Vienna's cacophonous concert ends to the sound of slapping

‘Fighting at a Schoenberg concert.

- Terry Blain

Audience members slap one another. Police clear the hall.’ These were the headlines in the German-speaking press the morning after a concert at the gilded Musikverein in Vienna on 31 March 1913. For some reason, pandemonium erupted among the venue’s elegant clientele that evening. Fists and insults flew, and the event quickly garnered the infamous moniker ‘Skandalkonzert’, with ‘Watschenkonzert’ (‘Slap concert’) as a no less inglorious alternative title. So what exactly happened?

The road to 31 March had, in fact, been paved with good intentions. A 24-year-old writer, Erhard Buschbeck, had organised it, hoping to boost the profile of a rising young generation of Austrian composers (known nowadays as the Second Viennese School), in particular its leading practitioner Arnold Schoenberg. The Wiener Konzertverein Orchestra (forerunner of the presentday Vienna Symphony) was booked, and Schoenberg himself would do the conducting. Happy with the generous number of rehearsals he’d been given, he was almost certainly not expecting any kind of trouble.

The problem, however, was the music to be played on the evening. Schoenberg’s own Kammersymphonie Op. 9 was listed, as were Zemlinsky’s Maeterlinck Songs, the premieres of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra and two of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder, and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Much of this music was notably advanced in idiom for its period, and strained against the inherited harmonic conventions of the 19th century in boldly expressionistic fashion. It was not designed to be a comfortable, unchallenging listen.