In the arts, it is possible for multiple superlatives to exist side by side—for which reason this author hopes it won’t be taken amiss that he considers the concert series “Echo of the Unheard” to be the most important one in Viennese musical life. This series affords an experience of how an entire, fully valid era of music history exists of which Arnold Schönberg, Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Egon Wellesz, Erich Zeisl, Ursula Mamlok, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Ruth Schönthal, and Marcel Rubin are just a few representatives among the approximately one hundred composers whose works it has included so far.
Though this era is by no means a marginal artistic phenomenon, a lack of appropriate dissemination by the music business has indeed caused it to be absent from public awareness: it exists, yet seems not to. One would therefore tend to perceive a need to rewrite music history—though said history is, in fact, a different one than we imagine. The music concerned here arose as a developmental step that departed from previous tendencies and opened up new ones to give rise to an independent era all its own, one that the National Socialist dictatorship—for reasons we know all too well—then smashed and buried for far longer than its own reign endured.
On 14 November 2006, which would have been Alma Rosé’s 100th birthday, the Exilarte Center—founded by Gerold Gruber at the initiative of Austrian Foreign Ministry envoy Waltraud Dennhardt-Herzog—staged a concert in Rosé’s memory to open a series that has been known since the 2015/16 season as “Echo of the Unheard”.
It was hence clear from the very beginning that the Center’s activities would be defined especially through the performance of music by persecuted composers alongside finding, collecting, and providing access to this music while seeing to its scholarly examination in a historical and musical sense as well as its editing and publishing. Affirming and rendering audible the fruits of the Center’s wide-ranging scholarly work is accordingly the object of this series’ six-to-eight concerts each year.
A 2007 symposium on Korngold marked the start of close collaboration with Michael Haas, who had been responsible for the 1990s Decca series “Entartete Musik” [Degenerate Music] and was to help shape the Exilarte Center’s work in a pivotal way. And beginning with the 2007/08 season, Ulrike Anton—now Director of the Arnold Schönberg Center—assumed principal responsibility for this concert series both as a performer and conceptually. Fruitful partnerships with Amaury du Closel’s “Voix étouffées” project as well as Volker Ahmels’ Centre for Ostracised Music at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre have since been recognised with the European Union’s Golden Star Award in 2009 as well as the Bank Austria Art Prize in 2010.
In 2016, Exilarte became an mdw Research Center. This broadened the spectrum of its work: artistic estates, previously sent on to Viennese libraries, could now find space in the Center’s own archive. This archive has since come to contain over 40 such estates, embodying a collection that extends beyond just composers with connections to Vienna. The research on these materials has been reflected in the Center’s concert series—which, following years at the Radiokulturhaus, was given a permanent home at the Kleiner Ehrbarsaal—since the very beginning.
After two decades of continuous concert-giving, this series has now established itself for the long term as an indispensable institution of Viennese musical life.
As horrific as the crimes of the National Socialist dictatorship were and as much as the period following World War II was characterised by ignorance, Echo of the Unheard has consistently avoided presenting the performed compositions from the standpoint of victimhood. Instead, it has brought them to life as purely musical phenomena despite their historical context—as works from a marvellous era that has asserted its artistic existence in the face of impossible circumstances and will doubtless continue to do so.
What can be said without any exaggeration is that the present-day dominance of opera and concert life’s repertoire warhorses would be far less extreme if this civilisational and cultural rupture had not occurred. And at every Echo of the Unheard concert, one can bear witness to the renewal that had been attempted in this so brutally terminated new era. The extent to which this renewal could have more strongly countered music’s oft-noted crisis may well remain a matter of speculation in view of how the complexity of this crisis makes such things difficult to assess. But one need only to have listened to last April’s performance of the violin sonata by Wilhelm Grosz (which, for its part, can stand for a still-unfathomable number of unknown masterpieces) in order to at least presume that present-day programmes would seem far less redundant—and that compositions from late romanticism and the early 20th century would now be viewed in a different musical light.
A further direct impact of this concert series is the priceless opportunity for mdw students to participate in these discoveries and use their musical performances to help develop the present-day experience of this era both musically and artistically. For while the artistic parameters applied to the standard repertoire are becoming increasingly narrow due to personal role models and the constant availability of countless random recordings, the existence of a still-to-be-discovered era offers the great challenge and liberating opportunity of a situation where one has only to confront the notation in an independent manner and develop one’s own perspective based exclusively on what one sees.
As can be observed in every concert, doing so results in fresh and individual readings—giving rise to a performance practice that affords a new perspective on late romanticism and early modernism. It is to be hoped that this will, in turn, generate an artistic impulse comparable to what occurred in connection with the rediscovery of early music.
Even just this fact is reason enough to assert once more that Echo of the Unheard is indeed Vienna’s most important concert series, which we can only wish a collective ad multos annos—for in its absence, Viennese musical life would be decidedly poorer.
