Arts and Crafts. Two years later followed the drama
Murderer, Hope for the Women which was set to music in 1921 by Paul
Hindemith (1895–1963). In his play Orpheus and Eurydice, written in
1917/18, he processed his war experiences and his intense, but
unhappy love affair with Alma Mahler into an expressionistic, psychodramatic interpretation of the mythical subject matter around the
central themes of love and death. In 1929 Krenek described
Kokoschka’s dramatic works as “eruption of the innermost vital
sphere,” as achievements of an artist whose creativity displayed
merely a “main emphasis on the visual,” but could by all means be
formed in another medium if necessary.
Krenek himself was only just twenty-two at the time he met Kokoschka,
had broken off his training with Franz Schreker (1878–1934), and set out
with great success on his own artistic path with a series of progressive
compositions, including his First Symphony and the First String Quartet.
At about the same time, he began to integrate his linguistic talent in his
artistic activities in that he himself authored the libretto of his opera
Sprung über den Schatten (“Jump over the Shadow”). His linguistic and
intellectual talents not only represent an essential characteristic of the
contemporary Ernst Krenek – who nearly his whole life subjected himself
and his fellow human beings to critical examination, by means of
pointed, occasionally sharp-tongued, yet always astute comments – but
was moreover an integral component of his artistic personality. A libretto
did not serve him as a excuse to compose music, but on the contrary it
was the fundamental element of an opera in which Krenek saw the
“greatest possible elucidation and vivification of the dramatic event as a
whole” as music’s “function and reason for existence.” With that, he
assigned music a supporting rather than a leading role. A remarkably
reflected attitude for an aspiring, up-and-coming composer.
It was also at this time that Krenek met Anna Mahler (1904–1988), the
daughter of Gustav and Alma Mahler. Her father died when Anna was
only just seven years old. Her mother cultivated an exceedingly active
social life and probably had only little time for her daughter, whose
upbringing was largely taken over by an English governess. Anna
(naturally) received a musical training, learning to play cello, but showed
a talent for drawing already early on. At her mother’s social events, Anna
used to (dutifully) converse with the guests and simultaneously make
pencil drawings of them while waiting for the hostess. It was possibly the
distant and strained relationship to her mother that induced Anna to
soon flee her mother’s house. She was sixteen at the time of her first
marriage, which lasted only a few months. Shortly thereafter, in 1924,
followed the marriage with Ernst Krenek, which likewise lasted barely a
year. During this time, she received informal instruction in painting and
graphic arts from various teachers. However, decisive for her later
development as a sculptor were her lessons with Fritz Wotruba around
1930. From the distance of some twenty years, Krenek looked back
rather critically upon the talent of his former wife, whose cello playing he
described as “without particular ability,” and he also judged her talent as
a painter as only “mediocre.” Moreover, he had the suspicion that this
concentration on the visual arts was in any case only a further means of
escaping her mother’s sphere of influence.
However, Anna’s musical skills were quite advantageous during their
relationship. Time and again she copied music for Krenek and made fair
copies of his compositions, for example of the piano reduction of
Orpheus and Eurydice, which as a result actually became the point of
intersection of three life stories that converged only for a short period
and were otherwise very independent. The piano reduction, which
served as the engraver’s copy for the first edition of the opera, displays
Anna’s handwriting in large sections and Krenek’s revision annotations.
Aside from the value of the autograph for research on Krenek and
Kokoschka, the document as such is a fascinating point of departure for
a further glance into an artistically exciting period of the early twentieth
century. The genesis of the opera, the biographical backgrounds, and
the above-described double talents of the persons involved lead without
long detours to impressions of a bourgeois world in which the effects of
a humanistically oriented educational ideal with a self-evident occupation
with the “fine arts” was still perceptible, but, at the same time, whose
dissolution was already apparent.
The above-mentioned piano reduction of Orpheus and Eurydice, as a
document of this period and of the special personal circumstances,
recently became part of the collection of the Ernst Krenek Institute
Private Foundation.
Translation: Howard Weiner