Adalbert von Goldschmidt (composer)

Adalbert von Goldschmidt

Jacob Adalbert Ritter von Goldschmidt (born May 5, 1848 in Vienna , † December 21, 1906 in Hacking near Vienna) was an Austrian composer , poet and satirist . His works also appeared anonymously and under the artist names and pseudonyms "Berti Goldschmidt", "Adalbert de Goldschmidt" and "Vigoleit Meinstet".

Life

Origin and education

Adalbert von Goldschmidt (also called "Berti") was the sixth of six children of the procurator, Prussian consul and co-founder of the Rothschild bank in Vienna Moritz Ritter von Goldschmidt (1803–1888) and his wife Nanette von Goldschmidt (née Rothschild, 1806–1891 ). As the youngest son, he was the only child who did not embark on a banking career but became an artist. The family originally came from Frankfurt am Main. Since 1863 she resided in the palace on Opernring No. 6, which she had commissioned and designed by Josef Hlávka , right next to the Court Opera .

As a child he was a student of the Goldschmidts' Jewish private tutors Salomon Hermann Mosenthal , Leopold Kompert and Schopenhauer's student Ludwig Ferdinand Neubürger. He received composition and piano lessons from Friedrich Adolf Wolf, who trained many residents of the Ringstrasse musically and dedicated his compositions to them. Since around 1865 Goldschmidt also received private lessons from Josef Hellmesberger . His first compositions (Mass in B flat major, Spanish Rhapsody for orchestra) were successfully performed in the pupil concerts of the newly founded conservatory at the Wiener Musikverein , although Goldschmidt was never officially a student of the Vienna Musikverein . There he learned a. a. know the students Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf as well as Anton Bruckner , who is professor for harmony and counterpoint . Goldschmidt made the acquaintance of Franz Liszt through Eduard von Liszt around 1870 and became his master student from 1876. He was one of the first members of the newly founded Viennese Wagner Association, supported Richard Wagner financially in the construction of the Bayreuth Festival Hall and fought for the entire school of future music to gain more recognition in musically traditionally conservative Vienna.

Compositional work

At the opening of the Künstlerhaus on Karlsplatz, Goldschmidt saw Hans Makart's painting The Seven Deadly Sins (later title: The Plague in Florence ) and felt inspired to create an oratorio. He commissioned the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling to write a libretto . The resulting work provided a portrait of the Danube Monarchy in the age of late liberalism and, in allegorical form a. a. the decadence fashion, the stock market speculation, the emergence of industrial capitalism , the workers' uprisings, the Franco-German war of 1870/71 and the Paris Commune on the subject. In his setting, completed in 1873, Goldschmidt transferred Wagner's musical language to the oratorical subject for the first time in music history and made use of the orchestral line-up of the Ring of the Nibelung and a leitmotif technique. At the same time, Goldschmidt tried to go beyond Wagner with blatant style breaks and to include workers' choirs, salon music, impressionistic sound effects and operetta melodies as characteristics of new program music in the tradition of his teacher Franz Liszt in a modern-looking collage process. The musicologist Arnold Schering called Goldschmidt's " Seven Deadly Sins " a "monster work" five years after his death:

"The monster work will be able to show later generations as a drastic example, the direction in which Wagner's unheard-of new formations most stimulated young, progress-thirsty minds to reproduce. Goldschmidt found successors on this point only late on, but none who were unsettled and Would have been tantamount to boldness. "

The premiere of the Seven Deadly Sins took place on May 3, 1876 in the Berlin Reichshallen and was a great success. The Leipzig magazine Der Salon describes the piece as a masterpiece, "truly epoch-making". The Berliner Musikzeitung recognizes that the score is “the most fully valid evidence of a very significant creative force”. The work of the young composer is noticed far beyond Berlin. Partial and complete performances in Vienna, Weimar, Hanover, Königsberg, Freiburg, Paris and New York were to follow. In addition to Franz Liszt, who considered the oratorio a “significant work of art”, Camille Saint-Saëns and Hugo Wolf expressed their appreciation over the next few years :

"The work that I heard for the first time today literally crushed me, the impression was so great, the composition so powerful" . (Hugo Wolf)

The Vienna premiere in December 1877 was less successful, as the music critic Eduard Hanslick , who was opposed to the music of the future , vigorously polemicized the work. Nevertheless, the oratorio was also translated into French and was performed on March 27, 1885 in the Parisian Théâtre du Chateau-d'Eau under the direction of Charles Lamoureux . The piece has not been performed since that Paris premiere. In May 2019, the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin had planned a rediscovery, which, however, had to be postponed for an indefinite period due to the corona pandemic .

