The Emil Hertzka era

Emil Hertzka (1869-1932)

There are no documents about Emil Hertzka's motives for decisively changing the publisher's profile. In any case, Universal-Edition henceforth relied on contemporaries. This was tantamount to a revolution.

Hertzka had no musical training, but he did have an excellent musical advisor in Josef Venantius von Wöss. Hertzka was guided by a keen sense of intuition and thus became one of the greatest promoters of modernism that music history has ever seen. From a purely statistical point of view, this attitude was already documented in the first years of his directorship: in June 1909, the contract with Gustav Mahler was concluded, followed in July 1909 by that with Franz Schreker.

The correspondence with Mahler shows how Hertzka was able to combine professional attention to detail and an eye for the essential with human warmth. In this way he won the trust of Mahler, who henceforth wanted all his works published by UE and sought to integrate those still with other publishers into UE.

In October 1909, Hertzka accepted Arnold Schönberg into the publishing house, followed by Alfredo Casella in June 1910 and Alexander Zemlinsky almost simultaneously. The tendency is unmistakable, but the astonishing thing is probably that within only two (!) years Hertzka took the step towards musical modernism that was significant for the further history of the publishing house. Did Hertzka suspect that Schönberg would establish his own great school with magnetic effect for his students, that he would become "the battery, the charge", "at which charging becomes an imperative." (Wolfgang Rihm)?

In addition to Schönberg, another person who knew how to implement visions and gather like-minded people around him was to play a formative role in Emil Hertzka's success: his wife Yella Hertzka. Yella had been an early advocate of women's rights and founded a horticultural school in Vienna for young women. She organised garden parties in the park of this school and invited representatives of the Viennese music scene, especially of Universal Edition, such as Gustav Mahler, Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud, Zoltan Kodály, Ernst Krenek and Arnold Schönberg.

As a genuine businessman, Hertzka must have been aware of the difficulty of being able to realise such a programme, also in terms of public recognition. Even Franz Schreker, with whom a general contract had been concluded for his music-dramatic work, had not yet had any success as an opera dramatist at that time. Hertzka must have literally foreseen success, and indeed Schreker's operas became the most frequently performed stage works of the time over the next 15 years, seriously rivaling those of Richard Strauss.

The great talents of the monarchy