Exiles Honored in Austria

Over the summer music festivities in Vienna and Salzburg this year lay the 50-year-old shadow of the Anschluss . Austria was remembering and honoring, in official ways, the artists, musicians, writers and scholars who fled the Nazi conversion.

“I think it was a re-evaluation of the whole situation,” Prof. Karl Geiringer reports, “and I think it was a very sincere, good thing to do.”

Geiringer was invited by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna to deliver two lectures, one on Bach and one on Brahms and Schumann, before large audiences in his hometown. The musicologist received his doctorate from the University of Vienna, and in 1938 had been librarian and museum curator for the society for eight years.

When the Nazis arrived, though, Geiringer departed.

“It was rather unpleasant,” he recalls in remarkable understatement, “but leaving the country was not difficult if you left everything behind.”

The scholar eventually took his family to London, where he worked for the BBC and taught at the Royal College of Music.

Emigrating to the United States, Geiringer became head of graduate music studies at Boston College for 21 years. Since 1962, he has taught at UC Santa Barbara, retiring in 1972 but continuing in an emeritus capacity.

Since the war, Geiringer has returned to Vienna, but this time was overwhelmed by the response, public, official and in the press, both to his own lectures and to the work and presence of other exiles. “The change was enormous,” he says. “Now the emigrants have the highest honors.”

Back in Santa Barbara, Geiringer says that he and his present wife “had a wonderful time,” in Austria, and that this facing of the past will ease the way to the future. For himself at 89, with two more scholarly publications in the works, he says, “I will be able to keep busy for the foreseeable future.”

Another exile who received an effusive official welcome-back in Austria this summer is Ernst Krenek, who forged a substantial pre-war reputation with works such as the atypically jazzy opera “Jonny Spielt Auf.” Like prophets, composers are often lightly regarded in their home towns. Krenek, however, found much cheering by public and press in June when his 1955 opera “Pallas Athene Weint” received a concert performance courtesy of the Vienna Musikverein.

Numerous other works by Krenek were performed this summer in Vienna, and in Salzburg as well, where his oratorio “Symeon der Stylit” had its premiere July 27. The Musikverein is planning other Krenek programs for 1990, when the composer will celebrate his 90th birthday. The Vienna Staatsoper is reportedly planning either Krenek’s “Karl V” or “Leben des Orest” for 1990.

There is, of course, a certain irony in the acclaim now greeting a composer whose works were banned 50 years ago. In his adopted land, however, cultural indifference has proved nearly as effective as political censorship. Krenek has lived in Southern California since 1947--Palm Springs currently--but is scarcely known off campuses, and there largely for theoretical and pedagogic writings. Ever-enterprising Long Beach Opera staged “Jonny Spielt Auf” in 1986--Music Center Opera? Opera Pacific? San Diego Opera?

IN CANADA: The National Ballet of Canada has announced that Reid Anderson will become artistic director of the company, effective Jan. 1, 1990. A former principal dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet, Anderson is noted for his staging of works by John Cranko, including the “Onegin” performed here by the company in June.

The National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company are much closer to a new home in Toronto. The Ontario provincial government has provided almost an entire city block for the site of the Ballet Opera House, and $65 million (Canadian). The federal government has already contributed $1.2 million for initial design and development, by Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, to the $230-million project.

PEOPLE: Composer/conductor Stephen Mosko, a CalArts grad and current faculty member, has been named music director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.