A scandalous premiere

This abandonment is all the more surprising given that Marx was one of the most well-known and respected musicians of his day, from his initial rise to prominence as a composer of lieder (German art songs) in the 1910s up until his death in 1964. Widely regarded as one of the foremost figures in Austrian musical life, he was famous also as a critic and pedagogue, authoring volumes on harmony and counterpoint, and holding a post as Professor of Music at Vienna University from 1914 until 1952. An eccentric, larger than life character, Marx was also exceptionally sociable and well-connected, maintaining friendships and correspondences with an endless list of fellow composers and conductors across Europe, which reads like a starry who’s-who of 20th-century classical music: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Giacomo Puccini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ottorino Respighi, Alban Berg, Eugene Ormandy, Karol Szymanowski, Aram Khachaturian, and on and on.

What’s more, the work’s first performance in February 1922 seemingly had all the ingredients necessary for musical myth-making: a vast (if under-rehearsed) Vienna Philharmonic under Principal Conductor Felix Weingartner, and audience unrest that appears to rival even the legendary premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913. Although essentially tonal and most likely unproblematic for 21st-century ears, clearly some Austrian traditionalists thought Marx’s harmonies and textures were far too jarring and modern; a group opposed to the work blew whistles in the hall in an attempt to stop the performance going ahead, delaying the start of the concert before they could be silenced, and some newspapers reported fights breaking out in the stalls between members of the protest group and others in the audience who wanted to hear the piece undisturbed. But although those who protested were unlikely to have been won over, supporters of the work were similarly vocal in their praise, as the Wiener Extrablatt reported:

It all sounds like the stuff of musical legend, so how could this major work by a major composer be completely forgotten for so long? After the premiere Marx quickly moved on to composing his Nature Trilogy (1922–25), a set of three further grand orchestral works themed around the changing seasons, while the Autumn Symphony found a champion in conductor Clemens Krauss, who conducted a handful of further performances in Vienna and Marx’s hometown of Graz. But even though the Autumn Symphony’s unapologetic boldness and modernity had provoked a scandal among conservative Viennese concertgoers at its premiere in 1922, Marx’s subsequent refusal to reject Romanticism and embrace the avant-garde meant that he increasingly found himself branded as reactionary and old-fashioned. Despite his enduring high status in Austrian musical life, within a few years much of his music seemed embarrassingly overblown and hopelessly outmoded, and after 1925 the Autumn Symphony fell silent. By the 1940s Marx’s reputation as the grand old man of traditional, tonal music in Austria was sealed, and after his death in 1964 his compositions — with the partial exception of his lieder — sank into total obscurity.

It wasn’t until 2004 that the conductor Michel Swierczewski, on the lookout for some special rarity worthy of rediscovery, had the massive Autumn Symphony score sent to him by Universal Edition. Convinced of the work’s quality he set about preparing a concert, which took place in Graz in October 2005, and confirmed that over 80 years the work had lost none of its power:

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