After the success of the Seven Deadly Sins , Goldschmidt married his wife Paula Kunz, daughter of a master tailor from the outskirts of Vienna and a singing student at the conservatory with Mathilde Marchesi . The wedding took place with great public participation in the Vienna City Hall, because a marriage between a Jew from the second society and a Catholic woman from the working class suburban milieu was still something very unusual. The young couple set up a much-visited artist's salon at Opernring 6, in which Paula Goldschmidt shone as a salon lady and premiered songs by her mutual friend and artistic pupil Hugo Wolf, including the little mouse trap slogans dedicated to her.

Goldschmidt became a master student of Franz Liszt in 1878, who accepted the oratorio with great enthusiasm and composed a “fantasy piece for pianoforte” based on Goldschmidt's themes. Between 1878 and 1883 Goldschmidt worked on his opera Helianthus , for which he - as "poet composer" in Wagner's successor - also wrote the libretto himself. The opera, set in the age of Christianization of Saxony , which has the Saxon Prince Wittekind as a main character, implicitly addresses the question of baptism and Jewish assimilation around 1880 against the background of the Berlin anti-Semitism dispute. The opera was premiered on March 26, 1884 at the Leipzig City Theater under the direction of Arthur Nikisch . Franz Liszt described it as the most important musical drama after Wagner's death.

Since 1883, Goldschmidt has regularly received guests in his summer house on Lake Grundlsee, including Franz and Joseph Schalk, who work there on the piano reductions for Anton Bruckner's symphonies. Through Goldschmidt's mediation, the conductor Arthur Nikisch came into contact with the Bruckner Symphonies and performed the Seventh Symphony at the Leipzig Music Festival. The concert became an event and ensured that Bruckner's work could establish itself permanently in the canon.

Goldschmidt is a regular guest in Paris from 1883–1885 and prepared the French performance of The Deadly Sins . There he came into contact with composers such as Jules Massenet , Edouard Lalo , Léo Delibes and - during his nightly cabaret visits - with Erik Satie . Compositions such as the French cycle "Six Songs", published in Paris, the "Allegory of Emptiness" (from: "Gaea") and miniatures such as "Too Late" demonstrate this closeness to French modernism. From 1884 to 1889 Goldschmidt worked on his musical drama " Gaea ", a three-day mystery play that is dedicated to the earth mother and her "world germ". Again he wrote both the text and the music itself. Figures from Goethe's Faust II meet Schopenhauer's philosophy of will, the Darwinian theory of that time ( Ernst Haeckel's theory of the germ) and early forms of psychoanalytic-Oedipal reading of ancient myths. The Munich symbolist Franz Stuck was commissioned with the stage and costume design. A first portable revolving stage was also to be created especially for the performance, which saw itself as a counter-model to the Bayreuth Festival. Despite numerous prominent advocates (including Émile Zola , Johann Strauss , Marcel Schwob and Maurice Maeterlinck ) and a Gäa Society (with committees in Paris, Berlin and Vienna) that was set up specifically for the realization of Hermann Bahr's total work of art , it is still not came to a performance. A premiere planned for 1898 at the Hamburg State Opera was canceled a few weeks before the premiere due to the death of the opera director Baruch Pollini , the stage paintings by Franz Stück were auctioned (and are still missing). Gustav Mahler refused a performance at the Vienna Opera, even if Alma Mahler-Werfel von Goldschmidt said he was "a lost but strong talent".

