Kontroverse Wege der Moderne

The life and work of Eduard Steuermann reflects the challenging and controversial diversification of modernity. His correspondence with important composers, conductors and musicians reveals a fascinating personality and opens valuable new perspectives on the history of music in the 20th century.
Edward Steuermann was born in 1892 in Sambor in the eastern part of the former Polish-Austrian region near Lemberg, today part of the Ukraine. He achieved a very high level of piano playing, becoming a pupil in the master class of Ferruccio Busoni, before starting to study composition with Arnold Schoenberg on Busoni's recommendation. With Schoenberg, Steuermann embarked on a lifetime relationship not untouched by difficulties. Schoenberg - a Moses-like messianic figure in Freud's sense, laying down lawful tablets for the path of New Music - posed inevitable challenges for Steuermann, who played many works of his teacher for the first time as world premiere performances. These works included not only works for solo piano but many ensemble pieces with piano such as the "Ode to Napoleon" and the solo part of Schoenberg's piano concerto op. 42.
In the 1920s, Steuermann became friends with his piano pupil Theodor W. Adorno, as well as Alban Berg, Adorno's composition instructor. Like Anton Webern, Steuermann was associated with the circle around Karl Kraus, artists who passionately embraced a lifelong commitment about the unity of ethics and aesthetics. In 1936, Steuermann fled Nazi persecution to resettle in Los Angeles, where his sister the actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel lived. Viertel enabled contact of a famous colony of emigrants with film personalities such as Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin.
Steuermann was regularly a guest of his sister and found possibilities to compose, but it was as an pianist that he achieved prominence in New York, giving many concerts with notable success, particularly a Chopin recital at Juilliard School of Music, where he taught piano. After Schoenberg's death in 1951, this great Atlas-like father-figure receded from Steuermann's life. In a creative space independent of Schoenberg, Steuermann contributed a lasting artistic legacy that mediates between the Schoenberg school, Neo-Classic tendencies and the Darmstadt Avantgarde, thereby bridging oppositional musical orientations.
This edition of letters contains two volumes and offers readers an annotated correspondence, including introductory essays and a six-part foundational in which the leading ideas and topics are traced and evaluated. The first volume is dedicated to the correspondence between Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor W. Adorno and René Leibowitz. The correspondence between Steuermann and Schoenberg from 1912 to 1951 casts a vivid light on their unique and meaningful artistic collaboration, one sometimes touched by ambivalence and deep conflict.
The letters between Steuermann and Theodor W. Adorno are of comparable value, providing a decades-long record of many-facetted issues of aesthetics and musical interpretation, and especially the controversial relationship of these figures to the Avantgarde after 1945. In this chapter are included parts of the letters between Adorno and Steuermann.
Part three of this edition presents the exchange of letters involving the conductor and composer René Leibowitz. These letters display his own individual accents, relating for example to the compositions of Steuermann and Leibowitz, to issues of Beethoven interpretation, as well as to theoretical writings about New Music and the performances of works by Schoenberg and Anton Webern. (Translation: William Kinderman, U.C.L.A.)

The research and publication of this project have been generously supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).