Classical musicThe radiant music of Austrian composer Franz Schmidt, once feted by the Nazis, is haunted by its past. Ahead of the Proms premiere of his Symphony No 2, Gavin Plumley explains why it is time to listen afresh
Franz Schmidt was a smiling, genial man. He was born in 1874 in Pressburg (now Bratislava) and died in Vienna in 1939. At the BBC Proms, on 10 September, there is the rare opportunity to hear his radiant Second Symphony, completed and premiered in 1913. Fittingly, the performance, the first ever at the Proms, will be given by the Vienna Philharmonic – the orchestra in which Schmidt once played the cello – under its regular guest conductor Semyon Bychkov.
The vagaries of the classical repertoire are such that very little of Schmidt’s output, which includes three further symphonies, two operas and various chamber and orchestral works, is still heard. Bar the continuing slew of performances and recordings of Mahler’s symphonies and the occasional foray into the even more complicated terrain of the Second Viennese School, 20th-century Austrian music is altogether poorly represented.
One reason the music of Schmidt and a number of his colleagues, such as Joseph Marx, Franz Schreker and Alexander Zemlinsky, has almost disappeared from the halls they dominated during the first 30 years of the 20th century, is that it is still haunted by the ghosts of the Nazi era. The performance of works by Jewish composers such as Schreker and Zemlinsky was effectively banned in Germany from 1933, and, from 1938, in the Austria that had once been their home. Ever since, those pieces have struggled to re‑enter the repertoire. Schmidt and Marx, on the other hand, had unfortunate links with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a Catholic, educated in Vienna, writing in a post-Romantic style, Schmidt dodged the Nazis’ “degenerate” tag. Instead, the annexing forces embraced his music, not least the 1937–8 Book with Seven Seals (heard at the Proms in 2000), a neo-Bachian oratorio based on the Book of Revelation and written following the death of Schmidt’s only child in 1932. The Hitlerite authorities appropriated its June 1938 premiere, arrogantly seeing the piece as a projection of their new regime.
The following February, Schmidt died at the age of 64, never living to see the worst effects of the Nazis, including the murder of his mentally ill wife as part of their forced euthanasia programme. The reportedly apolitical composer, who never once displayed anti-Jewish sentiment, was powerless to defend himself against claims of having supported Hitler. Detractors cited Schmidt’s (incomplete) German Resurrection cantata, which ends with a shout of “Sieg Heil!”, while emphasising his pan-German sensibilities, however distinct these were from nazism.
Such associations still prompt misgivings, though they need to be balanced with a sober appraisal of Schmidt’s character. He wrote music for Paul Wittgenstein, the Jewish one‑armed pianist and brother of the famous philosopher, and fellow musicians Hans Keller and Oskar Adler, both of them settling in the UK, exonerated him. “Schmidt was never a Nazi,” they insisted. “That the Nazis claimed him as one of them and feted him in this sense wasn’t his fault.”
Other musical figures who continued to work throughout the Third Reich era, such as Carl Orff, whose ubiquitous Carmina Burana will be heard again at the Proms on 6 September, or Richard Strauss, who led the Nazis’ Music Institute and wrote songs for Goebbels, before retreating from public life, have remained firmly in the repertoire. Why has Schmidt failed to prove as resilient?
The answer is that the composer does not belong to our conventional history of music in the 20th century. The works of figures such as Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg are often wedded to a narrative of dissolution and tragedy. Like those composers, Schmidt came to prominence during the fin de siecle, writing on the same lavish scale, yet never embracing expressionism and atonality. Intensely melodic, unashamedly kind-hearted, the second of his four symphonies begins with energetic, sunny scurries and ends with resounding fanfares.
How different, then, from other works premiered during the turbulent years prior to the first world war. In 1911, when Schmidt left his post at the Vienna Philharmonic and began writing his Second Symphony, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde were performed for the first time. Strauss’s opera may have a wry smile on its face, but it nonetheless ponders the same mortal questions that permeate Sibelius’s dark night of the soul and Mahler’s lingering farewell to the earth.
The premiere of Schmidt’s Symphony on 3 December 1913 capped a landmark year. A concert of music by his colleagues Berg, Schoenberg, Webern and Zemlinsky had been cut short in Vienna after it caused outrage among spectators. Only two months later, a demonstration had broken out at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris. Provocatively radical, these works seem to prophesy the wartime destruction to come.
No riots greeted Schmidt’s music. Brassy, bold, even belligerently optimistic, his 1913 symphonic masterpiece remains true to the tradition he had inherited from Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. While Mahler, under whom Schmidt frequently played, chose to provide a melancholy, shattered conclusion to that legacy in Das Lied von der Erde as well as his Ninth and Tenth symphonies, Schmidt vowed it would endure. And, as if his Second Symphony were not proof enough, he wrote a cheery, pastoral Third Symphony in 1927–8 and a Fourth in 1934, a requiem for his daughter, albeit concluding on a hopeful note.
Some have denounced Schmidt as outmoded for continuing to embrace the 19th-century form of the symphony and for adopting a tonal approach to music, at a time in the 1920s when others were exploring more fluid structures, Schoenberg’s 12‑tone technique, “new objectivity” and jazz. Seeing these concepts as progressive, commentators have overlooked Schmidt’s unique achievements. Yet the history of musical modernism is not as simple as this interpretation might suggest. When heard alongside the other composers of his generation, Schmidt can appear like a cheerful fish out of water. He was an affable soul, a great teacher and an obliging colleague.But he needs examining more sincerely, without immediately resorting to his equivocal ties to the Third Reich. For Schmidt’s output reminds us of the constant need to reappraise, rewrite and enrich our account of music during the first half of the 20th century.
Schmidt’s Symphony No 2 will be performed at the Proms on 10 September. Gavin Plumley will discuss his life and work, before the concert, at the Royal College of Music, London SW7.
- This article was amended on 31 August 2015. As a result of an editing errror, a previous version said that Hans Keller and Oskar Adler were exonerated. This has been amended. An incorrect picture, which was used in this article due to a captioning error, has also been removed.
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