I First Met Friedrich Cerha and his wife Traude in December 1956. After a concert given by the International Society for Contemporary Music—at that time still considered a small group of conspirators—in a remote room at the Musikakademie, my mentor Hanns Jelinek took me to the Gmoa-Keller on the Heumarkt to introduce me to the leaders of Vienna's musical avant-garde.

Let me start off by thanking my friend György Ligeti for his generous words, and at the same time (contradiction being a part of my nature) putting the record straight: to do something as well as possible because one believes in it is a matter of course rather than a cause for gratitude. Herr Peymann replied to an interviewer's remark, that Thomas Bernhard was lucky to be promoted by him: ‘Well, I suppose that is another way of looking at it. For my own part, I have always thought I was lucky that these works existed and I was able to perform them’. Which touches upon one—just one—of the crucial points in the relationship between the creative artist and society.

He was characterized long ago by his own specific set of adjectives: enigmatic, introverted, unwordly, ironical, cranky. We are speaking of Friedrich Cerha whose great moment—according to the criteria of the culture industry—came in 1981: first performance of Baal at the Salzburg Festival; first performance of Netzwerk under his direction during the Vienna Festival, at the Theater an der Wien; conducting Alban Berg's Lulu at the Styrian Autumn in Graz (Cerha had completed the third act of that work, which Berg left as a fragment, in 1978). These were just the biggest rewards of Cerha's Year, which catapulted the composer—until then known internationally only to connoisseurs and amateurs of music—into the consciousness even of politicians and culture buffs. Is that what he wanted? Does it tally with the abovementioned adjectives? He must have wanted it to some extent, for no composer could seriously wish to prevent the performing of his work. And on occasion he may even fit in with the cultural obligations, which, sensibly, do not always seek to ruin creative talents.

Ernst Krenek is the subject of the first chapter of John Rockwell's stimulating survey All American Music, but this is no compliment to the composer. He is described as ‘one of the last of a line of European immigrants who enriched our music but also suppressed the nascent evolution of a truly American culture’. This seems rough justice from a country which has been nurtured on generations of imported cultures, fed into a developing and eventually unique main stream, but one can see Rockwell's point about the enormous prestige of serialism. Forty years after his emigration, it is possible to wonder whether even Stravinsky, via Craft, was adversely affected by the powerful establishment fashions of his American context. And Copland? It is becoming commonplace now, especially in architecture, to regard some of the manifestations of modernism as, quite simply, a mistake.

The Austrian Theorist and Composer Josef Matthias Hauer evolved a system of 12-tone music which he felt would save music from what he saw as the excesses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the years 1918–26 he formulated his ideas concerning 12-tone music into three short treatises: Vom Wesen des Musikalen: Grundlagen der Zwölftonmusik; Vom Melos zur Pauke: Eine Einführung in die Zwölftonmusik; and Zwölftonmusik: Die Lehre von den Tropen. In these three works Hauer presented his ideas concerning the interval as the point of departure for melody, rhythm, and timbre, as well as his concept of music as a ‘pure’ art, which the composer should only approach through a system of ‘tropes’ or ‘tone-constellations’—theories markedly different from those of his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg.

In West Berlin on 8 September 1987, Fischer-Dieskau is to give a recital of Hanns Eisler's songs, with Aribert Reimann at the piano. A tribute at this level to Eisler's achievement within and around the Lieder tradition was long overdue. Since the concert is sponsored by the Berliner Festwochen—which this year is handsomely celebrating the city's 750th anniversary—it is assured international attention, which it deserves for a variety of reasons, not least because it is impossible to construct a complete and balanced programme of Eisler Lieder without somehow calling in question the very idea of official blessings, from whatever quarter.

Vienna, they say, is synonymous with music. Worldwide public opinion, responding to the New Year's Day Concert and the Vienna Boys’ Choir, confirms it.

Confronted by the multifarious political and economic scandals of recent times, the Austrian Minister for Education and the Arts has declared that our art and culture is the only ‘export’ to have survived intact. But as far as 20th-century music is concerned, its ‘export’ has received little official encouragement. Apart from a 1972 ballet production by Aurel Miloss with music by Schoenberg, and a performance of Gottfried von Einem's Kabale und Liebe at the 1977 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, our National Opera has presented no contemporary work outside Austria since 1945, nor any work by the Second Viennese School. Nor does any contemporary Austrian music appear on the touring schedules of the Vienna Philharmonic, as it used to (on a modest scale) in the 1950's; and works of the Schoenberg school are only played when conductors like Abbado, Zubin Mehta, or Christoph von Dohnanyi insist.

[A selection from Schwertsik's writings was made in 1980 by Harriett Watts for a projected Tempo article, and translated by her in collaboration with Schwertsik. Even though the present expanded and updated selection is once again intended as a general introduction to the composer, it takes account of a marked change in his reputation during the past seven years: neither his detractors nor his friends from the Darmstadt era can any longer echo the ironic words with which he began one of his own poems: ‘We have lost all trace of him./His very existence remains doubtful’.

below left: self-portrait by Schwertsik; below right: Schwertsik on location for Eine Reise nach Mu, a TV-film about him directed by Barrie Gavin for Hessischer Rundfunk TV, Frankfurt, in 1983.]

Leopold Spinner composed his Sonata for Violin and Piano at the age of 30, in Vienna, in late 1936, while Studying with Webern. It was performed in Vienna on 22 November of that year under the auspices of the Austrian Section of the ISCM. In 1940—having in the meantime been forced to emigrate to this country—he made a slightly revised version of the work, which seems to have remained unheard until this year.

If it is Indeed the case that there is a landscape of the soul which song inhabits, few would dissent from the view that in England in 1900 it was a dead land. The ‘aesthetic tension’ between poetry and music which had stimulated Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf seemed entirely absent, and there was no English Eichendorff or Mörike. Stephen Banfield has asserted that English composers at this time aspired only to produce a ‘frictionless entity’ by providing a ‘pianistic’ accompaniment to Rupert Brooke's or Mathew Arnold's words.

Paradoxes Abound in Arnold's music, and while in most instances they need not be understood in order to appreciate the music (for it is, as Hugo Cole has suggested, ‘so clear, so self-sufficient, so much to be enjoyed for its own sake’), in terms of the Symphony the idea deserves further consideration. The basic paradox is this: that the composer's particularily prolific form of eclecticism is at odds with the conceptual and technical demands of symphonic form. In his well-considered definition of the Symphony, Robert Simpson states that it is a ‘profoundly inclusive’ form, one in which all the diverse elements of music are brought together to make an organic and dynamic whole. It is active in all possible ways; ‘no evasions are tolerable in the attempt to achieve the highest state or organization of which music is capable’. Eclecticism, then, would appear first to present problems of technical integration, and second to give an overly diffuse aural result.

(In recognition that 1987 sees the 500th anniversary of the birth of Robert Carver (1487–c. 1566), generally considered the greatest Scottish composer of the Renaissance, we append a poem by a founder-member of the modern-day Carver Choir of Aberdeen. Dr. Reid-Baxter has written in Carver's own tongue, the aureate Scots of the late Middle Ages. After due consideration, we have forborne to provide translation or glossary, since enough of TEMPO'S readers should be acquainted with such major figures of British literature as Robert Henryson, William Ounbar, and Gavin Douglas.)