Disappointed by the failure of his great musical and dramatic plans, Goldschmidt turned increasingly to the song, composed numerous pieces based on texts by Helene Friedländer, Eduard Mörike , Goethe , Lenau , Storm , Platen , Geibel , Uhland , Rückert, but also French chansons based on poems by Victor Hugo , Paul Verlaine and Hungarian poems by Sándor Petöfi. Most of these songs will be premiered in the Salon am Opernring, directed by his wife, the singer Paula Goldschmidt. Prominent guests such as Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, Johann Strauss (son) and Hugo Wolf were guests again and again. In 1893 Goldschmidt undertook a European tour to accompany his own songs, which became one of his greatest successes:

"Has a musician ever gone through a purification process more energetically and more successfully than Adalbert von Goldschmidt? [...] Today, when he goes through the German concert halls as a song singer, he proves himself to be one of the most serene when he reached full maturity younger talent one. "

Goldschmidt's late work includes the comic opera "Die fromme Helene", composed in 1896, a "Buschiade auf die Meistersinger", based on a libretto by Fanny Gröger. The work, which premiered at the Hamburg State Opera, is a parody of Wagner's Meistersinger as well as Wilhelm Busch's verse epic and caused a scandal when it premiered. The anonymously performed piece was immediately removed from the program after its failed premiere:

"Stimulated by the Mardi Gras mood of the orchestration, which, in the old musical codex, proudly sweeps the top down and so likes to blur the drums and whistles into the adagios, the indignant audience also switched to drumming and whistling."

Presumably through the mediation of the Berlin cabaret artist Ernst von Wolhaben , the young Arnold Schönberg began to take an interest in the work and developed a chamber version of the opera for the Berliner Überbrettl , which was planned for 1901, but which was probably never performed. The work on this version can be traced in the fragmentary correspondence between Schönberg and Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt found himself in the aesthetics of the young Schönberg and the secessionists he was friends with and encouraged the young friend in a letter to take over his legacy:

"Dear Schönberg! (...) I am good to you with all my heart. (...) Just stay in Berlin and hear the well-intentioned advice of someone devoted to you. Hold on, you will make your way from there , and if you still have a few puddles to jump over, it doesn't matter. I think you're a good gymnast. Just jump over boldly. You will surely land well. I'm bad, I'm a forgotten, a deceased "I really don't believe in my resurrection anymore, otherwise I don't give a damn. I work a lot, hard, almost feverishly, but only because I want to have written down what fulfills me. Have no other value. You are energetic and young Luck on the way. You will reach your goal. Your sincere Adalbert v. Goldschmidt. "

In the last years of his life, Goldschmidt worked on a cycle of black fairy tales based on texts by the Brothers Grimm, based on Hans Christian Andersen and Fanny Gröger. In these experimental, prosaic language declamations, he approaches Schönberg's own continuation of Wagner's prosody and speech treatment in the Brettl-Lieder and in Pierrot Lunaire for the first time. In the concert series of the Tonkünstler Association, which emerged from the Vienna Secession and founded by Schönberg and Oskar C. Posa, Goldschmidt's setting of "Das Totenhemdchen" based on the Brothers Grimm was on the program on January 20, 1905. After that, his work was completely forgotten and has not yet been rediscovered. In 2020 the Urs Engeler Verlag published the study "Adalbert von Goldschmidt - A poet composer in the Viennese fin de siècle" for the first time an investigation and presentation of his work, written by Christian Filips .

Literary work

After Goldschmidt made friends with Hermann Bahr in 1893 , he became increasingly involved in literary circles and became a regular at Café Griensteidl , where he met Karl Kraus , Arthur Schnitzler , Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Peter Altenberg . As a literary figure and as a welcome patron, he appears again and again in the writings of these central representatives of Viennese modernism . Hermann Bahr even considers Goldschmidt - also because of his literary work - to be a "prophet of modernity" and dedicates a separate chapter to him in his "Studies on the Critique of Modernity", which is mainly devoted to the libretto for "Gäa" in the Bahr sees naturalism as well as symbolism (which has just become fashionable) overcome. The satirist Karl Kraus mockingly notes that this marked the beginning of the age of "Goldschmidtism":

Bahr is now beating the advertising drum not only for the composer, no, also for the poet Goldschmidt, and that very latest "sensation" is Goldschmidtism!

