TAPE NUMBER: I., SIDE ONE

AUGUST 26, 1975

COLE: In an attempt to understand Eric Zeisl, the man and composer, perhaps it would be appropriate to begin with his family background.

ZIESL: Yes, I think that would be very important, because there are several features in his music that reflect that family background. Both of his grandparents came from Czechoslovakia, and I think you probably noticed, because you are so familiar with his music, that there is a definite Slavic flavor in many of his pieces.

COLE: Yes.

ZEISL: In the family of the father, the grandfather [Emanuel Zeisl] came to Vienna when he was thirteen years old as an apprentice Schlosser, which is a blacksmith who makes locks. And this was of course at that time a very expanding city -- Vienna always had many beautiful palaces and gardens, and all these gates needed locks -- and I think it was a lucrative profession. He made good, apparently, because -- I don’t know how his life went, but at the time I heard about it, he had a big house, which already seemed to be reserved for people who were doing well (because usually you lived in apartments and didn’t have houses).

He had six children. And each of the children -- there were three girls and three boys; the girls got handsome dowries, and the boys each got.. . . like a shop. It was either a restaurant or a liquor store. It was told in the family that he said -- see, my father-in-law was the oldest -- Sigmund, I have to give something that goes by itself, because he's not smart enough to make a go of it otherwise [laughter] And so the coffeehouse that Eric's family owned was set up by the [grand]father.

Now, the grandmother [Rosalie Reichmann] later lived one floor below the family, in the same house. It must have been below, because they lived at the top. According to Eric, she couldn't read and write. She said to Eric when he was a child, "Eric, read me this in the paper, because I don't know where my glasses are. But Eric, as a little boy, knew that she said that because she couldn't read and write. My mother-in-law told me that she was the most fantastic cook that ever was, and that on a little alcohol burner, just one burner -- in the war they had no coal or anything, and stoves were out of commission so to say -- she could make a three-course dinner that would make you faint with joy.

So both these grandparents on the father's side were kind of very folksy and sturdy. And you know, there is a certain strength in Eric's music, and I think it comes from that heritage. It was not at all an intellectual heritage, but it was one of joy in life and of strength. And I think this tradition of the restaurant business came from this, partly from the grandmother. But though she seems to be such an illiterate type, it is through her that Eric is related to a very famous poet, Richard Beer-Hofmann, because she was born Beer-Hofmann, and I think that was like a cousin of Eric's. He was a very famous poet whose plays were played in the Burgtheater. And he's very well known.

Now, the family of the-mother was different. They also came from Czechoslovakia. The grandfather "Michael Feitler] was something like a Jewish scholar, and he was probably like tape recorder turned off] one of those Hasidic types, you know. Eric told me that his best, or maybe only, friend in the village was the village priest, because he knew Hebrew and he would often come to this grandfather's house and converse and discuss with the grandfather. He seems to have been a very nice and joyous kind of person, but also studious. He introduced Eric at a very early age into the Bible and brought him to the synagogue and developed in him this religious feeling that his music expresses so often.

Now, the grandmother [Rosa Bloch] was a very different type. She was a very negative person, it seems. And Eric said at one time that he hated three things: Hitler, the sun, and his grandmother, in this order. Slaughter] (He could not stand sun, and as a matter of fact it was confirmed by the doctor that he had something in his skin that let the ultraviolet rays through, you know -- didn't defend itself. It was really very bad for him. So this was almost killing for him to be in this sunny California, which is for others so beautiful and so wonderful. He was constantly wishing for fog and rain and all these kinds of things that were denied here. Ever since his death, the temperature has very much changed. But when we lived here in the years that we were here, it was hotter than Africa (so we were told by people who came from Africa). And he suffered very much from this. He has diaries where -- every so often -- every second day he writes down the temperature as the only event of the day -- 98, or something like this. And it was just terrible for him.

Now, this grandmother -- you know, the grandfather came to Vienna, got himself out of his poverty, and had a shop on the Mariahilferstrasse. With sponges. It seems that his own brother betrayed him and somehow took the shop away from him by bad dealings, by underhanded dealings. And the grandmother was very, very bitter about this. They went to live with Eric, and Eric's father supported them, but that made her even more bitter. She tried to be useful, and one of the things she did was darn the children's socks. So she wouldn't allow them to kneel: when they were playing at the table, she'd go, Knie night, knie night!" They would imitate her, you know. She seems to have been the bane of their childhood. And Eric didn't like her at all. She represented at a very early stage the negative force or influence of the stars that always appeared in Eric's life. She was the one that was always against him doing anything with music. For instance, as a child he would sit at the piano and fantasize; and she would say, "Er spielt schon wieder stats zu üben" -- "He plays instead of practicing" -- instead of listening and being maybe delighted that a child could do such a thing, which was probably very unusual.

Now, the father [Sigmund] was a very simple person, but he was not dumb. He had what you call common sense, a lot of common sense, and the strange thing was that Eric was his favorite son of all the four. He understood him better than the mother [Kamilla], who was very smart and clever but did not understand him at all. There was a very great friction, almost like a war between them. And I think Eric was probably naughtier than he would have been, just to get her attention. When I came into the family, when I was introduced and had dinners there, I was told that Eric's place was always next to the mother, and that in spite of the fact that this would result in countless Ohrfeigen -- head cuffs -- he would stick to this place. He was probably doing his best to get her attention. And she had this big family (she was the real mother hen). And I think -- I cannot say it differently -- she resented Eric because he tried to be different than the other children, or maybe asked for more attention and by his talent demanded more attention. And she wasn't going to give in to this nonsense. She found that everyone deserved the same portion of her attention, and who was he to demand anything else than the others? I think the only way he could ever get her attention was when he was sick, and then she proved to be a marvelous mother, according to his tales. I liked her very much; she was a very clever person. When you speak . . . . We have in German a word that is called Mutterwitz, and that you could really say about Eric -- I mean, that he got it from [her].

She was very quick and she hit the point. She was not an educated person, as the father wasn't either. But the father loved music. By the way, as I told you, the grandfather on the father's side had six children. The oldest girl, I was told, had a wonderful soprano voice and was studying singing, but she would never be allowed to go on the stage. That was just not allowed in these days. It was considered very low-class, as you would say. My father-in-law belonged to a music society, the merchantmen's singing group Wiener Kaufmännischer Gesangverein]. And the youngest boy [Erich, Eric's uncle] became a famous tenor in the Nuremberg Opera. He was there for all his life until the Nazis came -- no, he had retired before the Nazis came. On the mother's side, I was told, the grandfather wanted very badly to become a cantor, but that needed even more studying and money, which wasn't there. So he didn't become a cantor. But the love of music was there. Eric's mother had another brother who had absolute ear [perfect pitch] and could play by ear and sing from the piano, but he was as negative as the grandmother. And

nothing became of him. There was the talent on both sides to give him this musical talent.

I think that Eric's position as the third one was a very difficult one, because there were the two oldest 1Egon, Walter] who were naturally doing everything already before him, and then there came the youngest [Wilhelm] who needed the mother's attention because he was a baby. So that gave him an unfortunate position. And I think it showed very, very early that he was an extremely nervous child. I was told that my mother-in-law went with him to a famous psychiatrist [Batka?] -- you didn't call them psychiatrists but Neurologs. He must have had symptoms of extraordinary gravity for them to do that. But when I asked Eric, he never wanted to talk about it. Apparently it was still painful to him in his adult age, what he had gone through as a child there.

COLE: I see. Can we talk a little bit about the family circumstances, especially in the rather rigidly class-oriented society that Vienna was in the early twentieth century? Eric's immediate family owned a coffeehouse?

ZEISL: Ja. They owned a coffeehouse. In the early days, in his early childhood, they were not rich, but well off. But they were not educated people, and that made them lower-middle-class people. They had a nice apartment in this house -- it was Heinestrasse 42. The street was then called Heinestrasse, after the poet Heine. It was a corner house that bordered the Praterstern, a big square which had the Heinestrasse on one side. And the windows went into the Heinestrasse, and here was the big street which is called the Praterstrasse (it's still called the Praterstrasse) on the other side. And the windows looked on the Heinestrasse and the big square, which was called the Praterstern. It was called Praterstern because, like L'Etoile in Paris, it had so many streets leading into it like rays.

Right opposite was the North Railway Station. It was the railway station where the people arrived from the north, which means Czechoslovakia and Poland. Right east was the Prater. The Prater is a big park, you probably have heard. One part of it is the so-called Wurstel-prater, which is like an amusement park. It has coffee-houses, and some of these coffeehouses were quite elegant and even the nobility frequented them. When they went to have a good time, they would come down there. Then came a part of the Prater that had big, tree-lined alleys (allées, as you call them). The trees are chestnut trees, and in the spring it's very, very beautiful: everything, with these chestnuts in bloom, like candles. And it's a very, very broad avenue, through which the Kaiser would daily make his outings. He would come down in his carriage from Schonbrunn and go through the Prater and back. On the two sides of this big allee were riding bridle paths, and there the nobility would ride along to see the kaiser and greet him. So this was quite an imposing picture, probably. From their balcony they could see the kaiser coming down. When you looked to the west, you could see from the balcony the hills of the Wienerwald with their castles and the ruins on them, which reminded you of the past. So I think it was a very stimulating place. And this romantic trait that Eric is showing in his music I think was nurtured there, both by the Prater and these views. Behind these allées and princely riding paths was the big park, which was a wilderness. There lovers would meet, and you could meet there birds and deer and everything wild. It was the former hunting region of the emperor, which at one time he had given to the people of Vienna.

COLE: Such proximity to the Prater probably encouraged Eric's love of nature music and certainly of ceremonial music, which figures in many of his compositions.

ZEISL: But also the railway station had its influence, I think, because from the railway station would come the young peasant girls in their colorful costumes. They were coming to be nursemaids. At that time, the rich ladies would not nurse their children themselves. They would have these peasant girls who were strong and healthy. They left their children, usually illegitimate, behind with the grandparents and came to the city to earn money with nursing. You would call them wet nurses. The young peasant boys, also with their colorful costumes, came to either enlist in the army or be all kinds of servants, you know -- go into the service of some rich young woman of the nobility and so on, or become coachmen, and all this. When they arrived, they still wore these native costumes. And during the war, naturally, there came this flood of Polish refugees. In Poland the Jews still wore those old costumes, like 200 years ago, with the black caftans and the black hats. You see it sometimes here around Fairfax Avenue], but very, very little of it. But there it was still as it was, you know, centuries ago. They came like this. And there right opposite was the coffeehouse. Usually before they did anything else, whoever it was, peasant girls or anyone, they would come into the coffeehouse, take a cup of coffee, and then they would vanish into the back streets.

In these years, the second district, where Eric lived, became completely like a ghetto district, like you have Harlem full of black people. The Jews would stay there in the second district and have apartments there, and the district was full of them. So this I think also had its impression on Eric. That his music is so colorful. And I think his later trend of turning to his Jewish heritage was, I am sure, strongly influenced by what he saw at this time and identified with his district. Because, otherwise, the parents, the father and the side of the family that had to do with the father were more like peasants. They were really not identifiable as Jews. The father had blue eyes, was blond, and was very athletic. It's very funny: he could do tricks, athletic tricks. He could balance a stick on his nose. It seemed almost like there was a heritage of maybe circus people or something like this.

COLE: That's amazing. What about the family attitude towards music? We've discussed this before.

