A Concert of Wunderwerke

Dr. Christian Meyer, Director of the Arnold Schönberg Center, with his wife, Dr. Susana Zapke, at the post-concert reception.

Tonight the second of two stellar concerts took place in the concert hall of the Arnold Schönberg Center, presented by the Ensemble Wiener Collage. Spanning eight centuries, from Guillaume de Machaut to Sidney Corbett (whose arresting Knochentänze, for viola and accordion, was premiered this evening), nearly half of the pieces were written by composers in their 40's. As befitting the venue, the program began with three of Schönberg’s Five Piano Pieces, and closed with Webern’s Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone and piano. Taking a clue from the unusual and compelling instrumentation employed by Webern (whose Quartet was praised by Alban Berg, at the 1931 premiere, as a ‘Wunderwerk,’ and the one composition in the world that was 100% original), the remaining works on the program were largely written for atypical instrumental combinations: Isable Mundry’s Spiegel Bilder for clarinet and accordion; Alexander Stankovski’s Linien for alto flute and trombone; Simeon Pironkoff’s Zyklus Sujets – Epilogue, for clarinet, trombone, cello and piano; Machaut’s Biauté paree de valour, arranged for accordion by Alfred Melichar; Sofia Gubaidulina’s Et Expecto for accordion; and René Starr’s Gemini A1 for violin and flute, and Gemini A7 for violin and saxophone. These latter two works were brief, intense, and rhythmically complex, yet the accelerating ‘spiral structure,’ with the instruments seeming to engage in a drag race, remained transparent. Alfred Melichar, a well-known interpreter of contemporary music written for the accordion, captured the harsh, thick sonorities of Gubaidulina’s solo work with passion and attention to the extreme dynamic contrasts, reflective of her tendency to oppose light and dark. Finally, the fractured components of Pironkoff’s Epilogue from the Zyklus Sujets were infused with a dry humor---one could almost hear the ghost of Erik Satie. Four strands of material unfolded simultaneously---faux Bach, played on a cello tuned in microtones against the piano; muted glissandos sweeping around on the trombone; chords repeated twice on the piano in a wide array of tempi and dymanics and register (these are what brought Satie to mind); and the clarinet, in his own world. I wanted to hear more, and in fact there are three earlier sections, written for trio, of this complex work. This evening's concert was the final event of two days devoted to the topic of music and number, with symposia, lectures, and panel discussions.

Tis the Season for Morchella

The Arnold Schönberg Center is hosting a symposium today and tomorrow, “Musik und Zahl” (Music and Number), with lectures, panel discussions, and evening concerts. Tonight I had the pleasure of hearing the Ensemble Wiener Collage perform works by Cage, Frescobaldi, Berg, Ligeti, and Zimmermann. Intercommunicazione, for cello and piano, by Bernd Alois Zimmerman, was a tour-de-force of a piece with unrelenting intensity, even when the intensity wasn’t apparent. Roland Schueler, the cellist, played this dark and difficult work with ferocious precision, and the pianist, Johannes Marian, let the crashing chords fly with violent finesse. Zimmermann’s music was like a roomful of Rothko canvases unleashed into space.

So what do morels have to do with numbers and music? A serendipitous confluence: having attended a concert tonight starting off with John Cage’s work, Two, and having had exactly one conversation with Cage in my life that had nothing to do with anything except mushrooms, and having been seduced into buying (instead of finding, much more exciting than hunting for Easter Eggs), sautéing, and consuming a few exquisite Viennese morels, I assume that if you've gotten this far you probably know that John Cage was a mushroom expert and aficionado---and in fact, a founder of the New York Mycological Association. I'd like to share an irresistible anecdote, appearing in an article, "Sounds and Mushrooms," penned by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times, November 22, 1981: "A woman once asked John Cage, ''Have you an explanation of the symbolism involved in the death of the Buddha by eating a mushroom?'' Mr. Cage thought: ''Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassible heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it. So I wrote to the lady in Philadephia. I said, 'The function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.' ''

Schönberg from All Angles

The Arnold Schönberg Center, situated in the Palais Fanto for just over ten years, is literally a curved ball stone’s throw from where I live. Yesterday I was able to make a first proper visit. Upon entering the Center, one first encounters Schönberg’s actual working studio, replicated behind glass. But not everything is off limits. In another room, a number of his personal items (or facsimiles thereof) are displayed, laid out on tables and available for handling and examining, such as his idiosyncratic chess invention – coalition chess. He had a dry sense of humor that cuts right through the grainy archival recordings, continuously playing next to a comfortable sitting area with books, devoted to his works, readily available for perusal. One of the highlights of the Center is a small screening room with the Staatsoper performance of Schönberg’s opera, Moses und Aron, projected on a large screen. The score, projected as well and adjacent to the performance video, corresponds to the videotaped excerpts, with new pages appearing automatically. The entire Center, devoted to Schönberg's works, is a model of how such a brilliant and historic figure can be presented to the public using an array of media.

Laundromats and Schönberg

My thoughtful artist-landlord installed a washing machine in the apartment prior to our arrival. However, due to various complications I wasn’t able to use it until now, three weeks after moving in. I’ve been searching everywhere for a Waschsalon (laundromat), on the internet, in the streets, in the yellow pages; imploring people if they knew of one. Evidently even the good citizens of Vienna find it difficult to locate laundromats. Low and behold, on a stroll last night, in perfectly delicious cool weather, I decided not to return to my apartment after sampling the galleries in the inner city, but to walk right past it in a quest to discover what the opposite direction might turn up. (I’m usually headed toward the alte Stadt (the old inner city). Lo and behold, practically around the corner, a veritable army of washing machines, a dry cleaning operation, and an offer to do it all for you if you can’t be bothered to do it yourself. But the little home washing machine makes all manner of rough, gruff sounds, with the clothes magically emerging in a nearly dry state. So I asked myself, what would John Cage do? (My guess: his own).

In the same way, before locating it on the map, I unexpectedly encountered the Arnold Schönberg Center---one of the top ten places on my list. Lisztstraße (sorry, couldn't resist) intersects with my street, Traungasse. Out for a walk last week, I simply had to walk on this street named after Liszt, and suddenly there was the striking building, the Palais Fanto (housing the Schönberg Center), a disorienting reminder of New York's Flatiron Building. In her immensely engaging book, The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir, Marjorie Perloff writes about the Palais Fanto in Vienna, with gripping stories detailing its history---and her own, originating in Vienna and later in the U.S.