Austria The Country of Classical and Opera Composers

There is music everywhere in Austria.  Besides the famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony there are the equally famous State Opera and the wonderful Volks Opera. You can enjoy dinner shows where between courses you are treated to highly entertaining music and dancing in traditional costume.  In late July and August there is the world renowned Salzburg Festival of Vienna (that is called Wiener Festwochen) during the first three weeks of June.  Also during the summer and autumn there are numerous village festivals and most sizeable villages have dances on Saturdays.  Vienna has been considered the music capital of the world for centuries.  From here came the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Gluck, Haydn, Bruckner, Wolf, Mahler, Lanner, the Strausses and other great artists.

In Austria during the late 19th century, Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler continued to push the symphony farther along the path that Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms had traveled. But, just as Wagner brought new dimensions to opera, Bruckner and most notably Mahler expanded the scope of the symphony (and in Mahler’s case, the orchestrally accompanied song cycle, as well) to epic lengths. Mahler, who lived into the first years of the 20th century, demanded a broad coloristic palette and an unprecedented degree of orchestral virtuosity. His sprawling canvases embody a searing emotional intensity and a sense of self-revelation. They mark the zenith of the expressive romantic style.

Mahler’s successors in the early 20th century felt that the language of romanticism had been taken to its limit. Arnold Schoenberg composed his early works, including the massive Gurrelieder (1901-13) and the dark, mysterious string sextet Transfigured Night (1899), in a style that seemed the outgrowth of Brahms’s and Mahler’s romantic aesthetic.

By 1920, however, he had developed a method of composition in which he arranged the 12 tones of the scale in a series, and then used the permutations of the series as the thematic material on which he based his works. Actually, this form of composition (called the twelve-tone system or serial music) is less confining than might be supposed, for a work could use several series, each of which could be broken into shorter components and subjected to all the traditional forms of thematic metamorphosis (including inversions, retrogrades, transposition, augmentation, and diminution).

Serialism, as Schoenberg saw it, was simply a tool whereby composers could find fresh material, free from the constraints of major and minor tonalities. Later composers brought serialism to greater extremes, serializing not only pitches but rhythms, tone colors, and dynamics.

Schoenberg, along with his two greatest disciplesÑAlban Berg and Anton von WebernÑworked in Vienna, were the central figures in what was known as the Second Viennese school. Each pursued a different route, and taken together, their works show the variety of styles the twelve-tone school allowed: Schoenberg adapted his method to the traditional chamber and orchestral forms, while Webern left a body of compact, concise miniatures and BergÑin many ways the most enduring of the three composed two full-scale operas, Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), plus a romantic violin concerto (1935) and a handful of songs and chamber works.