Letters from the 1920s: Contributions to the history of the first performances of Schreker’s, Berg’s and Krenek’s operas in Russia

Abstract

The article focuses on the musical life of Leningrad and Moscow in the second half of the 1920s. During this time the Soviet Russia re-established connections with the West that had been disrupted in the years after the beginning of the First World War. Concerts of contemporary music were arranged, including modern music by European composers. Many of them came to the USSR to perform their works. This article presents new documents from the Austrian National Library and Vienna Library in the City Hall (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus). These documents are related to the first stagings of operas by Austrian composers Franz Schreker (“Der ferne Klang”), Alban Berg (“Wozzek”) and Ernst Krenek (“Der Sprung über den Schatten”, “Jonny spielt auf ”) in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The documents include letters from a renowned Soviet musicologist and composer Boris Asaf ’yev to Schreker and Berg, from a musicologist Viktor Belaiev to Berg and Krenek, from a theatre director Nikolai Smolitch and a conductor Samuil Samosud to Krenek regarding the stagings of the abovementioned operas in Leningrad, their public receptions, details of their performances as well as plans for prospective opera productions in Leningrad and Moscow. The documents, contributing to the existing publications, and in some cases correcting them, shed light on personal and professional contacts between Russian and Austrian musicians in the 1920s, and reconstruct the cultural context of the period. Moreover, they enable to clarify some facts related to the stage life of these opera productions and the reception of Western European music in the Soviet Russia. The article is accompanied by unique pictorial material.