Read on to discover just why a concert showcasing young Austrian talent descended into a brawl...
Why did this highbrow concert end in a brawl?
'Fighting at a Schoenberg concert. Audience members slap one another. Police clear the hall.’ These were the headlines in the German-speaking press the morning after a concert at the gilded Musikverein in Vienna on 31 March 1913. For some reason, pandemonium erupted among the venue’s elegant clientele that evening. Fists and insults flew, and the event quickly garnered the infamous moniker ‘Skandalkonzert’, with ‘Watschenkonzert’ (‘Slap concert’) as a no less inglorious alternative title. So what exactly happened?
A concert of modern, challenging works
The road to 31 March had, in fact, been paved with good intentions. A 24-year-old writer, Erhard Buschbeck, had organised it, hoping to boost the profile of a rising young generation of Austrian composers (known nowadays as the Second Viennese School), in particular its leading practitioner Arnold Schoenberg. The Wiener Konzertverein Orchestra (forerunner of the present-day Vienna Symphony) was booked, and Schoenberg himself would do the conducting. Happy with the generous number of rehearsals he’d been given, he was almost certainly not expecting any kind of trouble.
The problem, however, was the music to be played on the evening. Schoenberg’s own Kammersymphonie Op. 9 was listed, as were Zemlinsky’s Maeterlinck Songs, the premieres of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra and two of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder, and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Much of this music was notably advanced in idiom for its period, and strained against the inherited harmonic conventions of the 19th century in boldly expressionistic fashion. It was not designed to be a comfortable, unchallenging listen.
When Schoenberg's work was played, the audience began hissing and whistling...
Details of what actually took place are in parts vague, but the broad outline is clear. Webern’s Six Pieces opened the concert, drawing audible protests from some audience members. The Zemlinsky songs were more warmly greeted, but the rot truly set in with Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie. This 20-minute movement already had a controversial history: its premiere six years earlier in Vienna had attracted a sniggering, hissing and foot-stamping response. History repeated itself on this occasion, when the Kammersymphonie again provoked ripples of hissing and whistling, with fisticuffs reported in the gallery.
The worst though, was yet to come. Berg’s songs were next on the programme, and during their performance a general hubbub of jeering, whistling and laughter gradually rose to a peak. Shouts were heard, recommending that both Berg and the song texts’ author Peter Altenberg be committed to a lunatic asylum – Altenberg was, alas, living in one already. An irate Webern chipped in by yelling ‘Throw the rabble out!’, and somewhere in the confusion that followed Buschbeck slapped an individual who allegedly called him a ‘scoundrel’. That slap was, the operetta composer Oscar Straus later quipped, ‘the most harmonious sound we got to hear all evening’.
The concert that ended in a brawl... police arrived and arrests were made
At some point, the house lights were switched off, making it difficult for combatants to pursue their confrontations. Police arrived, arrests were made and the evening ended without the final item, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, being heard. The orchestral players had, it seems, long since disappeared from view, seeking refuge from the astonishing fracas they saw unravelling before them. Eventually the hall emptied, and the whole unseemly incident appeared to be over.
A slap, slander and lawsuits
Or was it? Just days later, the target of Buschbeck’s slap, a Dr Viktor Albert, filed legal proceedings against him, and Buschbeck countersued for being dubbed a ‘scoundrel’. In his defence, Albert claimed the music at the Skandalkonzert was so ‘enervating’, ‘damaging’ and ‘depressing’ that the audience reaction was essentially a cry for help, and unavoidable. Schoenberg himself weighed in with the opinion that the real criminals were those who interrupted the evening with their injudicious catcalling and mischief-making. ‘It was breaking the law to make such a racket,’ the composer commented. ‘A concert ticket only gives you the right to listen to the concert, not to disrupt the performances.’
After the concert brawl... Schoenberg launches a new society
When the rival actions reached the lawcourts a few weeks later, both Buschbeck and Albert were found guilty and fined for their misdemeanours. For Schoenberg, the entire debacle was one more demonstration that music-making in Vienna was terminally riddled by cliquishness, controversy and conservatism. Five years later, in 1918, he finally devised his own solution, founding an organisation called ‘The Society for Private Musical Performances’. Critics, applause and ‘demonstrations of disapproval’ were all prohibited at the Society’s concerts, and membership was carefully vetted in advance to include only ‘serious’ listeners.
For three halcyon years, Schoenberg’s dream-formula for concert-giving worked. In total, 353 performances were given across 117 concerts before a rampant hyperinflation crisis in the Austrian economy forced the Society’s closure. And as for Buschbeck? Having had his unwanted brush with the law, he would from now on focus his attention largely on the theatre…