ZEISL: Well, as I told you, there were three singers in the family. And then when Eric's family, his own family, when the boys grew, it developed that the oldest and the youngest had voices. The oldest had a tenor voice. He was the biggest, and he had a tremendous, very powerful tenor voice. Willi, the youngest, had a very beautiful baritone voice and also had very great musical talent. The oldest didn't have any talent, which is amazing in this kind of family. Eric wrote very, very little for tenor because he had a kind of fear that his brother Egon would sing anything. He was always a little quarter-tone off or something, you know. You were sitting there and clenching your teeth. Willi had a beautiful baritone voice and was very musical. There was only one piano and therefore one music room, and of course he [Eric] hardly ever had the piano to himself. There were fights about it, which always were won by Egon, the eldest, because he was the biggest and also kind of brutal. In his childhood, Eric said he hated that brother so much that he went to bed with a knife. Because apparently Egon was, so to say, the executioner and would keep the family discipline. That must have been quite difficult for Eric. Being a composer was something that nobody understood, and they didn't even want to, you know -- it was just ridiculous. It was, as the grandmother called it -- she always said, "Er lebt in dem wahn." He the lives in this delusion." It was just accepted that he could play anything that he heard, that he was always composing, even as a young boy. To make matters worse, they had a piano teacher by the name of Smetana, who lived from his name -- he was some distant relative of the composer Smetana -- and must have been a first-class jerk. He told Eric's mother that she should not allow Eric to the piano, that he would go crazy if she let him there. And she believed all this, so she burned his compositions and closed the piano with a key -- would not let him play. You know, it is incredible because I have now, through Eric, known so many musicians and to everyone Mozart is the god. Eric said that in his youth he began to hate Mozart because the older brothers went through this -- this was a course and you played Mozart and then you played Beethoven. Now, his brothers could already play Beethoven. Eric heard it and then he could play it by heart from what he heard. But this teacher1 made him play Mozart because that was the step-by-step procedure. The teacher had absolutely no flexibility. If I were a teacher and had a gifted child who wanted to play [Beethoven3 and could play it, even without notes, I would let him certainly play it.

COLE: In addition to these obstacles that were placed in his path, was it true that the father would actually put want ads of professions, jobs . . . ?

ZEISL: That was later. Eric saw that he couldn't get anywhere with his parents and so he decided that the only way was to flunk school, but completely. He succeeded completely, and I think he had a report card at the end of what would be here about the tenth grade of nothing but fails. I mean, he wanted to fail so that they should see. Then they had a family council. I think a cousin was very instrumental, and the parents were finally persuaded to let him go to the academy [now Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst]. But in the academy it was a disaster again, because Eric said that when he entered the examinations, they examined his ability of hearing, his musicality. And he said they all came together marveling about it. He had that also in his later years. You could sit on the piano and he would tell you every tone that you hit by sitting on it. He had absolute, absolute hearing. And so when they did that and had complicated the chords more and more, they immediately put him into, I think, harmony and left out something that was before (Musiklehre). But he didn't understand anything, because he had never had any real instruction. So he just sat there and didn't know what the professor was talking about. Of course when there were written tests, he flunked them, completely. After a semester was over, he got home with a certificate of flunking again. The parents said, "See, what did I tell you?" So then the father began wanting him to take a job as an apprentice. He came with these want ads every day to his bed. He had several unfortunate experiences, and then they allowed him to go on.

COLE: Maybe you could illustrate a couple of these unfortunate experiences.

ZEISL: Well, he said that at one job he lasted a day because he was supposed to write the sales or something in a folio, and he began each line with a clef. When the boss, or whoever was in charge of him, discovered that at the end of the day, that was the end of his being there. Then in the next job he got, he was carrying coal from the cellar up to the boss's wife. When he had delivered the coals, he saw that she had a piano, so he sat down at the piano and played, and she listened with great admiration. After this went on for maybe a week, she said, "Don't waste your time here. I'll persuade my husband to dismiss you" -- which 1Ericl was very grateful for. And I think there was a third episode that likewise ended in disaster.

Then he was allowed to go back. As I told you, they could not finance that, so he financed it himself by selling his stamp collection, which was very dear to him, and that took care of this half a year. At the end of the year -- do you want me to tell the episode of what happened at the end of the year?

COLE: Oh, maybe we can get into that in just a minute. I think at this point we might say that Eric was born on May 18, 1905. Could you give us some idea of when he made a decision to study music seriously? He was a very young boy still.

ZEISL: Well, there was never anything in his mind but music, and he never wanted anything else. He began composing at a very early age, eight years, nine years. As I told you, his mother was completely against it, and nothing has survived of these things because she tore them up and burned them. But that was in his mind, and it was a one-track mind. As the grandmother said, he lives in this delusion. He never let go of it, in spite of all these obstacles, in spite of the fact that nobody would listen and nobody was interested. It must have been a very sad childhood. He had a very, very difficult and sad childhood in this respect. In other respects, the family was well off. They went to the country in the summer and had a big villa and garden, and all this was very nice.

COLE: I gather that they loved him and thought they were doing the right thing for him.

ZEISL: Ja, they thought they were doing the right thing, but they were restaurant owner[s], and they thought he would starve to death. That was a terrible thought. For a restaurant [family] couldn't think of anything worse that could happen to anybody. So this all took a tremendous amount of strength, but Eric had in him a very, very great potential strength which overcame that. I think you can feel that strength in his music. It's one of the features of his music. There is real power in it.

COLE: Who were some of the musical influences on Eric?

ZEISL: Well, whatever he heard. Naturally, because his brothers were singers, and the youngest and oldest were singers, he heard a lot of songs and singing in the house already. I'm sure that this was a strong influence. Most of his music is going this way. He is writing so much for the voice. And even in one, in two of his ballets appears a singing voice, which is kind of unusual. I think that is perhaps due -- we don't know -- maybe they were singers and so this was also in his kind of makeup to begin with, or it was because he heard it so much. I can't say.

And of course he was influenced by what was played at the time in Vienna (Vienna was the music city). They went for the summer to Voslau, and then [at] Baden was a Kurkapelle that played whatever was popular at this point. Coffeehouse[s] played Strauss, but he was never very fond of Strauss or operetta music. They said that Alban Berg loved operettas and loved to go to them. Eric did not, and I think that was the negative side of the problem. He had too much of that, and he disliked it for this reason. It was something he wanted to get out of, this kind of thing.

COLE: Who were some of the composers whose music he admired?

ZEISL: Well, Schubert. And that remained with him until the end of his life. He loved Schubert, and of course Beethoven and later Wagner. Wagner was a god to him. I know that at one time -- I just got a letter [which] brought it to mind, because I had forgotten it -- that we had a discussion with a young singer who is now in Germany. Since many years she is singing there, at the opera houses (I think she is in Essen right now). And she said, "Remember the discussions we had?" At one time Eric had said that Moses, Christ, and Wagner were the three greatest prophets. She was a very religious girl, and she objected to this very violently. Anyway, she reminded me of this and said how wonderful discussions one had: the art of conversation seems to be going out of style right now.

COLE: Was he an admirer of Bruckner?

ZEISL: Yes, yes. And you know, when Eric admired something, he was going into it completely, and that means that he knew it by heart and could play it from beginning to end.

COLE: I understand he was an admirer of Hugo Wolf, too.

ZEISL: Ja. Because in the beginning, when he himself tried composing, it was mostly songs, and he told me that [Richard] Stöhr, who was his teacher in the beginning, would ask him to write a sonata or chamber music, and he came back with songs, always. That was a form that he could master at that time, and the other forms scared him. He had all these difficulties in his life and all these fights, and all this strength went into this, I think. At an age when all children . . . . I am a teacher, and I see the tenth graders (who are usually fourteen or even fifteen) and how immature they are. At that age he already had to support himself completely, because his parents never gave him anything for the music. That was all his own doing; he had to compete on his own. I think so much strength then went into this that he kind of postponed the struggle with the material, with the music -- how shall I say this?

COLE: With the larger, the more abstract forms.

ZEISL: Forms, ja. But it was always a goal and remained so. The moment he felt more secure in his craft and everything, he tackled it.

COLE: Perhaps it's appropriate now to talk a bit about

his formal training, where and when and with whom he

studied.

ZEISL: Well, he was very much like Bruckner in this way. Be never felt secure, and he always wanted to test himself. So he changed teachers very often; line] always went from one to the other and tried to get what was lacking. In Vienna he was for a short time a student of [Joseph] Marx. And in the beginning the teacher was Stöhr because Stöhr made it possible for him to get lessons when he had no money. He [Stöhr] sent him students, and the money that these students brought he would then give to Stöhr for getting his lesson there. Stöhr was a man who knew very much, but he was a very academic person, as Eric described him. He was too narrow a straitjacket for him. He called him very dry. So he was looking further. He went to Marx for a short while, and then he went to a fellow by the name of Hugo Kauder, who is in this country. Eric liked him very, very much and, I think,-gained a lit from him. Under his guidance he wrote his first string quartet. That string quartet was then played by the Galimir Quartet. They were quite a famous quartet in Vienna and consisted of brother and sisters (Felix Galimir was the only boy, and three girls). One of the girls, Adrienne, the youngest, married [Louis] Krasner, who was the violinist who premiered the Berg violin concerto. Stevie [Walter Zeisl, nephew of the composer] met them in Syracuse [University]. They are now teaching in Syracuse. And this quartet had, I think, two weak opening movements, a very excellent scherzo, and a fugue which was made from the theme of one of the songs. This was the first thing that Universal Edition printed.

COLE: Can we talk a little bit about Eric's aversion to the traditional classroom approach to theory? I think this gives us an insight to Eric as a rather unique individual.

ZEISL: One thing was that he had no schooling when he came to the academy, as the others. When the others came to the academy, they were already showing talent, and it was already nurtured and usually guided before they entered the academy. And when not and they entered the academy by the usual channels and were examined, the more average they were, maybe the better for them, because they went through the usual routine. But as I told you, because of this marvelous ear and this piano prowess that he had gotten, so to say, by nature, he was put into glasses that were above him, and he could not quite follow. He was anyway a person who could not learn. He had to do things. He was not a very good listener, I think, to theory. So that, I think, accounted for his difficulties there. When I went to the university -- I'm somewhat younger than Eric, but not much, about one and a half years younger -- I met a boy in my course. (I studied law.) He was also going to the academy at the same time. He was also very musically gifted. When I talked about Eric, he said that the academy -- and that was long afterwards -- was still talking about Eric, and that he had been the most gifted student there. He knew his name, and yet by that time he had been out of the academy for more than six or seven years. So I think he made an impression on his fellow classmates. I also know that when we were in New York, Felix Kuhner came to visit us. Felix Kuhner was the second violinist of the Kolisch Quartet. I don't know how we met. He found out that we were there, and maybe they had met at NBC or something. Eric brought him home. And he said, "Now what are you doing, Eric? You were the most gifted there at the academy. n I think his classmates saw that, but Eric didn't know that they knew that or saw that.

COLE: Perhaps it should be pointed out that Eric was only fourteen when he made this impression. I think you've told me before about Eric flunking the class in theory even though he was coaching others. There was a marvelous story at the final examination time.

ZEISL: Well, at the final examination, after a year had gone by, the professor said, Know I want to know who is really gifted. Who can harmonize a melody?" Eric knew that he could do it, but he wasn't going to speak up. But the children cried -- this is how Eric told it to me -- the children all cried, "

ZEISL: And he thought that they did that because they were making fun of him, knowing that he was the worst in the class. But he said he was going out anyway. So he went out. Of course, this was born to him; he didn't have to learn it. So he did that perfectly and very marvelously, I am sure. The professor was very much taken aback, and he said, "I have made a terrible mistake. Your mother must come and see me." The mother came, and she was of course very, very doubtful of the whole thing and didn't want to believe it. And Stöhr said that Eric was very, very gifted, a born musician [who] had to study privately because class instruction apparently was not for him, that he was not a youngster who could take class instruction. My mother-in-law told me that herself, and she said, "So I asked him again, 'Do you really think that he should be a musician, a composer?', and he said, 'If not he, then I don't know who in the world.'" Then Eric said, "I have no money." He then made it possible for Eric by sending him [students], because he Was the examiner of the harmony examinations that everybody who was studying an instrument had to take in order to get certificated. You called this the state examination in piano. You had to make the harmony, and that was of course very difficult because many of the young Höhere Tochter, the better educated girls, had to get this examination. They learned to play the piano like you learn to crochet or something. The harmony was very difficult for them. And Eric-got them in order to get them through the thing, and the money he then gave to Stohr in order to get his own lessons. Be later said that this gave him such a marvelous technique of teaching. He was only fourteen when he began that, and later on he was quite known as a theory teacher. People from the Conservatory of Music and from the academy itself, professors who were already white-haired, studied with him.

TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO

AUGUST 26, 1975

COLE: We've been discussing Eric's formal training, and the picture that's emerging is one that could be described as a combination of formal curriculum and self-teaching. Perhaps that would be a good place to start. We can talk a little bit about the steps Eric took to instruct himself and the talent that emerged, the strengths.

ZEISL: Ja, it was a great struggle for him, and he was often commenting on it. [He] said that every sixteenyear-old boy who left the academy could write a sonata, and he could not. Yet [fuel was so much more equipped than these often very average-gifted children. And yet, [just as] you could be a very poor writer and yet you could write a thesis [for] school, so every one of these boys had learned how to put together the things to make a sonata. Eric couldn't do it, because if he were writing a sonata, it had to be a masterpiece. At that stage he wasn't there, so he couldn't write it at all. He could not do things halfway. That was impossible. He also told me that Stohr was trying to teach him these things and was telling him, "So, for the next time when you come to me, bring a sonata,. and then he would come with ten more songs. At that time he was writing songs and that was it. Stohr was kind of disappointed; on the other hand, he was full of admiration because he saw that these were masterful songs. Be was instrumental in introducing him to a man by the name of [Ferdinand! Wogerer, then the head of Strache, who printed these first songs, ~Armseelchen, n [~Rokoko,~ and "Neck und Nymphe.]. This was a big thing, of course, because he was only sixteen years at that time. The publisher gave it to [Hans] Duhan, who was one of the most well known singers of the state opera, a very wonderful musician, who sang these songs. Later, he also sang the Mondbilder (croon Pictures) on the radio. In this way Eric was very much like Bruckner. He was constantly studying and felt that he lhad to] advance himself. It was even so in our married life. Each morning he would emerge from a certain place with a big score that he had been studying. He was going nowhere without a score and studying constantly. He had this urge to verify himself with a teacher, and so he went to several other teachers. Besides Stohr, he went for a short time to Marx and then for a time he was with Hugo Kauder, who was quite satisfying. I have here a letter that Hanns Eisler wrote as an introduction for him to go to Schoenberg. But when we were here we had so little money and had such a struggle. And he never dared go to Schoenberg without having money to pay. He would have thought that very arrogant to do. .... I am really curious [about] what would have happened if two such very, very different personalities would have met. Would Schoenberg have become more tonal or would Eric have become atonal? I know that the Requiem [Ebraico] was played over the radio, and the person who arranged these concerts where the Requiem was played was a composer by the name of tJUlius] Toldi, who was a student of Schoenberg and who later was completely flustered and flabbergasted about the fact that Schoenberg had liked the Requiem very, very much. He couldn't understand, because it was tonal music. But Hanns Eisler, who was a Schoenberg student and atonal, also was very fond of Eric's music, had a great deal of admiration for him and told him so. Eric never had problems with the creative people. They understand each other. They are like dogs who smell each other and know. But the minor exponent[s of] Schoenberg's school gave him a great deal of trouble, because they heard only the tonality, and that for them was out. They didn't have this immediate response to what was underlying. Because I think atonality [and] tonality are really dresses, and the dress is on the person. And when you know the person, that is [the] important [thing]: is the person worth something?

COLE: It seems that the emerging picture is one of Eric as a lyric-dramatic talent. You've used this term before, and perhaps you could amplify lit] a little bit.

ZEISL: Well, I consider something like chamber music or symphonic music epic. From the beginning, he was always a lyrical talent. The lied attracted him and the word. It was, so to say, the stimulant that loosened the creative impulse in him. All his life he was looking for texts and wanted to write operas. It was due, I think, to a desperation that he composed the little Mass [Kleine Messe] or the Requiem [Concertante], because the text is so dramatic. . . that it is almost like an opera, and what he composed was almost like an opera. I mean, his approach to it was very much like in the Verdi Requiem, for instance. Not that it sounded like the Verdi Requiem--I don't mean that--but a dramatic approach, the approach of the dramatic composer. And he kind of needed that.

COLE: Yes. I think we'll see this as we get into some individual works. He needed some kind of extramusical stimulus to begin, some kind of dramatic story perhaps. Another facet of his training, one which I think is significant in his development as a composer, too, is his ability as a pianist. Perhaps you could talk about this.

ZEISL: Oh, he was a fabulous pianist, and he had an ability which cannot be explained: on the piano he could bring out tones that were not in the piano. I mean when he played~orchestra [music!, it sounded like orchestra. I remember an incident when he came to visit us one time. My father was a violinist--an amateur violinist, not a professional. He had the radio open, and the Beethoven Violin Concerto was played. Eric listened with us; then he went to the piano and played the opening passages. My father was simply amazed and said, "That's fantastic, the piano sounds like the violin! How does he do that? n And also when he played--there was a man by the name of [Ernest van] Gompertz who took lessons from Eric because he wanted to play the "Ride of the Valkyries~ and the ~Feuerzauber" ("The Magic Fire Musics) the way Eric does. So he just sat there next to him and paid him to watch what he did, because it sounded like the orchestra. He did certain tricks. He didn't play the notes as they were in any written piano score. He played what he knew from the orchestra score; he made it sound like an orchestra.

COLE: Had he considered becoming a concert pianist?

ZEISL: Ja, he was, because this prowess apparently was already in him when he was very, very young and a boy. He could play anything. When he entered the academy, he also entered a piano course in order to become a virtuoso. He considered that as a career which might satisfy the demands of his parents for making money and not starving to death. The teacher with whom he studied--I forgot his name--had a method. It consisted [of] working with one finger or something constantly. It overworked his fingers. He was double-jointed and had very soft bones in this respect. I think it overwrought the fingers, and he had to wear his hand in a cast for awhile. He said that fin] the corridors of the academy he met another professor, [who] said, "Oh, another victim of The Method!" Apparently this happened quite frequently. That ended his career as a virtuoso, but for his own use he played very well. He also needed the piano as a stimulant. When he composed, he would play. When you listened, it sounded sometimes very, very awful, because it was wild chords that somehow didn't make any sense. But they kind of released something.

COLE: And he could certainly hear what was supposed to be coming out.

ZEISL: Ja, but it was sometimes very hard to make out something.

COLE: As we go along, we'll see that his ability as a pianist influenced the way he wrote music and [is] one of the factors that make his songs the significant achievements they are, where the accompanist is a true partner and not a subordinate.

ZEISL: Ja, it is. On the other hand, because he dis regarded difficulties and it was easy for him to bring out what he wanted, the accompaniment is sometimes too difficult, I think. I think that accounts for the rejection that it found, because many of the accompanists are usually the ones who show it to their singers. Then they probably found it too uncomfortable to promote it.

COLE: Yes. I think of something like "Schrei,. which is fiendishly difficult if one tries to get all the notes. I think we've begun to get a good picture of his family background, of the obstacles he had to overcome, of some of the shaping forces on his music, of his formal training, and some of the self-teaching to which he continually subjected himself. It's clear that for one reason or another he was determined to be a composer.

ZEISL: Oh, yes. I think there was never any doubt in his mind from his earliest childhood on.

COLE: Perhaps now we can talk a little about life as a young, aspiring composer in a musical capital of the world, one that had been famous for centuries. How was Vienna as a place for a budding composer?

ZEISL: Well, I think it was in some ways a wonderful place, because when you imagine that there were in Vienna three--really four--orchestras that were playing: the Philharmonic, the Concert[house] Orchestra, the Radio Orchestra, and an orchestra that was called the Symphoniker. They had reasonably fine musicians, too. Then there was the big opera, and there was the Volksoper, and then there were usually two little chamber opera outfits. One was in the Redoutensaal--that was in one of the palaces and had a big hall richly decked out with Gobelins [tapestries]. It was very pretty, and they would give chamber operas. Marriage o Figaro and Donizetti smaller things. There was the Schonbrunn Schlosstheater in the summer. And that is not the operetta houses; that is just the serious classical music. And always of course wherever you went, there were orchestras, in the Prater, in the cafes. In the Stadtpark, which is behind the music buildings, there was this orchestra playing. They were usually playing Strauss and so, and Eric wasn't fond of this. It was some of those Kurkapellen that played wherever they went. You were exposed to music as a natural thing. In this way it was very, very good. It didn't cost much money to go to the opera. The young people would stand; you know, there was standing room. Being a member of the academy and so on, Eric naturally belonged to the in-clique as a musician with a recognized place. Fellow musicians, as such, were in the in-group. There was this system of Plaques. You were usually given standing room. [Otherwise,] it was difficult; you could stand there for five hours and then not get a ticket because there were only so many. At least he was assured that he would get his ticket, and for this he had to clap. The leader of the Plaque took care of his own. They would then pay back their dues by clapping. Otherwise they were not admitted. In all this it was wonderful. In other ways it was very terrible. Austria lost the war, and that meant for Eric's parents, for instance, real poverty now. In the inflation, they had at that time rented out the coffeehouse. They had found a person who would pay them like a--how do you call it? [tape recorder turned off] They had sublet the coffeehouse. I didn't mention to you that during the daytime that coffeehouse was a coffeehouse, but it was also a night place. In the night it served drinks, and there was a string of girls there, and all this kind of thing. It was too strenuous for his parents, who were getting on in years. So they had sublet the coffeehouse for a yearly sum. Now so much was paid every month. After the man to whom they had sub let it had been there two months, say, what he paid as aI monthly rent wouldn't even pay for a little roll of bread. And yet they had to live. The two older boys were at that time seventeen and eighteen. The second gun' school. They went to work, and they supported the family and the parents. Naturally they didn't support anything like music. It was that they could put food on the table. That happened all over Vienna. It was a tome of depression and extreme poverty for most of the middle-class families. They had lost everything because of the inflation. And that, again, made it very, very difficult, because music is a luxury in a way. So as cheap [as] it was to stand at the opera and get a Stehplatz, standing room, yet this was already a problem which had to be met. It was fortunate that even in this bad time' Eric was able to make money by giving lessons.

COLE: Yes. Was teaching the primary way in which he earned a living?

ZEISL: Yes, yes. There was no other way.

COLE: What kinds of lessons, what age groups did he teach?

ZEISL: He taught whatever he could get, and mostly he got little children, which was of course hack work of the worst kind. Fortunately he had a few richer families who paid better prices, but mostly it was very modest fees. And I know that when he went to my father to ask for my hand in marriage (which he didn't get, by the way), my father asked him, how do you make a living? How do you think that you can support a wife?" He said, "I am giving lessons. n My father said, "May I ask what you get for a lesson?" And he said, "Well,;that's different. I have lessons for five schillings and lessons for eight schillings and lessons for ten schillings, and even lessons for twenty schillings, but nobody takes them. n [laughter] SO my father came and said, "This is a complete child. You can't marry him. He doesn't know anything of lifeBut this is the way it was, actually. Most of the lessons were for five schillings, which is about like a dollar when you translate it into American money.

COLE: Was he teaching piano or theory or a combination?

ZEISL: He was teaching piano to the children, of course. At the same time he had always some young people who were seriously studying music and whom he taught theory. He must have been a wonderful teacher, because his students always--some I have met--treated him not like a teacher but like a god. They thought they owed life itself to him. This was the way they looked at him.

COLE: Would he go to their houses, or did he have a studio?

ZEISL: Let's see. For the little children, he went to their houses. The others, the more serious, came to him. He had one student tFeldstein]--his sister lives here- who he thought was very, very gifted. He perished underi the Nazis. Another one "Rudolph Fellnerl, I think, is a conductor now with the [New York] Met[ropolitan Opera]- I mean, a young assistant conductor. (Maybe now he is not- so young anymore.) I have lost track of him. When we were in this country for a little while, we heard of one by the name of 1Rudolf] Kruger, who[m] Eric thought very much of, but we never heard of him tagainl. I think he might have been taken into the army and maybe perished. We didn't have any address or anything of him.

