Jewish Vienna - new CD by JCOM with Chen Reiss
The JCOM's new CD with soprano Chen Reiss will be released on April 25, 2025. Titled "JEWISH VIENNA," it features works by well-known and lesser-known Jewish composers in late 19th and early 20th-century Vienna, whose lives intersected many times in the city's vibrant cultural scene.
Conductor Daniel Grossmann on the program:
From the mid-19th century onward, Vienna experienced a remarkable flowering of Jewish art and culture, unparalleled in almost any other European city. Jewish artists, musicians, and intellectuals found fertile ground for their creativity here. This scene experienced a brief heyday at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
Gustav Mahler and Alexander Zemlinsky
At the center of musical life during this era was Gustav Mahler. Around him, as a kind of artistic sun, the other composers of Vienna gathered, and many creative connections between them shaped this period. It is precisely these connections that we wish to make audible on this CD.
Alexander Zemlinsky's mother, born in Sarajevo, was the daughter of a Muslim mother and the Sephardic Jew Shem Tov Semo. Her husband, Zemlinsky's father, came from a Catholic family but converted to Judaism and became secretary of the Sephardic community in Vienna. The young Zemlinsky grew up in this strongly religious environment.
On 22 January 1900, Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of Zemlinsky's opera Es war einmal... at the Vienna Court Opera, which he had composed between 1897 and 1899 at the age of only 26.
In the autumn of 1900, Zemlinsky began a passionate love affair with Alma Schindler, which ended in 1901 when she met and married Gustav Mahler. This turn of events was not only a personal but also an artistic one, as it strained the long-standing creative relationship between him and Mahler.
The cheerful waltzes from 1898, which open this CD, already demonstrate Zemlinsky's musical versatility and talent.
Alexander Zemlinsky and Erich Wolfgang Korngold
In 1890, Zemlinsky won the gold medal in a piano competition and a Bösendorfer concert grand piano, which he later presented to the famous music critic Julius Korngold. It is assumed that Korngold's son, the later composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, played this instrument. Mahler is said to have called the young Korngold a "genius" as a child, and the child prodigy also received lessons from Zemlinsky as a child.
As early as 1910, at the age of 11, Erich Wolfgang Korngold began work on his ballet-pantomime The Snowman, which premiered two years later at the Vienna Court Opera—an exceptionally mature work orchestrated by Zemlinsky. Korngold's Shakespeare songs were composed between 1937 and 1941, partly in Vienna and later in exile in California, where he worked as a successful film composer. Despite his fame in Hollywood, he was largely ignored as a classical composer during his lifetime.
Josefine Winter and Alfred Grünfeld
Two other names, almost forgotten today, also belong to this remarkable Viennese heyday: Alfred Grünfeld and Josefine Winter.
Josefine Winter was born in Vienna in 1873 and grew up under difficult circumstances. Her mother suffered from depression and was placed in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. Although Josefine received piano lessons, her great musical talent remained undiscovered for a long time because she was denied academic music training as a girl. In 1900, through the family's family doctor, Josef Breuer, who was a key inspiration for Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis, she met her future second husband, the physician and poet Josef Winter, who supported her musical development. The couple was closely connected to Viennese musical life and met Gustav Mahler on several occasions. In 1910, Josefine Winter attended the premiere of Mahler's 8th Symphony in Munich.
As a Jew, she was subjected to severe repression after the “Anschluss” of Austria: first, she was taken to a collective apartment in 1938 and then deported to Theresienstadt on July 15, 1942, where she died on January 20, 1943.
Alfred Grünfeld, born in Prague in 1852, grew up in a musical household, although his father was a leather merchant. He began music lessons at the age of four and self-published his first piano piece at the age of twelve. In Prague, he studied piano with the great composer Bedřich Smetana. In 1873, after studying in Berlin, he moved to Vienna, where he enjoyed great success as a concert pianist. Tours took him throughout Europe and even to North America. In 1913, he appeared in the Austrian silent film Johann Strauss and the Blue Danube. He became friends with the Waltz King, and his concert paraphrases of Strauss's waltzes brought him considerable fame.
Alfred Grünfeld and Gustav Mahler
A remarkable incident from Mahler's youth is said to have occurred in the Grünfeld family. In 1871, when Gustav Mahler was sent by his father to Prague to attend school, he stayed with the Grünfelds. Alma Mahler later recounted the incident, which took place in a dark room: Mahler was an involuntary witness to a brutal love scene between the maid and the son of the house. He jumped up to help the girl, but she did not thank him for his efforts. He was severely insulted by both and sworn to secrecy. This episode left a deep impression. Just as one can spend all day angry at people who have annoyed one in one's dreams, Gustav never forgave the young pianist who had given him this shock . In 1907, under pressure from the anti-Semitic Viennese press, Gustav Mahler was forced out of his position as director of the Vienna Court Opera. A severe blow for Mahler, who shortly afterwards also had to cope with the death of his four-year-old daughter, Maria Anna. A few months later, he was diagnosed with a serious heart condition.
In the summer of 1910, a time marked by a crisis in his marriage to Alma and his failing health, Mahler composed the Adagio of his 10th Symphony. He died a few months later, in May 1911. Mahler's death also marked the end of an era of Jewish life in Vienna.