City Without Jews, the musical version
OrchestrasThe Salzburg Festival is putting on performances of a prophetic 1924 film, predicting the upsurge of murderous Viennese antisemitism.
The film has been furnished with a musical score by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, co-commissioned by the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Ensemble Intercomporain, and London’s Barbican Centre.
First reviews says the music adds little to the caustic horror of Hans Karl Breslauer’s silent film.
Neuwirth said she tried ‘to maintain a liveliness by making the music simultaneously touching and hard, warm-hearted and open, amusing and angry, involved and distant, humorous and sad.’
Die Presse’s headline was: ‘Olga Neuwirth’s music has nothing to say about “The City Without Jews”’
Der Standard’s critic writes: ‘The music, which Olga Neuwirth composed in 2017, is subtly biting and ironic and also not at all funny.
Neuwirth’s world of ideas… is more like a dark field of energy that envelops the threatening aura of this story. Alienated mass hysterical applause, veiled yodeling, wine tavern music: all of this shines through as an alienated original; you can even briefly hear the song Immer wieder Österreich , which the John Otti Band sings at FPÖ party events.’
PHACE
Nacho de Paz Dirigent
I don’t know about an “upsurge” of antisemitism in Austria post 1924, it was already then in evidence and nor has it even now disappeared.
So sad
Here is a trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqEw-m6-U0k
Olga Neuwirth says she is a ‘punk composer’. Her sonic art is thus well-suited to horror.
Here is a reportage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1e6e2rIU68
We hear that primitive, ugly, angry noises are ‘much contemporary’, as a compliment. Therefore, the taste-making elites find her works really great, she was even called ‘the new Mahler’.
All of this will be a subject in a future cultural-anthropologic study and a PhD in mass psychology.
Instead of something contemporary, it’s all extremely oldfashioned and conventional, harking back to the German fifties and sixties of the last century. One wonders: if looking back, why not a little bit further back? When there was still music around? But of course, that is taboo – there apparently are two very different ways of nostalgia.
It’s a ‘Nachkriegschuldbewältigungsneurose’.
Did listening to ugly music ever help anyone cope with post war guilt neurosis?
Did very long words?
Yes, music that makes you feel ill quenches Kollektivschuld. You suffer to make amends, and the longer you listen, the more chance you are redeemed.
This work was composed in 2017 and premiered in 2018 in Vienna.
Well it seems to me that so called classical music without those of the Jewish faith (to include composers, conductors and orchestral and chamber musicians, etc.) is as a boneheaded idea as to exclude opera from Italian contributors.
I do not find the new score any better or interesting than the original one.
We need to move on…