COLE: The stories are widespread and celebrated about Beethoven's many moves around and about Vienna. Did Eric as a young composer move about frequently?

ZEISL: No, really not. This was almost like a sickness. He was unhappy at home, and it was very confining, as I said, and he had all this neglect or ridicule and everything. But he could not move out of his home. It was really a kind of neurotic thing. He could not travel, not even the shortest distance, like from Vienna to Baden, which is an hour. [He] couldn't go alone by himself. He would take his brother along. And when we were already, so to say, engaged or whatever you would call it, I went with my mother to St. Wolfgang, which is near Salzburg. He was quite poor at the time, and money meant a great deal, but he paid the train fare for Hilde Spiel, whom you met, to come with him, because he could not go on board a train by himself. This made things so difficult because in the beginning, up to, say, his twenty-fifth year, maybe, he could have gone to Germany, as ldidl so many of the young musicians. When they had talent, they went. They didn't stay in Austria, because there was very little that you could do here. Austria didn't believe in giving young people a chance. Before you got anywhere, you had to have a beard, and it had to be long and white.

COLE: So you built your reputation in Germany?

ZEISL: The young musicians went to Germany, like Mahler had done, and Bruno Walter, and they all did. But Eric could not do that. He could never go on his own, by himself. He took psychoanalysis for three years and tried to break himself of this thing, but it didn't work.

COLE: So he had chosen a doubly difficult task to estab lish himself as a young composer in Vienna. Who were some of his associates? Was there any sort of league of young composers?

ZEISL: Yes, there was. There was a Komponistenbund. That wasn't only young composers; it was composers. They gave concerts in which they performed the works of the members. Marx was the president of that thing. He was also critic for the press [Neue Freie Presse]. And then Eric was in a league which was called Young Art--Junge Kunst. It had meetings every month, I think, in the lower level of a coffeehouse where they met. They were all kinds of performers and creative artists--writers, musicians, singers, painters. They all belonged and had their meetings there. That was quite nice and stimulating, and we had friends there with whom we communicated.

COLE: And there was an opportunity of hearing each other's music at these sessions, too?

ZEISL: Oh, ja, ja. -

COLE: One reads a great deal about the Schoenberg circle, but one often has difficulty discovering what else was going on.

ZEISL: Ja, well, at that time already, when this happened, Vienna was really dead. It was very, very dead because of Hitler. Hitler had come to power, and that meant that there was a complete shutting out--you know, Germany was closed for people like Eric, who were not considered completely Aryan. You could not be performed in Germany, and the publishers couldn't publish you. So Vienna became-it wasn't a capital, anyway, anymore, but as long as the connection with Germany had existed and the old tradition that Vienna had as the capital of an empire kind of persisted, then it had all the institutions, like the opera, and so that went on. And all this still had Germany as a hinterland. But then this was not anymore, and so it became like a little frog pond. It was really quite an unbearable situation for a gifted person, and Eric- suffered under this very, very much and longed to go out. After we married, we had kind of planned--because with me beside him, he would have dared--to go out and maybe try London or Paris or something like this. Then Hitler came, and that was almost like a liberation, to send us out of this.

COLE: In line with this train of thought, perhaps we can talk a little bit about an observation Eric made about the interaction among composers and musicians as opposed to that among artists.

ZEISL: There was really not much fellowship among the composers. They were mostly intensely jealous of each other, didn't seek so much each other's company. At one time we went into the Wienerwa?d, as we used to every Sunday, making these hikes. My best girlfriend [Lisel Salzer] was a painter. And we met her. There was a group of painters who were at that time the most known painters, making an excursion together through the Wienerwald. Eric remarked how wonderful that was, how he would love to do that with his fellow composers, but it was nothing that was really done. The reason was also that most of the people that were there were older than Eric, about ten years older, you see. [They] had established themselves there, had some kind of position, with the conservatory and so on. The younger ones who had nothing had gone out, so there was like a vacuum there.

COLE: Another fascinating aspect of a young composer's development is how one goes about getting his music played. How did a young composer go about getting a piece played in Vienna?

ZEISL: Well, that was rather diff.icuit because the big institutions like the Philharmonic would wait until you had a beard like Brahms. Before that, they would not acknowledge you. There was the radio, and that was very good because the radio also paid you when you were performed. The procedure was usually that: you went there and--say you went there in February, you got your appointment for September. That was already lucky because you had to please the secretary who gave you this appointment. Then when you got this appointment, you talked to IOswald] Kabasta, who was the director of the radio. When he liked you or liked the score you showed him, then he would actually schedule it for performance, and that was then next February. So in some way it was perhaps not so bad for a creative person, because your mind was at ease. There was only this one opportunity. You could get it or you couldn't get it. When you got it, you knew, and up to February there was nothing in the world you could do. While in America, you almost--the thousands of things that you could do left us breathless in the beginning. There was really never any definite ~no" to anything, because at the next step there were so many other opportunities and you kept running. It isn't good for a creative person, you know.

COLE: No, I agree. One last thing about establishing himself as a professional composer. We've said he supported himself by teaching. Just before Hitler's final rise to power, Eric was appointed a professor at the Vienna Conservatory. Is this not correct?

ZEISL: Ja, well, he was by that time about thirty-one, thirty-two, and he had many performances and was getting recognition and being regarded as a coming great talent of great hope. And so this showed also in that Professor [Joseph] Reitler, who was the director of the conservatory, was giving him a contract to teach at the conservatory for the next season. Then Hitler came and people emigrated, so it never came to it. COLD: This is one of many examples of how unfortunate- circumstances beyond Eric's control worked against him. I think that to conclude this first interview, we could ask you lto tell] a couple of favorite stories about Eric. Since both of them involved you, perhaps you could tell us when your connection with Eric began. You certainly knew him very early.

ZEISL: It began through a common friend, whom you have heard me mention, Fritz Kramer. I grew up with Fritz Kramer. He was like a brother to me because our mothers were best friends. We grew up from babyhood together and spent all our vacations together and all of the Sundays together. Fritz was a kind of piano prodigy and a very fine musician. One day he began telling me that he had met at a party . . . . In his words he said, "I have met somebody who can play everything, like me. Then pretty soon he began telling me that this person was so gifted as a composer, and he tried to describe him in words [and] what he had composed. And so he said, "You must meet him. So one day--Vienna has this wonderful environment, and . . when you meet you go out into the Wienerwald with your friends, especially when the weather is peautiful--we went to a place called Hauserl-am-Roann. That is a little inn in the middle of the woods. Their specialty was Ribiselwein. Ribisel is gooseberry or something like this. It's little, little red berries, very tart. Out of it they had made a wine which wasn't at all very powerful, but [was] very good. He had brought Eric along, and we all drank a glass of Ribiselwein. At this time I was about between sixteen and seventeen and Eric must have been eighteen. Well, this glass of Ribiselwein had a very unexpected effect, because it was like a whole bottle of whiskey would have worked on somebody else. He was completely, but completely drunk. And he began these wile fantasies that were very, very X-rated. I didn't know what to do. On the way home, he was jumping at all the street lights, claiming they were the moon and ltrYing] to get them. So it was very amusing to me. And I had the feeling of something very odd, something that you go and see in the zoo. After this first meeting, then Eric kind of entered our circle. At that time there were no rock-and-roll bands around, and the young people entertained themselves. Usually every weekend there was another party at some friend's house, either at my house or at somebody else's house. They arranged these parties during the wintertime. After midnight, when we were all tired from dancing and sat down, Eric would sit down [at] the piano and play, just wonderfully. And we were sitting there listening. He would sweat profusely at these occasions because it was very hot, and we would say, "Take your jacket off! Take your jacket off!n And he shouldn't take it off. I later discovered that his shirts were of two colors in the back, because they were all repaired, I don't know how many times. Part of it was blue, and the rest was green or something. He was ashamed of that, but it just gives you the idea of what poverty meant at that time. I don't think any poor boy here would wear such a shirt or even consider keeping it. At this time, as far as we knew, Eric was always violently in love with some girl. At one time he wrote a trio for my friend Lizzi [Alice Weisskopf], who was a very, very beautiful girl, and lwho] of course wanted nothing to do with him because the stage in which he was at at that time was really not anything any girl would want to have anything to do [with]. So his love affairs were usually very unhappy ones. He was very much . . . . You know, I remember really unforgettable times when we went hiking through the woods, we young people, and then came to some little inn with some piano that was completely out of tune, and he would sit there and play for hours. It was this kind of Schubertische atmosphere, and he could make these old pianos sound like something really beautiful. It was really very beautiful. But apart from his music, he was a very wild, untamed fellow at that time. We were all from better families and were carefully brought up, and we kind of shied away from this. And, as I told you, Eric had then gone through analysis, which I think left him crazier than ever, if anything. It was shortly after that--I was already, I think, twenty-four years old--when he had naturally matured and so had I, and then the thing began between us. We both knew then what we were doing.

COLE: We begin to get a picture of a very unique person ality and a strongly romantic individual. Perhaps we can conclude with just these two marvelous anecdotes which I think illustrate not only his uniqueness, but also the friendship and the affection that many people had for him. Perhaps you could tell us the remark made by Alma Mahler, who apparently was a friend and an admirer of his.

ZEISL: Alma we met here--that is, we met her first in Paris, but in Vienna we did not know her. That was here. But I can tell you the story if you want to fit it in here.

COLE: Yes, fine. ZETSL: Well, we met Alma ; . . . That was quite inter esting, most characteristic of Alma, very characteristic of Alma. We were in Paris at that time. We survived in Paris--because we came to Paris without money--through a very marvelous incident. We came and were in this little hotel which was filled from the cellar to the top with refugees who had just arrived. Eric's three brothers were also there. And so we came to the desk very often to ask, "Are there any letters?. The people around us, who also came for this, were usually from Vienna also, heard "

ZEISL" a great deal, and they remembered the name. It was maybe two or three days after we had arrived in Paris when in the morning the telephone rang and somebody said, "Are you Mr. Eric

ZEISL?" And I said, ~Yes, Eric

ZEISL lives here. h He said, n In the Pariser Tageszeitungn--that's a newspaper called Pariser Tagesteitung--.there's a very big ad looking for you.. So we went down and bought a paper and sure enough, there was a big ad, "Eric

ZEISL, composer this time in Paris, is asked to call the number so-and-so. n I said to Eric, "You don't call." I was afraid it was the Gestapo or something. And so I called. It turned out that Eric had had in Vienna a--if you want to call it a student. He was an art dealer [Hugo Engel]. He had wanted to compose little waltzes and [such] that he had in his mind, and Eric: was putting it down for him because he himself couldn't do that. This man had then moved to Paris. He had a customer, a rich Spaniard 1Carasso] who had said at one time to him, "You know, I have made a lot of money, and that was my goal for a long time. But now I am settled and I have enough and I am wealthy." He said, "I would so much like--I have my head full of music, and I'd like to write it down. n And this art dealer said, "Look here, I know the man who could do that for you. Maybe he is in Paris. Will you spend the money for an ad?" He said yes. And that was two days after we arrived. Well, to make it short, we lived off this man, and he made our stay in Paris possible and very enjoyable. Of course, we lived only in a hotel room, and the hotel room was very cold and disagreeable. So Eric took that music that he was doing for this man to the Cafe Weber and was writing there, on a table. And Alma was there. When she saw somebody writing music, she immediately left her place and seated herself next to him. When I came to fetch Eric, there he was sitting with her, and Werfel was there, too. She was at that time sixty years old, but beautiful, a charming, sweet face. Blonde. And so we became very good friends. She had asked him what he was writing, and he told her. She had this kind of flair. She knew immediately if somebody was somebody. And so we then were friends, and that continued when we came here to Los Angeles. We went to visit her quite often. She could say remarkable things, and I was terribly disappointed when I read her book. The two figures, the personality that emerge[s] from her book and [the one] I knew, are so completely different that I can't understand how they could be the same. She had that flair: when she was with somebody who was somebody, or especially a creative person, she became like a mirror and she reflected. She would then also say great things and novel things.

