Musicologica Austriaca (Feb 2023)
Gottfried von Einem, Bertolt Brecht, and Franz Kafka: New Perspectives on Musico-Literary Collaboration from the Einem Archive
Abstract
Once both globally renowned and tightly enmeshed in Austrian musical culture, Gottfried von Einem has faded into obscurity in the some thirty years since his death. However, his Nachlass (estate), left in its entirety to the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna, paints a fascinating portrait of this complex and contradictory figure. From a musicological standpoint alone, Einem’s archive is a goldmine: almost entirely unstudied, it offers a wealth of insights into postwar musical culture in Austria and Germany, of which Einem was once a central figure. But his archive holds even more interest as a resource for interdisciplinary scholarship, relevant to both musicologists and literary scholars in its extensive documentation of the operas Einem adapted from canonical German literary texts, including Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (Danton’s death), Franz Kafka’s Der Prozeß (The trial), Johann Nestroy’s Der Zerrissene (Torn apart), Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Besuch der alten Dame (The visit of the old lady), and Friedrich Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and love). Crucially, it offers important new insights into the creative partnerships between Einem and his literary collaborators, a group that counted both Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Dürrenmatt among its numbers. While my focus here will be on the collaboration between Einem and Brecht, Einem’s archive is an unexpected and long-undiscovered lodestone for Austro-German musical, literary, and cultural studies that warrants further exploration.
