Martin Zenck: …die Freiheit vom Banne Schönbergs…

Neue Bewertungen des Komponisten und Pianisten Eduard Steuermann

This article considers three main points: 1) the significance of Schumann’s Kreisleriana in musical interpretation seminars during the “Kranichstein Summer Courses for New Music” in 1954 with Eduard Steuermann, Rudolf Kolisch, and Theodor W. Adorno; 2) the circumstances surrounding their exiles in the USA; and 3) Steuermann’s compositions that attempt to break free of Schoenberg’s influence, in particular, the Improvisation and Allegro for violin and piano (1954/55). This study’s point of departure maintains that the conflict between the Darmstadt avant-garde and the middle generation of the Schoenberg School was due not to age and therefore generational difference but rather to the pressures surrounding the historical-moral legitimacy of the cultural and political situation in Darmstadt, and, more generally, in West Germany. Although the American composers John Cage, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, and Stefan Wolpe (perhaps also Eduard Steuermann) individually helped determine new directions in Darmstadt after 1954/1957, a productive dialogue—whether it be institutional, aesthetic, or concerning the history of knowledge—was never established between the heritage of Bauhaus principles taught at Black Mountain College and the Darmstadt and Cologne Schools’ concept of an open work of art (“offenes Kunstwerk”).

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