COLE: She made a very concise observation about Eric.

ZEISL: When he [had] played his music to her, and she admired it greatly and [told] many people how impressed she was, she said, you are a tonal nature, just like Schoenberg is an atonal one.

COLE: I think we have time for this one final story which illustrates the uniqueness of Eric. Perhaps you could describe the episode where he would wait for you at lunch times.

ZEISL: Well, Eric had very definite tomes where he could compose every morning, up to, say, about twelve-thirty, because in the afternoon he was giving his lessons. The morning was his composition time. And when he had finished composing for the morning, he went and fetched me at my place of work. I was a lawyer's assistant at that time, a Konzipient, as you call it. That was in the Trattnerhof, off the Graben in Wien [Vienna!. And there he was standing and waiting patiently for me to come down, because some times that took some time. One day a friend came by and talked to him, and then she said, "Goodbye. I am going. n And he said, "I am going with you." And so she said, "But are you not waiting for Trude? n He said, "No, today she isn't coming. n But he was still standing there because he was used to that place. That was his place, I guess, to kind of free himself from the accumulated steam of the morning composition. He needed that, so he was standing there anyway.

TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE

SEPTEMBER 4, 1975

COLE: In our first interview we talked about Eric

ZEISL the man, his family circumstances, the obstacles placed in his path, his formal training, and life as a professional composer. Before we get into the material for today, is there anything that you'd like to add?

ZEISL: Perhaps I should describe a little bit more the circle of friends he had, because I think they were o' quite a bit of influence in some ways. Now, I should mention that in his very early years, Eric didn't have a large circle of friends. I mean, this was almost something remarkable, because young people--sixteen, seventeen-usually move in a big circle. He did not. He usually had one close friend, of who you very much wondered why he would be his close friend. For instance, at the time that I first described when I met him and he was so drunk, then he had a friend who later became a lawyer [parcel Singer], and was just the typical lawyer type--very, very dry, a very logical man, and just so much the opposite of Eric. But he tagged along. He was musical, I presume, and he tagged along. It was necessary for Eric to have somebody to tag along, but he was never real close to any kind of friend. I think he was either too close to his brothers or distrusted men because of his brothers, because they had so little interest for him. He was much more liable to become very close to a woman, and trust a girl, and completely devote himself when he was in love, which he usually was. And then he was constantly with that person, with the exclusion of all others. But he did accumulate some friends,-and when he entered our circle, and especially when be became closer with me, then he acquired my friends (and I had a large circle of friends). Now, one of his friends, for instance, was a rather rich young man [Roland Stern] from a wealthy house, and he looked and acted like Maecenas, the Roman. Whenever Eric was in dire need, he was always good, we would say here, for a buck (there, it was a schilling or two). It wasn't very much that he got. This man wasI generous, but to a point he was also very commercially minded, so he didn't give it for nothing. He wanted Eric to give him a score for this, and Eric always promised, and the poor guy never got any of these things. (I still have them here.) I think he sold him the Requiem [Concertante] about three times over or something, but never delivered it. But he was good-natured and didn't seem to mind, just a few bitter remarks here and there of never getting anything. Then there was, of course, Fritz Kramer, who appreciated him very much and with whom he became closest, as far as Eric became close with any body. And then there was a young poet, Alfred Farrau he called himself later; his real name was Fred Herrnfeld. And then of course there was Hilde Spiel. Remember, she was a writer of considerable talent and is still active in Vienna, i s very much respected there. I told you that -she included him in her first novel [Kati auf der Trucks, 1933]. A whole chapter has a figure in it, a composer that is just a copy of him, as if you would sit down and make a portrait of somebody. And it's really very good and accurate when you read it. I wanted to describe these few people to you which were especially important, I think. They sometimes came and provided him with books. They -knew that he was always looking for texts to compose. So I think it was this Roland, the Maecenas, who gave him the Africa Sings [Afrika Singt]. And they brought him the [Christian] Morgenstern poetry or later on the [Joachim] Ringelnatz. They introduced him to current literature. Ja, I forgot to mention Lisel Salzer, who was a painter, and a very gifted one. She is now living in Seattle and getting many prizes, and [is] very respected in her field. She was very musical, and it was at her house that we usually met and where Eric played the latest thing that he composed. Sometimes it was a movement of a greater work; the Mass [Kleine Messe] was entirely premiered at Lisel's house. And we all sang, Hilde Spiel [and everyone], and we called it the Gesangsverein Keuchhusten, which means the singing Academy Whooping-cough, because none of us had really a voice, but it had to do. We sang the different parts, and this way the thing was premiered at the house. ~

COLE: As time goes on, we'll be talking more about

ZEISL's meolody. It's amazing to me that Hilde Spiel could remember

ZEISL's song melodies at least forty years after she'd heard them.

ZEISL: Oh, ja, but that was a part of our life at that time. He was the uncrowned king of that circle. I mean, everybody knew that he was, so to say, three feet higher than everybody else, though these were very gifted people. But he was a unique person, and one knew that. Now, another thing that I have been speculating about- is the name "

ZEISL." In Austria,

ZEISL means a little singing bird. And many places even are called so, like

ZEISLmauer, and have that name in them. It's known. But the family came from Czechoslovakia, and I was sometimes wondering whether the name really had that connotation in the beginning, and if it didn't come rather from the Hebrew - word Zeiser which means actor. And since the father was so good, almost like a circus [performer--so athletic, and could do circus tricks--I was wondering if, in the past, there was not a background of circus people, because that was a thing that existed at that time, these wandering wagons of people who could sing and act and perform circus tricks and apparently made their living this way. It is interesting to me that the name Toch, which is quite a frequent name also, comes from the Spanish word tocar, which means to play: like the guitar, you would say ~tocar la guitarra.~ And I heard, for instance, that Schoenberg was related to the mother of the Marx brothers. So I think there is such a background there of all-around musician-actor-performer that maybe then culminates in people like that. This is of course pure speculation, but it might be true.

COLE: It could be. Today I thought we could begin with the year 1922, a significant year in

ZEISL's life as a composer, because this was the year in which his first compositions appeared in print. Certainly he'd written compositions before. We know that several had been destroyed by the family. But this is the year of his first published compositions, a set of three songs, published by Edition Strache. We've talked about this before, but perhaps it's worth reiterating: song is the basic ingredient of

ZEISL's art. It might not hurt to summarize the reasons for this early and effective cultivation of song.

ZEISL: Well, all his life, before he came to America I would say, Eric was drawn to this form. And it had several reasons. For one thing, song was the best medium for thim1 and song was so pervading ^-he life of the family even, with his uncle a tenor, his father a tenor in the Singakademie, ihis brother a tenor, and his younger brother a baritone. So he constantly heard music of the voice, and so that was a natural thing. But it was also that he was born a true romantic and that song is a romantic medium; and it attracted him for this reason, I think. And we have already talked about it that the spoken word or poetry and so on were a kind of releasing element that would stir his creative impulses. Therefore, he reacted to these short poems. And also he was an enormously dramatic talent, and he said that a song is a drama in a page. Another thing is that he had overall, not only in music, this very great talent of portrayal, and he could measure up a person with one phrase. He would say one thing, for instance, about his brother. I better say it in German first, because when you translate it, it isn't as good. Part of these sayings are that they are very short and sometimes humorous--most of the time humorous. But also they have a kind of poetic quality. It only occurred to me why they were so good in German when I began to teach Ovid and Virgil, and I was explaining to my students the rules of consonance and assonance. And there are these things. They have a flow, and there is a poetic assonance and consonance in them that makes them better. When you translate, this is all lost. So for instance, he said about his brother, "Mein bruder ist eine komische Mischung zwischen k8 Kunstler und ka Faufmann." Now you see, this komische Mischung, and ka Run and ka Kau--this is so alliterative, and consonnant, it makes it so much better than when you translate it and.say he was a funny mixture between no artist and no merchant. You know, the meaning of it is still very good; it is there, but it isn't as well coined. Very often, it was like a game in our parties that he would characterize on the piano the people that were there, and it was just uncanny how he could with a few melodies characterize a person [so] that you would think, he comes into the room and you see him. Anyway, he had that gift of really seeing to the bottom of your heart. And when he looked at you, he knew you and knew everything about you. And there was a strange thing about him, that for instance he could take a letter, and he had never seen the person, and [yet he] could describe that person, exactly how he was, and not only the exterior of the person but what he was thinking and what his character was. And he had never studied graphology or even been interested; it just sprang out of the pages to him. And so when he met you he also had that feeling, he knew who you were. This sometimes created enemies, because when you were a good person, you saw yourself as he saw you, and you liked what you saw. It was like a mirror. When you were not so nice, you also saw that, and all of a sudden you saw yourself as a contemptible person. You didn't like that, and so you didn't like Eric.

COLE: I see. It's clear that Eric needed some kind of extramusical stimulus to get his fires burning. With the song, obviously the poem was inspirational. But as time goes on, we'll see that plays, stories, liturgical works, and even art works inspire music above and beyond song.

ZEISL: Yes. As I told you, it was very important for him to have a stimulus, and usually it came from the word, but not really always. Sometimes very outside stimuli would translate themselves then through the medium of the song or of the poem. For instance, it's hard to believe, but the "Stundlein wohl vor Tag," which is so eerie--when he brought it to me and played it.to me and I was the first to hear it, he said, "You know, this morning I saw this pigeon on the windowsill. n And you know, nothing in the poem or in the [song] would relate to such a thing. But it was maybe a bird or something, and then he got stirred by it. It was, of course, an expression of the mood he was in at that time, because he was in an extreme anxiety. Our relationship was--I will speak about this later.

COLE What factors affected his choice of a poem? Was there any common denominator?

ZEISL: Well, there was constant turmoil in his soul. He was very restless and very, very unhappy most of the time. And I think, for instance, he looked for texts that would give him quiet. He was kind of trying to heal himself. And therefore that he made so many night songs was like he would give himself a medicine and quiet down this stormy soul of his. He loved especially, for instance, the first night song, "I Wander through the Silent Night" [Sechs Lieder]. It expressed the feelings that he had at this time, and they were pretty much the same, but especially strong in his views where everything was unsolved, so to say. Was [that] what you wanted to know?

COLE: One thing that amazed me is the broad taste he had in selecting poets. I see a little bit more clearly now. Some of his friends brought poems. Did he read widely, too, searching for texts?

ZEISL: No, that was the funny thing. I think he had very good taste in his selections. Whenever he composed something, they were mostly of a much above-average lyrical and poetic quality. And yet he was not a reader at all. I very often made fun of him because I am a very ardent reader and he was never reading. He was, of course, all the time reading, but scores. He was a one-track person. I think he never knew the real contents of Lohengrin. I think he knew the score from A to Z. every note of it, but in this way the text didn't interest him. But he had this feeling for text and for real quality. For instance, I think the only book that he had read up to then--later on, here in America he read quite a bit, especially in the last years of his life--but then I was always kidding him that the only book he had ever read was Wilhelm] Hauff's Marchen. He loved fairy tales, and this was one of his favorites. But at the same tome he could--and would do it for fun--imitate Schiller or Goethe, but in such a way that you would think they had written this thing. He needed not much to get the gist of something and knew exactly what made it. I think that for quality most of his texts are very well chosen.

COLE: Yes. Beginning with this set of three songs,

ZEISL comes upon the stage, as it were, and is recognized. From the year 1922 to about 1930 we see a continuing and growing recognition of his talents in Vienna and beyond. In the dissemination of this material, one needs performers. Who were some of the singers who performed these works over the years?