Goldschmidt's poetic work has so far been largely unexplored. An authorship can be proven for the anonymously published satire "Hanusch. Eine Reise-Vivisection (1887)", a parody of the affected artistry of the conductor Hans von Bülow , in which Goldschmidt uses the type of the "immortality clown" as a name for himself staging artistry invents. The boulevard play "Arsena Daginoff", which premiered in the Graz Theater on Franzensplatz in 1893 and which saw several performances in Prague, Brno and Leitmeritz, also comes from Goldschmidt. At the center of the plot is a gang of Russian nihilists who invade the Comédie-Française and there assassinate Prince Golgorucki.

Goldschmidt's "Gäa" can be found again in the diaries of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal:

"The evening at Goldschmidt's. La vie entrevue! [...] The pretty little songs and the Promethean."

As a figure in public life, Goldschmidt has repeatedly become the subject of literary fictions: In Daniel Spitzer's novella "Verliebte Wagnerianer" he appears as the composer "Max Goldschein", in Ernst von Wolzhen's novel "Der Kraft-Mayer" he figures as the Tonkünstler "Peter" Gais ", who is said to have written a tetralogy" Man ". Goldschmidt could also have been a model for the fictional character of Eduard Saxberger in Arthur Schnitzler's novella " Später Ruhm ". It should be investigated whether Goldschmidt did not also inspire Vinzenz Chiavacci for his figure of "Herr Ritter von Adabei" (= Adalbert Ritter von Goldschmidt?), Which has become popular in Vienna .

Illness, death, oblivion

Since the political anti-Semitism in Vienna with the election of Dr. Karl Luegers has become socially acceptable as mayor, Goldschmidt's presence in the cultural life of Vienna is increasingly declining. The brothers distance himself from him and he generously invests his father's inheritance as a patron of many artists. When he lost a considerable part of his fortune in stock exchange transactions, he brought a lawsuit against the stock exchange advisors and against the Anglo-Bank. The Viennese press commented on this bourgeois coup by the impoverished member of the Rothschild dynasty, while Karl Kraus tried to defend the publicly exposed person. He describes the press campaign as a "rabid intrusion into private life."

With the loss of his wealth comes social isolation. Together with his wife Paula, he left his parents' palace and moved into an apartment at Wohllebengasse 17. On January 29, 1904, he submitted his resignation from the Israelite religious community to the Vienna District Office and had the artist father Dr. Wolfgang Pauker - Egon Schiele's religion teacher - is baptized. Did Goldschmidt want to protect his Catholic wife Paula from further hostility with the conversion?

In August 1906 Goldschmidt suffered a stroke that developed into a nervous crisis. On September 15, 1906, the Wiener Salonblatt reported that the composer had arrived at the “Sanatorium und Wasserheilanstalt Bellevue” institute in Vienna-Hacking “for spa use”, which had been newly opened a year earlier for “internal and mental patients”. The treatment by Prof. Alexander Hollaender only lasts four months. Goldschmidt is classified as an incurable case and dies three days before Christmas, according to the inspection slip of a "cerebral hemorrhage due to chronic nerve inflammation". The Catholic death register records the address of the clinic (Raschgasse 6) as the place of death. According to tradition, only his wife, the music historian Heinrich Schenker and Karl Kraus are present at his funeral .

His grave is in the Israelite department in the Döblinger Friedhof in the family crypt of the Goldschmidts.

After Goldschmidt's death, the work of the poet-composer, known as a “Jewish Wagnerian”, was quickly forgotten. On September 1, 1935, Joseph Goebbels had a list of composers distributed in the ministries and Nazi cultural institutions, at all theater and radio directors and all state music institutions, whose works "are no longer to be included in series of German radio stations or theater institutes". The forbidden include Alban Berg , Hanns Eisler , Erwin Schulhoff and Kurt Weill, the oldest of all those named, as well as Adalbert von Goldschmidt, who has not been officially rehabilitated and reassessed to this day.

