The Vienna ´Hofoper´ between Mahler and Strauss

The era of Gustav Mahler (1897-1907) and the era of Richard Strauss/Franz Schalk (1918-1921) are reckoned to be the most splendid periods of the Vienna Opera. Little is known about Hans Gregor (1866 Dresden - Berlin 1945), who directed the Vienna Opera House from 1911 to 1918. The founder and leader of the "Komische Oper Berlin" was called to Vienna after the embittered retirement of Gustav Mahler and the three years intermezzo of Felix Weingartner. Gregor had become well known in Germany with highly acknowledged opera productions, where he transmitted his reforming ideas about the opera as a musical drama. He was considered to be the "Max Reinhard of the opera stage" but also a man with a good sense for the financial side. Gregor, a German, rigourous in organising, actually never gained popularity in Vienna. His programme for the opera, including repertoire, the new productions and their style of stage setting, was more and more denied by the local press.He was soon forgotten after his dismissal in1918 at the end of the war. The chronicles of the Vienna Opera deliver for a long while the unaccounted bad jugdement about the "unartistic" director, who "lost the heritage of Mahler definitive" and state the date of his his death as 1919 instead of 1945. The aim of the actual project is to establish an academic report on opera and ballet and their style of setting productions under the directorship of Gregor. To this day we don`t know the set designers of Richard Strauss opera "Ariadne auf Naxos", world premiere in Vienna 1916, and the "Salome" premiere 1918. An examination and interpretation of the statistics of performances between 1911 and 1918 will help to clarify Gregors structuring of new productions and repertoire. The files concerning "Oper" and "Generalintendanz" in the archives of the Austrian Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv will be the subject of investigation and evaluation: They contain Gregors own reports as well as his unpublished correspondence with composers, conductors, singers, publishers and artists. There are detailed estimates of costs for the stage settings, fees, libretti, scripts, newspaper articles, sometimes even ground plans of the stage. In many cases the stage designers are hitherto unknown. Not until 1920 did the play bills mention their name. Many stage settings have been erroneously attributed to the stage painter Anton Brioschi, who had made a documentation of all decorations he carried out for the Vienna Opera House. They were always signed "painted by A. Brioschi" but the artistic creator of the stage design is never named, not even Alfred Roller. The very first investigations show, that Gregor was not willing to return to the style of stage settings which was representative in Vienna before Gustav Mahler. In addition to the artistic council for décor and costumes, Hans Pühringer, and the decoration painter Anton Brioschi the following artists are to be named as stage designers in the years 1911/1912: Alfred Roller, Kolo Moser, Karl Walser, Ernst Stern, Heinrich Leffler, Joseph Urban, Karl Ludwig Prinz. The relevant stage settings and costume designs are to be documentated and analysed, to obtain, together with the results of the archive research, an evaluated conclusion about the style of stage settings. The increasing restrictions inflicted by the world war from 1914 onwards, will also be of importance: contents and interpretation (compositions by living artists of hostile countries were forbidden), social aspects (male members were sommoned to the front), in commercial and material aspects (temporary closure of the opera house, lack of material for decor and costumes).

The Vienna Opera house celebrates in these days its 140 th anniversary. Hans Gregor, director of the `Wiener Hofoper` from 1911 to 1918 can claim to have been, with eight years, the longest time in office, after Holender, Jahn and Mahler. The experienced stage director and founder of the `Komische Oper Berlin` was known in Germany for his epoch-making opera productions as the `Max Reinhard of the opera stage`. In Austria however, after 1918, he was hardly noticed and often had the reputation of being a spend thrifty Philistine and an artistic `vandal` who `finally wasted away the heritage of Gustav Mahler`. To achieve an objective and unbiased opinion the records in the `Österreichische Haus- und Hofarchiv` for the period 1911-1918 were consulted. With the contents of some 50.000 documents not only the entire spectrum of an important and famous music theatre between 1910 and 1918 was unveiled but also a chapter of the history of culture in Vienna during the last four years before the outbreak of the Ist World War and the proclamation of he Republic of Austria. The result is storage of around 3500 computer pages which can be consulted at any time and printed out. Correspondence, for the larger part hitherto unknown, with composers and set designers of the new productions came to light. Correspondence with singers, authors, impresarios, publishers were unearthed. Amongst others Richard Strauss, Oskar Strauss, Siegfried Wagner, Hans Pfitzner, Eugene d`Albert, Jules Massenet, Giacomo Puccini, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Alexander Zemlinsky, Vater und Sohn Korngold, Julius Bittner, Max Oberleithner, Wilhelm Kienzl, Franz Schreker, Karl Goldmark, Max v. Schillings, Franz Schmidt, Wolfgang v. Waltershausen, Leos Janacek; Alfred Roller, Heinrich Leffler, Karl Walser, Kolomann Moser, Ernst Stern, Julius Diez, Karl Ludwig Prinz, Hans Pühringer, Anton Brioschi, Oskar Kauffmann; Sergej Diaghilev, Jacques Dalcroce, Grete Wiesenthal, Mata Hari, Alma Mahler, Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehmann, Alfred Piccaver, Leo Slezak. A copy of this `selected archival material of the Vienna Court Opera from 1911 to 1918` can be found in the `Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaften- Universität Wien`. For further specific requests to this subject matter please refer to the email address werner-clementschitsch@aon.at. On the grounds of the presented results of the research the history of the stage settings and costume design of the Vienna Court Opera between 1911 and 1918 should be considered under new light. For his new productions, Hans Gregor commissioned not only the stage designer Anton Brioschi but also highly qualified artists of international fame with whom Max Reinhard collaborated: Alfred Roller, Karl Walser, Ludwig Prinz, Ernst Stern, Kolomann Moser, Heinrich Leffler, Josef Urban, Franz Schmitt, Oskar Kaufmann, and Hans Pühringer. With the starring of Sergei Diaghilev`s company Gregor presented in Vienna for the first time stage sets of the Franco-Russian avant-garde: Leon Bakst, Konstantin Korowin, Alexandre Benois, Sonja Delaunay, Boris Anisfeld, and Nikolai Roerich. Apart from the Strauss operas `Rosenkavalier`, `Ariadne auf Naxos`( finally we found the name of the stage designer) and `Salome`, the spectrum of Gregor`s world premieres and premieres in Vienna included `Parsifal`, `Tannhäuser, Pariser Fassung` (Wagner), `Pelleas und Melisande`(Debussy), `Mädchen aus dem goldenen Westen` (Puccini),`Jenufa` (Janacek), `Der Gaukler unserer Lieben Frau` (Massenet) `Notre Dame` (Schmidt), `Bergsee`(Bittner),`Das Spielwerk der Prinzessin` (Schreker), `Oberst Chabert` (Waltershausen), `Mona Lisa`(Schillings), `Violantha`, `Ring des Polykrates` (Korngold), `Eine florentinische Tragödie` (Zemlinsky) ... In view of the variety of the novel Viennese spectacles - more than half of the given operas were not much older than 30 years - Gregor`s repertoire must be considered as being avant-garde and even nowadays not out of date.