ZEISL: Well, he was very lucky already with the first three songs, because tHans] Duhan . . . . There you see the power of the publishing houses. A private person hardly ever gets to a performer, but the publishing houses have an in. Strache approached Duhan, and Duhan liked it and performed them. Immediately, the year they came out, they were performed by him in the concert. He gave only one concert a year, and he included these songs in his concert, which was a great honor. And I think it must have given Eric great encouragement. You know, in between all these disappointments, there were always these certain things that kept Eric going, that told him that there must be something that was true behind what he thought and that he should continue. And so there were of course a number of younger singers and performers that would take material like this, but they were not known themselves, and it was always kind of a struggle. Usually it was done like this, that the composer. was promising to sell so-and-so many tickets, and this made part of the concert possible. And I remember at one time when my friend Lizzi and I had taken some tickets to sell for Eric, and then we left and went skiing and forgot all about it. It was the trio [Piano Trio Suite in B Minor] which was dedicated to Lizzi. And my father wrote me and told us that Eric had come to his place of business and asked for the money because he had to deliver it. And we had the money but we hadn't delivered it. And he said, The beautiful Lizzi, the trio is dedicated to her, but not its proceeds," and that we should send the money, which we then did. But this was terrible for Eric because he had no money; and there he was responsible for it, and it must have been quite a situation that he went to my father for it. There were a number of very important singers that sang him. Shortly before we left, I think it was in the year '35 or '36, [Oscar] Jolli sang a cycle, a whole cycle, the Night Songs--you know, all these baritone songs [Sechs Lieder]. And he commented how beautiful they are, and how happy he was finally to sing something that seemed so worthwhile to him, and how sad it was that he couldn't do them in Germany. He was German and was really very much known in Germany, and he was very, very upset about the fact that he couldn't sing them in Germany anymore. 1Alexander] Ripnis came to Vienna, and Eric at that time, I have mentioned it, had a disciple--or what you would call it--a Baron Gompertz. He was a rich man who lived on his income. He didn't do any work. He was a typical aristocrat of--how [do] you describe them?--very much for the arts, very interested in but not doing a bit of work. And he perished because he could not face going out of Vienna and could not face doing any trade or anything, so he just stayed there and perished. But he was very interested in Eric's music, and he had this knowhow of course--born as an aristocrat and very much of a society man, he felt free to approach anybody. And so he went with the songs to Kipnis, and Kipnis liked them and sang them. But I think if Eric had come, he would never have succeeded even to be admitted into his presence. There was a very beautiful young singer--I don't know what became of her--Tatjana Menotti, who sang his Children's Songs 1Kinderlieder]. And there were others whose names I have forgotten. The Children's Songs were the most performed. And it was very moving to me (because they were all the time performed in Vienna, and Eric would usually accompany them himself) that when we came to America and long years passed by, they were given on the Evenings on the Roof, and Eric accompanied them here, too. When he came on the stage, it became obvious to me how many years had passed, because his temples were gray, and I saw him yet as a-young man per forming them in Vienna. In the meantime maybe ten or more years had passed, and there was like an older person coming on the stage, like it was somebody different.

COLE: Getting back to the three songs, it's interesting to me that two of them represent very different poles of Eric's character. Perhaps we could talk a little bit about the first song of this set, called "Armseelchen, n a piece that you said is almost a symbol of Eric's own life.

ZEISL: Ja, really it is, I think. And he felt that probably as a child, because he said that he composed that when he was only a child, maybe nine or ten years old. Probably the harmonization was refined later, around 1920.

COLE: Here he is only sixteen and it's published.

ZEISL: Ja. And it is a very simple song, as you know, almost like a fairy tale, but it has this aspect of something very moving going on and nobody paying attention, and that not even a light would shine at the funeral of this little soul that was buried, and that the children were singing, that the wild animals were crying, but the i:important thing was not happening, and this was very typical of his life.

COLE: And symbolically, too, especially in light of our last interview, this song is dedicated to his mother.

ZEISL: Well, that was a lifelong wound. She was very strange. I remember we were young married, and it was the first time that we had come back from the honeymoon, and it was the first time that his parents came to the house. And he had at that time composed Leonce u Lena, or was in the middle of it. He didn't know any other way to please somebody than to play his music. How should he honor his parents? That was synonymous. And so he went to the piano and he played that. And the mother shook her head and said, HI hope you will sometime make a good operetta." And it was like a slap in his face; she could not see anything else. I think she had . . . . She was a very clever and smart woman, but she was like a chicken that could only see the corn before it. She had no farsightedness, or no view of the world, and she was only worried about what was before her, and the next day, and these things. Now, the father, though he was probably seen as a little dumb by the people, had this ingredient: he could see the world. He could see ahead. And so it was always disappointing, and the two, Eric and his mother, were always up in arms. I think that when you speak of the ~songs, many of them, not only the ~Armseelchen, n are in .~~ some way autobiographical, as In the Night Songs and "Aus dem Walde bitt die Nacht" [nDie Nacht," Gilm], all this disorder in his soul. But also the portrayal, for instance, in the ~Stilleben.~ I think there was a scene that Eric and his brother very often enacted, and they enacted the father and the mother discussing Eric and the mother nagging. And he must have been impossible, but it was because she didn't understand him. And so she would always say, "Des halt' ich nicht aus!" n I can't stand that any longer, and the boy must get out of the house! I can't stand that! I can't stand that!" And the way of the music really -Aimitated the mother. I never saw her like this. She behaved very well with me. But all the children kind of made fun of her--they would say, "The lovely voice of Mama, and so on, indicating that she probably shrieked most of the time when she talked with them. But it was almost like he had composed it [sings tune of "Stilleben"], this nagging wife in the "Stilleben.~ It was almost just copies from how she spoke.

COLE: In the "Armseelchen, we see Eric's ability to capture a mood concisely. We see the accompaniment as an equal partner with the voice. We see many things that will be typical of his songs throughout his life. Perhaps most typical, we see a gift for lyrical, expressive melody. Did Eric ever say how a melody came to him? It's a magical process, we know. Beethoven has talked about it a bit. Did Eric ever?

ZEISL: I don't think he talked about it too much. It came at different times, but mostly it came when it was supposed to come, because he--it is strange that such a wild and stormy person was in other ways very pedantic. You should have seen his workroom. There was not a pencil that was in disarray. And he was very, very tidy and almost pedantic, and so also were his work habits. And because he always gave lessons in the afternoon, he had kind of trained himself to work in the morning. He went to the piano and began. But there were times when absolutely nothing would come, and it would make him extremely unhappy, because then he would think that it would never come. And he could not force it at all, and it either came or it didn't. And when it didn't come, then he was unable to work and could do nothing. Now, he had a number of sketchbooks (I still have some here), and in part they contain the nucleus to what is later a composition and existed, but I do not really know how he used them and if he used them during the day. I have never observed him do that. About outward stimuli, sometimes it was--for instance, the Requiem lConcertante], the big Requiem. We had a great political upheaval in Austria, in which a man by the name of [Engelbert] Dollfuss, of [whom] you may have heard, suppressed the Socialists, and it was like a civil war. There was shooting in the streets, and there were many dead. And that is when Eric began the Requiem. But the Viennese forget quickly. The thing quieted down, and everybody went to the Heurigen, which is the place where you drink wine, and everything was quite happy. And so after working feverishly on the first part, the whole mood of the city went back to normal, and he couldn't compose any more. It was impossible for him. And he had one of those times where he couldn't compose at all. And then Dollfuss himself was killed, and there was another uprising of the Nazis at that time, and he was killed under very pitiful circumstances. He had a mortal wound and they hovered over him. They didn't let any doctor come in, and he slowly bled to death, and it was really quite a horrible thing. And then Eric continued.

COLE: Finished it. That's amazing.

ZEISL: Ja. So it was really absolutely outward stimulus.

COLE: The opposite pole from "Armseelchen" is the third of this set, "Neck und Nymphe, n which is a marvelous early example of a comic song. Maybe we can talk a little bit about Eric's sense of humor.

ZEISL: I think that his sense of humor was one of the most marked features that he had. I remember quite a few things, but I constantly meet people who remember this or that of him which I have forgotten. He never told a joke or even remembered a joke. He made them up himself. His Ccoinages were so funny that you really could remember them, like Hilde Spiel remembered the melodies. They were really quite unique and original sayings. He had a real sense of humor. He was not witty; he was humorous. And, of course, the humor in a little child, or the humor in an animal, as Disney, for instance, caught it so well--you know, the quack-quack of the duck or something like this--he had this kind of humor, a humor of portrayal. Or he could, as I have told you with the example of his brother Willi, coin a phrase. He would characterize me, for instance. I am so absent-minded. All our young marriage, I was trying very hard to be a good Hausfrau and so on. And so he said, "My wife is the best Hausfrau. Every schilling is turned three times and then lost. n [laughter] In German it's much funnier. n [Jede Schilling] wird dreimal umgedreht und . . . dann verloren. n It's funny. But it characterizes me so very much, so excellently. And he had sayings like this. And of course his humor was sometimes- it was never bitter, but it was sometimes sharp, and then it would run into the grotesque, like in the "Grabschrift" Stimulus, ein Affe") or the "Stilleben.

COLE: We'll talk about those as we go along. One other manifestation of the year 1922 is a little unpublished song called "Vale. n It's not the most memorable song, but it is the earliest preserved example of an unpublished song, and this might be the [place] to mention that ZEISL has a large, large number of these.

ZEISL: Ja. Well, he was guise fond of this song, and it was in a way a kind of autobiographical song because it pictures his very unhappy love to my friend Lizzi, who was at that time not my friend (I didn't even know her yet). She later entered our circle, and we became very good friends. She was very, very beautiful. miS song pictures a monk who must renounce his love and gives his heart to the bells which ring out, plays the evening chimes, and in this he sings out his love. And so it was somehow remindful of Eric, who did the same with music. This Lizzi was a very great experience for him, a very unhappy one. And he did go into psychoanalysis after that experience because it really must have disturbed him to the point where he was unable to work and . . . .

COLE: [whistles] I hadn't known that. Two things strike me about this large amount of unpublished material. One, certainly there is a large number of pathetique songs. Is this again in large degree autobiographical?

ZEISL: It is. It is. And when you speak of his -humor, then I would say that humor is usually just the other side of melancholy. And the most humorous people are very melancholic offstage, in their daily lives. And so he had a melancholy streak, and it was very justified because his life was very unhappy. And as I said, many of his songs are very autobiographical, because there he was with this extremely sensitive nervous system, which was very unfortunate. It probably belonged to the trade, but it was also a very hard thing to cope with. And with that he had all this strength that he had to expend for his daily life. It was just like a very fine racehorse that has to pull a coal wagon, because he had to earn his living. Can you imagine a person with such ears who has to teach little children who play every note wrong? Think what that must have been.

COLE: And at the same dynamic level always.

ZEISL: Ja. Yet he was so patient, and children just adored him.

COLE: And then of course the other question which we can perhaps attempt to answer is, why were not more of these marvelous songs published?

ZEISL: Well, part of it was that it was the time of the Depression, so nobody took time to look at them. And then it was Hitler. From his twenty-fifth year on, where Eric really emerged, Hitler was in Germany, which means that no song could be published there, and no songs could be sung there. Therefore, even the Austrian publishers didn't like to publish anything by a person who could not be sold in Germany, because there was the market. And so it was extremely difficult to place something. It was really quite hopeless. Eric often told me that Schubert had ... difficulty selling his songs, but he got one gulden when he sold it. But Eric got nothing, and he couldn't even place it for nothing, because at that time it was just impossible to place.

COLE: Once again he was a victim of unfortunate circum stance--as so often.

ZEISL: Ja, the circumstances were certainly very much against him. The Depression was against him. Then nothing would go. And then Hitler was a special thing, and that he came so early in Eric's life. The other composers, all the ones whose names you know, had already established them selves. They were about ten years older, and more, than- Eric. So they were already published; they were already established. And when they came to America, they had an established name. And for Eric that was very difficult. He was just emerging. In normal times, I think he would have certainly become famous in the next ten years.

