“Hugo Kauder’s First Symphony was first performed in Vienna in 1924 – it has never been performed since then,” says Karin Wagner. The musicologist and pianist, who was born in Klagenfurt and grew up in the Upper Mühlviertel, is the world’s leading expert on the life and work of this forgotten Jewish composer, who, like many of his colleagues, fled Austria from the National Socialists. She wrote the only biography about Hugo Kauder (2018, Böhlau Verlag). Tomorrow, Thursday, she will be there when his symphonic opening work will be performed for the second time in New York’s Carnegie Hall (“The Orchestra Now” under conductor Leon Botstein) – invited by the American “Hugo Kauder Society”.
Wagner has been teaching at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna since 2001, OÖN readers have known the specialist for years as a well-founded music critic. Wagner came to Kauder through her work with the Jewish composer Erich Zeisl, whose biographer she is also. Zeisl was a Kauder student, and Wagner aired Kauder’s correspondence with the philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz (1881-1969) in the Marbach Literature Archive near Stuttgart – “I knew then that nobody had ever looked at it before me, I wanted to write about it,” says Wagner. The violinist and violist Kauder was not only a composer (1928 Music Prize of the City of Vienna), but also an important music theorist, including his own theory of scales, which was published in Vienna in 1932. Along with Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith and Anton Webern, among others, he was also a founding member of the still existing International Society for New Music in Salzburg. In 1938 Kauder fled to the USA via the Netherlands and England.
In the private home of Zeisl’s daughter Barbara, who is married to Arnold Schönberg’s son Ronny and lives in Los Angeles, Wagner rummaged through countless documents.
According to this, Kauder would have trusted in the spiritual forces in Austria to the last to put a stop to the National Socialists. In vain – he witnessed the November pogroms of 1938 in Vienna, after which he fled.
Wagner’s expertise can also be experienced on November 5 (8 p.m.) in the Kulturhaus im Schöffl in Engerwitzdorf. Under the title “Letters from Exile” she reads letters from Kauder and Zeisl – accompanied by the Trio Shalom (Harald Hattinger, Kurt Edlmayr, Günter Wagner). Tickets/information at: www.imschoeffl.at.
Karin Wagner: “Hugo Kauder (1888-1972), composer – music philosopher – theorist”biography, Böhlau Verlag, 224 pages, 36 euros.
Source: Nachrichten