Works (selection)

Stage works

• The Seven Deadly Sins, oratorio, 1870–73, first performance: 1876 in Berlin
• Helianthus. Music drama, 1878–83, first performance: 1884 in Leipzig
• The pious Helene. A Buschiade for the Meistersinger, 1886, first performance: 1897 in Hamburg, whistled
• Gaea, music drama (three days), 1883–1889, planned premiere: 1898 in Hamburg, canceled

Vocal works

Songs

• Black fairy tales (1893–1906), based on the Brothers Grimm , HC Andersen , Fanny Gröger, Upanishads Das Totenhemdchen, The fairy tale of the toad, The fairy tale of the almond tree, It is quite certain, The noon magic, Satyakama
• "Six songs" cycle and French chansons by Paul Verlaine , Victor Hugo a . a.
• Poems by Eduard Mörike (1885–1890): Let, o world, o let me be !, early, when the cocks crow , think it, o soul , of an Aeolian harp, Jung-Volkers song, Jesus child, prayer, memories
• Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1888/89): Found, equal and equal, Mignon , The Recensent, Reconciliation, Self-deception, The Summer Day, Different, Eve, Problem, The Rising Full Moon, Wanderer's Night Song
• Poems by Sandor Petöfi (1885)
• Numerous other settings, youth songs, songs unpublished during his lifetime based on texts by Byron , Heine, Fallersleben , Lenau , Rückert , Storm, Platen and others

Orchestral works

• Symphonic poem for orchestra, after Lenaus Faust (1880)
• Spanish rhapsody
• Idyll for string orchestra

literature

• Christian Filips: The Immortality Clown , Adalbert Ritter von Goldschmidt (1848–1906) - A poet composer in the Viennese fin de siècle, Urs Engeler Editor, Schupfart 2020, ISBN 978-3-906050-61-4
• Saffle, Michael: "Adalbert von Goldschmidt: A forgotten Lisztophile", in: Journal of the American Liszt Society, Vol. 21, 1987, p. 31.

Web links

Commons: Adalbert von Goldschmidt - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Adalbert von Goldschmidt in the catalog of the Austrian National Library
• Catalog raisonné, sheet music and audio files by Adalbert von Goldschmidt on the blog "Der Immortlichkeitsclown"
• Songs by Goldschmidt on YouTube, recordings from 2020

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ludwig Ferdinand Neubürger . In: Der Kunstwart: A review of all areas of the beautiful; Monthly booklets for art, literature and life . tape 11 , 1898, p. 41 ( online ).
2. ↑ Septet in F major (score) , from accolade.de, accessed on June 22, 2020
3. ^ Arnold Schering: History of the oratorio . Wiesbaden 1911, p. 503 .
4. ^ E. Dohm and J. Rodenberg: The salon for literature, art and society . tape 2 . Leipzig 1876, p. 1120 .
5. ^ Anonymous: Berliner Musikzeitung . Berlin May 11, 1876, p. 149 .
6. ^ Hugo Wolf: Letters 1873-1901 . tape 1 , letter no. 20 . Vienna November 22, 1877.
7. ↑ THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS +++ POSTPONED! +++ , on sing-akademie.de, accessed on June 22, 2020
8. ↑ Love scene and Fortuna's ball from: "The Seven Deadly Sins" poetry by R. Hamerling. Music by Adalbert von Goldschmidt. Fantasy piece for pianoforte (for the concert lecture) / by Franz Liszt , on haab-digital.klassik-stiftung.de, accessed on June 22, 2020
9. ↑ Alma Mahler-Werfel: Memories of Gustav Mahler . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1971, ISBN 978-3-549-17445-6 , p. 33 .
10. ↑ Anonymous: Musikalisches Wochenblatt . May 4, 1893, p. 273 .
11. ↑ Anonymous: Wiener Theaterzeitung . Vienna November 30, 1897, p. 5 .
12. ^ Adalbert von Goldschmidt: Letter to Schönberg . September 19, 1902, p. ASCW, ID10583 .
13. ↑ ^{a b} Das Totenhemdchen - Adalbert von Goldschmidt , on immsterblichkeitsclown.de, accessed on June 22, 2020
14. ↑ The Immortality Clown - Adalbert von Goldschmidt - A poet composer in the Viennese fin de siècle , on engeler.de, accessed on June 22, 2020
15. ^ Karl Kraus: In: The society . tape 9 , part 1. Vienna 1893, p. 631 .
16. ^ Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Complete works . tape XXXVIII . Frankfurt a. M. 2015, p. 149 .