COLE: Yes, I agree. In the year 1924 two new things happened. I under stand that he, while still a teenager, produced his first dramatic effort. This is an early opera that I haven't seen.

ZEISL: Ja, it was called The Sin [Die Sunde], and it was ;. ' _ taken from a little Boccaccio story. And it is about a young--how do you call? they are not knights yet--page, a page who is in love with his lady. And they pray together, and the prayer becomes 8 love scene. Just about the time when Eric entered our circle, he had finished this, and this great love song in which they end, this duet, was a constant number to which we were treated. I have read somewhere where Oscar Levant, I think, said that an evening with Gershwin was a Gershwin evening. Well, it was very similar with Eric. He would begin with other composers, and then it would invariably end with himself, and he would play his own composition, and we were his audience.

COLE: I see. And already we see him attempting the larger dramatic forms that he will undertake very successfully in future years. The other thing new in this year is a piece, a suite for piano actually, called Die Heinzelmannchen. This is an early example of instrumental music. Maybe we can talk about it a bit.

ZEISL: Well, unfortunately I don't know anything about it.I Eric never played it to me or to any one of us. It must have been behind him already at the time he entered our circle.

COLE: It is interesting that again it's an extramusical kind of influence, a programmatic nature. Perhaps we can mention what eon Heinzelmannchen is.

ZEISL: Ein Heinzelmannchen is a little dwarf. They are supposed to be quite helpful to man. [There exist] lots of stories in which the tailor has work to finish, and he's already so tired and goes to sleep, and the Heinzelmanuchen come and they finish it. And in the morning, to his great surprise, everything is done for him. They always perform these impossible tasks for persons that they favor, but sometimes they can be mischievous. Like Rumpelstiltskin is such a Heinzelmannchen.

COLE: So here again we see something consistent with something we discussed the other day, that in these early years it was difficult for Eric to think in terms of abstract musical forms. He takes a programmatic . . . .

ZEISL: Ja, ja, that was his love. But I think Stravinsky was similar in this respect.

COLE: Yes. Also beginning in 1924, and continuing as long as Eric remained in Vienna, was a large number of reviews in a tremendously wide range of periodicals. The thing that impressed me is the favorable reception that one finds in papers intended for a wide variety of readerships.

ZEISL: Well, for one thing, you must understand that the Viennese took their music seriously, and that music was .. . really a very important part of their daily life. So, for instance, a review of an opera or of the last concert appeared on the front page of the most important papers. And the music critic of any newspaper was one of the most ,.. known and feared personalities of the editorial staff. We had a great, great number of newspapers at that time. And they all felt it their duty towards their readership to review concerts and would faithfully go to these concerts, and it was news, and it was read. So this is one part of it. The second part of it is that Eric--I don't want to sound like I say this because I'm his wife or something, if but it was the truth--that when on a whole concert one' song of his was played, it was usually the one that made the evening, so to speak. Everybody felt it in this way. And it even happened here, when his song cycle, the Children's Songs, were played on the Evenings on the Roof. This is usually a very intellectual audience that is not given to much applauding or demonstration. And they applauded so much that it had to be repeated. And again, what the critics wrote most about of the evening was it. He had something that--in German we called it Zunden. It put an audience to flame.

TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO

SEPTEMBER 4, 1975 .

COLE: We ran out of tape as I was [about to] say that the scrapbooks function as a marvelous research tool. I certainly hope that people become aware that~these are available. [They contain] reviews [from] most, if not all, of his career. You have them arranged chronologically, and one sees an amazing variety of journal and critic and the favorable response to Eric's compositions. Moving ahead a couple of years, we could talk about unpublished songs in 1925-26. But we find something new in 1927, namely, a song cycle This is a cycle of four songs, on a text called Aus der Hirtenflote, by a poet named Karl] Kobald. I had never heard this name before. Can you tell me a little bit about him and perhaps about the cycle?

ZEISL: Ja, he was an elderly man, a Hofrat, very typical. The Hofrat is a very typical thing of Austria. It is a man who has served in the government service and has gotten to a higher rank. And most of these, especially in Austria, were very cultured people who dabbled in the arts, aside, because their offices left them a lot of time. And he befriended Eric. Because it was before my time, I really don't know how he got to know Eric, but he must have been quite taken by his gift and probably was an admirer and audience for Eric, and Eric was very grateful for this because he had so little response from his family, as you know, and of the world yet. And so he gave Eric this cycle of his poems, and Eric composed quite a few--not only this cycle, but I think he composed a great many of these songs. I think they were also performed, because immediately when he wrote something there was usually some performance pos sible, but not all of these performances were of the same Importance, naturally. When they were played--when a Duhan sang something, it was the Grosse Konzertsaal, and it was heard and then also reviewed very extensively. Or when the radio brought something, that was an excellent opportunity to get your name known, because at this time radio provided almost the only entertainment that was possible for people at home, and they were home a great deal, especially since the time was Depression. Also, it was a great thing to be performed on the radio because the radio paid for it, and that was important to a composer. Otherwise I don't know much about it, because when Eric entered our specific circle, he did not see him anymore. Either the man had died, or I don't know what had happened. I never got to know him.

COLE: The year 1928 sees two significant compositions. The first of these is a piano trio. Is this an early example of absolute music?

ZEISL: Ja, I think that is one where he tried, and I think successfully tried, to go into bigger forms and also into what you call abstract music, without lied. But the stimulus for this was his love for Lizzi. The trio was dedicated to her, and the trio was very successful from the start. A very good young group of players took it under its wing. I think the pianist was Edith Wachtel, and the violinist was called [Georg] Steiner, I think. They were excellent musicians, and they travelled with it, and they went to Hungary and Yugoslavia and Rumania and so on; so it was played not only in Austria but also, so to say, in foreign countries. And always it received very favorable reviews. I heard it several times, which is an indication that it was performed quite a bit, because this was before my time--composed long before Eric entered my life, so to say. And when I have heard it, it means that it had staying power and was even later performed after it was composed.

COLE: One significant component it contains is a theme and variations movement. I say "significant" because this is the first manifestation I know of a baroque form used in the works of Eric

ZEISL, and we're going to find baroque forms surfacing again and again in practically every major [work] he was to compose. When did this interest in baroque procedures surface? What can you tell us about this?

ZEISL: Really, I think it was always there. It was a wish, a desire, something Eric was striving for. And why the baroque influence? I think it is there in Vienna wherever you go. You have these baroque buildings and I think the baroque time is a time of intense religiosity, and Eric was a religious person by nature. And the counter point was something that had eluded him at first but that he was striving for, and I think successfully striving. I think he never completely attained mastery in the larger forms. Strangely enough, I think Stravinsky had the same problems and was always striving to do music--at least in our talks. He talked with Eric about it and said that it was a great problem for him, that he was striving and trying to attain it.

COLE: Could we mention the subsequent fate of this piece? I think there is a moral to be derived from the story.

ZEISL: Well, we took it to America and it was there; and then I don't quite know anymore the year, but it was the year in which Eric orchestrated a Tchaikovsky operetta for the Philharmonic for a fellow by the name of [Theodore] Bachenheimer, who was the producer. There was a young conductor by the name of Franz Steininger, who came from Vienna and who had heard of Eric. He had arranged melodies of Tchaikovsky to a simple love story. He came to Eric and wanted Eric to orchestrate that. And Eric got $2,000 for that. And it was a great moment in our lives, because up to that [time], in our life in America, we had never seen that much money in one piece before. So Eric did it, and it was given to a man by the name of Rubinstein, I think, to copy. We became friendly in the exchange of the work with him. And at one time he arranged [forl this trio to be played. (He was doing chamber music at his house.) And that is the last time I know that it was there, and it was played. And we never knew. Either Eric left it there, or I really don't know what happened after that, because it wasn't there afterwards.

COLE: The moral is, what a fragile link connects an unpubiished work with posterity. If you have only one or two copies and they're lost . . . .

ZEISL: Absolutely. I think quite a few things got lost this way. I think Eric had many more songs than are there, because sometimes when he wanted to give or dedicate a song to somebody, like a present, he would take that song, and he was too lazy to copy it, and that was it.

COLE: They didn't have Xeroxes then.

ZEISL: No.

COLE: The second significant composition in 1928 is a marvelous cycle entitled Mondbilder. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about the poet of this cycle and the overall fascination with the moon that one finds in this piece and in many Viennese works in the earlier part of the century.

ZEISL: Well, Christian Morgenstern was a very famous poet of the time, and he was mostly famous not for his earnest songs but for very scurrile--I don't know if that is an English word. ltaPe recorder turned off] He had a whole volume of these scurrilous verses which were called Songs of the Gallows (Galgenlieder). And to give you an example, one said, for instance, HA knee went wandering through the world; it was a knee and nothing else." This kind of thing. It was very strange and very good poetry. And this cycle had some of these traits of the scurrilous but was also partly serious. I think a friend gave the book to Eric, who was always in need and looking for good texts to compose. And the Moon Pictures were the result. He did them first for piano, and then he decided to orchestrate them. And at that time I think his art of orchestration developed to a point where it was masterful. That was one of the gifts that he didn't have to struggle with. It was always there; from the start, he got it.

COLE: Yes. Perhaps we should point out that he offered many optional accompaniments for songs and song cycles. You could accompany them with piano or with orchestra. Was he fortunate enough to hear many orchestral performances of his Mondbilder?

ZEISL: Ja, the radio performed it twice with the Symphoniker, and at one time I think it was Duhan who sang it again, the first time, and the second time another singer. I think his name was [Ernst] Urbach, but I don't quite remember. But the program would tell you what it was, when it was played over the radio. The orchestration was wonderful, and Eric was very pleased with it, because sometimes, in rehersals . . . . Here, I think-the musicians are much better at sight-reading. You will seldom have these first reading debacles. The Viennese are wonderful musicians, and the orchestra had a wonderful way of playing when the thing was rehearsed, but they are used to about twelve rehearsals or something. (That's the least, if not more.) So at the first rehearsal they do not have this intensity. [It] doesn't matter too much. So sometimes at the first rehearsal the thing sounded awful, and Eric would come to me, and he was gray with perplexity and fright. "I can't orchestrate," he said, "I can't!" And then when the thing developed, it turned out that it was just like he wanted it to be.

COLE: If we get back to the moon in this particular cycle, is there any comparison, do you think, between Eric's version and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, or are they attempting different things?

ZEISL: Well, I think they both depict the moon, but otherwise they are completely different. Because Schoenberg's piece, to me at least, is really a break away from earth, so to say, up into the stratosphere. And you really have the feeling when you hear Pierrot Lunaire, and it must have struck everybody, especially at that time. (Now the stratosphere is something familiar.) Well, in these Moon Pictures--though they are, I think, very original and very personal--Eric is looking at the moon as a person on earth looks at the moon, and maybe the only thing that is not different there (and which is already in the poetry) [is] that the moods are so different and are really hardly from the day, but have a dreamy quality and bring in mythology and the Austral native, etc. So it isn't really the average person that looks at the moon. It has a kind of eerie quality there. And of course, a great sense of humor is there.

COLE: Yes. We might mention [that] it is a cycle for baritone, one that certainly could be revived with some profit.

ZEISL: Oh, I think they are marvelous songs.

COLE: The year 1929 witnesses a major breakthrough in the composition of a large dramatic work, entitled Pierrot In der Flasche. To get into this piece, we might talk a little about the figure of the Pierrot in general at that time.

ZEISL: Well, I think it wasn't so much Eric that looked for the Pierrot, but he was always looking for texts, and so I think this Mr. [Zdenko] Kestranek, who was the singing teacher o. his brothers and therefore also knew Eric quite intimately and knew of his need and was dabbling in literature, decided to make a text for Eric. And he read [Gustav] Meyrink, who was a very popular poet at that time and who also had this sense of the scurrilous and the absurd that we find in tiorgenstern, only he wrote prose. And so Xestranek chose that particular little novelette. )

COLE: This was called The Man in the Bottle.

