![]() Hanslick is more light-hearted and enjoys being provocative and amusing. Scholarship was extraordinary at the time presuming a knowledge of world literature, and at least a literate fluency in French, English, Italian, Latin and Greek.īeyond that, there were the writing styles of the different individuals. Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schreker and indeed Strauss probably had more Italianate German singers in mind rather than the huge great Wagnerian singers we tend to hear in these roles today. This alone meant there were many styles of singing in German. It was invariably performed in the vernacular with German speaking singers specialising in French and Italian repertoire. There were parallel venues for light musical theatre in most cities, but opera was certainly a more popular genre with a wider social catchment than it is today. It would not be directly comparable with Broadway or London’s West End. It was a more popular medium of entertainment, and until the dominance of cinema, the most extravagant theatrical experience to be had. But the opera then was not the opera today. Reading and translating the extraordinary degree of scholarship assumed by writers and readers, it might be tempting to think times were definitely better in those days. It’s like being in a time machine, catapulted back a century. ![]() More to the point, to translate complex cultural commentary from a century ago means trying to enter the headspace of the writer and understand exactly the point being made. On the other hand, there have been countless times I have translated a word or concept and discovered it moving comfortably into one of today’s buzzwords. And, there was the challenge of trying to understand what was meant by words that have clearly changed their meaning over the last century – or at least, shifted their centre of gravity with one now infrequent meaning being the principal meaning a hundred years ago. I discovered words that were derived from the names of popular authors turned into adjectives – authors popular at the time, but largely forgotten today. ![]() It requires untangling complex syntax that would be unacceptable in English. It is one thing to skim read one of these extraordinarily lengthy Feuilltons, and quite another to translate them. In spite of the loss of Julius Korngold and his ability to discuss works as if standing in front of a large lecture hall, there were still any number of excellent writers available, including reviews of Das Lied von der Erde in New York in 1937 and a Mahler Cycle conducted by Hermann Scherchen in Vienna in the same year. Though the culture section remained largely untouched, they took the opportunity to retire Julius Korngold, or he possibly took the decision to retire himself. In 1934, the Austro-Fascist government of Engelbert Dollfuß took over the paper. I haven’t decided on the cut-off date, but I suspect it will be around 1936 or 1937. Hanslick even gets Mahler’s name wrong and refers to him as “August Mahler”. They began with Eduard Hanslick reviewing Mahler’s completion of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Die drei Pintos – the Three Pintos, a performance that took place in 1889, eight years before Mahler took the position as Music Director at Vienna’s Court Opera (as the State Opera was then known). These included articles and more general Feuiletons or essays on Mahler. I finished my second book for Yale University Press on the music of exile and started the process of translating the reviews about a month ago. ![]() After I posted it on this blog, an offer from Routledge followed for an entire book on Mahler as viewed through the lens of the Neue freie Presse. It was from 1901 and was a general article examining the meaning of “Modernism” and its application to music. Exactly one year ago, I translated the very first mention of Gustav Mahler by the music journalist Julius Korngold in the Habsburg “paper of record”, die Neue Freie Presse. ![]()
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