ZEISL: Ja, ja. I read it sometime. I have again for gotten if the person in the novelette is also a Pierrot, but I forgot.

COLE: He's in the costume of a Pierrot. He's a prince who's been dallying with the Sultan's wife. So he's in a Pierrot costume.

ZEISL: Pierrot costume, ja. So this was more or less incidental. And Eric, if it were not a Pierrot, would also have composed it. What I think is-interesting and special to Eric is that this ballet contains a song, because the Pierrot or the lover or whatever you would call this figure, comes with a serenade, and the serenade is really one of the best pieces of the ballet. He comes from backstage with that song.

COLE: So perhaps it [represents] a sense of frustration in not having an operatic text. Another thing we can point out is that the original score, which you and I have studied, has an amazingly complete and detailed libretto, more so than ~ had seen in a ballet; this also seems like opera.

ZEISL: Ja. It was interesting that that piece, when it was played over the radio--the conductor was a man by the name of Karl Alvin, who was a conductor of the Viennese State Opera and a very fine musician and a friend of Richard Strauss. And Richard Strauss had often played his compositions to him, he told us, and had harkened to what he would say about it and sometimes change even. And- when Kabasta, who was the director of the radio, gave him this piece to play, he called Kabasta and said he didn't want to play it because he didn't know Eric's name and he, being a famous conductor, wasn't going to play the thing of an unknown. And it was to Xabasta's merit that he said, "Just look at the score before you turn it down. n (All this is what Alvin told Eric.) And he then looked at the score, and he was just amazed and conducted it and loved it. And he thought very, very great things of Eric. My mother--I have never mentioned that Eric always -had somebody who was against him. And in the picture of me and Eric, it was my mother. She didn't want to hear about this thing at all. You know, like the grandmother who had said, she lives in this delusion. n [If] I told her that he had a performance, she would say, "That's what he tells you, n or something like this. She wouldn't even believe it. She was this negative figure that always appears in his life. And we were in St. Wolfgang, in the Salzkammergut, and Eric came there, and we met Alvin. And my mother was there, too. And he put his hand on his shoulder and he said, This will be a great man. He has a great future before him.. That was the first time that my mother heard that from somebody whose judgment she couldn't doubt. So that was Pierrot in the Flask, this piece. It brought Eric a great friend. But unfortunately, when we came to America, Alvin went to Mexico, and he died there very soon afterwards. Because he would certainly have done something for Eric.

COLE: Was the complete ballet ever performed?

ZEISL: No, it was never performed as a ballet. And Eric then made the suite out of it and orchestrated it, and as the suite it was played.

COLE: I see. Wasn't Eric to do this many times? He didn't want to waste a scrap of material, and he would take the best movements and make suites.

ZEISL: Ja. This was a kind of a practical thing, because he wanted it to be performed. He didn't want to have done it in vain. And there was a possibility, because symphonic music had a greater possibility than ballet at that time.

COLE: In this piece one sees many

ZEISL characteristics [which will be] developed increasingly. You've mentioned this quality of the grotesque and one certainly sees it in this composition.

ZEISL: Yes, absolutely. That is very strongly there, and also already in the Moon Pictures.

COLE: Yes. And we see the use of the fugue [for four giant toucans], another baroque procedure and a procedure that was quite difficult for Eric to master. Isn't it . somewhat innovative or unusual to use fugues in dramatic works?

ZEISL: I think it is. I couldn't say it haunted him, but it was something that he desired and loved to do. And so he did it whenever he could. I think it was as if he would do repentance for his youth, where his teachers wanted him to do this kind of exercises, and he wouldn't hear of it or wouldn't do it. And the moment he got mature enough, then he would do it on his own.

COLE: It's a shame this piece was never performed, because it would have been delightful to see the four giant birds dancing the fugue.

ZEISL: Ja, ~ think it has a very interesting text.

COLE: Yes, it's fascinating. They actually took the Meyrink story, which had been set in one time and place, and updated it considerably. Was there any sort of jazz influence or American influence here?

ZEISL: Well, the circle in which Eric and my friend Fritz Kramer and all moved--they were absolutely crazy about jazz. It was at the time when jazz became very fashion able. You know that Milhaud wrote a jazz piece and that Stravinsky was influenced by it--it was a very strong influence of the time. It came over like a wave from America, and it caught the fancy of all the young people and composers.

COLE: It seems to me that in some of the characters in this ballet, Charlie and Li perhaps, one sees an almost American flapper type of influence.

ZEISL: Oh, yes, yes, definitely. Eric loved, for instance, when An American in Paris and the Rhapsody In Blue came over, and when Eric was enthusiastic about it--and he knew the Rhapsody _-Blue--he knew it by heart. He could play it from the first to the last note, which he often did at that time.

COLE: It seems to me that there are a few other components in this ballet that are worth mentioning because they show Eric's ability in different dimensions: as an orchestral and a descriptive composer. I understand that the Dance of the Bats" became quite popular.

ZEISL: Ja. That was a very impressive piece, I think, and it was very weird and rhythmical and yet very melodic at the same time. And I think the orchestration in the ballet is very masterful.

COLE: It's outstanding. Whenever possible, Eric tried to score for a large symphony orchestra, didn't he? The outcome of the romantic tradition.

ZEISL: Ja, he did, but he also has quite a few chamber pieces. The older he got, the more he tried to say it with the most thrifty means and, even when he orchestrated for full orchestra, have only one instrument play at a time, instead of the full orchestra. He Was talking about this and pointing it out that he was striving for this. When I say that orchestration was born with him and that it was easy for him, one should still not imagine that it was easy, because I would sometimes come into the room- where he was orchestrating, and I would notice that his forehead was swollen, that there were actually like bi'g bumps over his brows. And that was from the mental effort of the orchestration.

COLE: He had a gift for it, but it still was not an easy task. There are two other movements that strike me because they illustrate things we've talked about already, and one can see them now in the concrete. The "Festmusik, n for example, is a marvelous bit of ceremonious music. You've talked about the Prater before, and this must still have been with him then. .

ZEISL: I think so. This kind of grand gesture, that depicting a king, appears in many of his pieces. It is the love for the stage, I think, that inspired that.

COLE: We've established a picture of Eric as the romantic figure, the person always in love but rarely successful in love. Might this have [occasioned] the lushness and exoticism which he [brought to] his "Love Dances? lIt is] certainly a marvelous example of sensuous, rich orchestration. -

ZEISL: Ja, I must say that he was an extremely sensuous person. And of course, his loves were completely without luck. He was a person to whom sex was very necessary, and I thank my stars that he never became a victim of some dread disease, because he certainly had all the opportunities J for this and took them to get it. He was running wild. He was a rather wild person. [tape recorder turned off] He had no restraints or inhibitions. When he thought.he needed something, that had to be so. And I think probably it was partly due to that that he was so unlucky in his real loves, because the young girls to whom he addressed all these feelings were not ready for this kind of thing, and so he had to go to the kind of worst paid thing because he was very poor. Knowing as I now do that Schubert and Schumann and Beethoven were all victims of these dread diseases (because they probably had similar temperaments), I really am very happy that he was spared this one thing. So love music came natural to him.

COLE: In the year 1930, which I think we'll use as the terminal year lof] this first period--[

ZEISL's recognition] by the Viennese public--two compositions certainly should be discussed. The first is a set of pieces called Three African Choruses. It came as a surprise to me to find an Austrian composer in 1930 setting black American poetry to music. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about the impact of this poetry as it appeared translated in a volume called Afrika Singt.

ZEISL: I think this is very fine poetry, and Eric always reacted immediately when poems were good. He had a natural feeling for it, a natural sense. It isn't necessary for a musician to have that, but he seemed Gto have had it and, though he was not a literary person, a great deal [of it]. Now, the poems were usually given to him by somebody--some of his friends, who were literary people and read a lot and therefore knew of new trends or appearances by publishers and so on. And then they would think of him, who was always in need of this and could so easily be stimulated. It needed not much. He always wanted to compose. And so some friend gave him this book, and he immediately set about to compose it. And it could have been that at that time--since his father was a member of the Merchants' Singing Academy and the brothers were both singers--there was an outlet for him, where he knew that he could get a performance. The conductor of the singing academy, a man by the name of Julius Katay, was very impressed with Eric and liked his music very much and usually performed what he brought to him. And so he immediately performed this.

COLE: This was a vocal group that was part of a trades men's guild?

ZEISL: Ja, like this. And it meant a great deal to the father. It was, so to say, his life. And his sons would - kind of kid him about it. (You know, he was so simple; he was almost that simple that he would believe every thing.) So they would say, Today I met a Mr. So-and-so, and he said you will be expelled from the singing academy! n "Oh, what have I done? How come? n And he was just beside himself. Then they told him that it was just a joke. But you can imagine when they made these jokes that this was a very important thing to him. He loved it. And so thi's singing academy did it. And ~ think the first performance, if I'm not mistaken, was in the Burggarten, which was a beautiful setting for it. I think you have seen the Burggarten. It's a very beautiful garden next to the big palace. And the summer evenings are so lovely. I remember it was at a time when I was just friends with Eric, nothing started between us yet. And I was in Reichenau with my parents, because it was around Whitsuntide, and I went in with the train and left earlier just in order to hear that concert. Because our circle was really very much taken with Eric--it was all very important to us.

COLE: I gather [that] this premiere was part of a festival week. Perhaps you could explain a little bit about this Musik Festwochen.

ZEISL: Vienna was always a music city. I really don't know the historical context and who had the idea, but this Festwochen idea developed. May and June was festival time in Vienna. And before Hitler appeared, a lot of Singvereins came for it, from Germany especially. And they performed there with their singing groups, because all over Germany you had these singing groups. (That is a very typical . German thing, to belong to a singing academy.) The teachers have their singing group.

COLE: They have men's and women's and mixed choruses.

ZEISL: And mixed, and everything. And it's a way of life there. And so it was really a very fine performance there in the Burggarten. It was something, an achievement that he was happy about. It was done with orchestra.

COLE: As far as you know, this was one of his earliest choral ventures, wasn't it?

ZEISL: Ja. And I think [that] out of the cycle, it was this song ["Harlemer Nachtlied"] that Fritz Kramer always told me about before I knew Eric. He was so fond of that song, and thought it was marvelous, and told me a great deal about it, and then thought I should meet Eric.

COLE: There were ultimately three components in this group of choruses. The critics recognized

ZEISL's ability to write for chorus. There are some marvelous reviews about the way he handles the human voice.

ZEISL: When I remember it now, the voices sounded like orchestra voices. It sounded like an orchestra.

COLE: Do you know the extent of Eric's interaction at that time with other composers who set these same texts? It turns out, as you know from my research, lthatl I've discovered six composers.

ZEISL: Ja. He didn't know of any of them.* No, he didn't. Maybe he heard later on of [Wilhelm] Grosz, because Grosz was also in Vienna. *

ZEISL did know one of them, Fritz Kramer. [M.C.]

COLE: It's rather striking that six composers would set these texts to music within a year of their appearance.

ZEISL: Ja, it just shows you the impact that book had.

COLE: Yes. Hilde Spiel said it sent shock waves through her literary circles at that time. Each piece, I think, has something worth discussing. The "Harlem Night Songs is one of his greatest choruses, a magnificent piece which we hope to hear recorded on tape in revival pretty soon. There are two things associated with the other choruses that I think are worth commenting [about]. One, we've talked about

ZEISL's ability to capture the essence of a text, how he was always searching.for a text. What happened in the "Arabeske"?

ZEISL: Well, the "Arabeske" was completely misconceived, so to say, by Eric, and that wasn't his fault but the translator's fault. He had translated "swinging in a tree, n as schaukeln. And schaukeln meant "rocking." And so Eric translated a picture of a black man who was holding two babies and rocking in a tree, and the whole thing very merry and happy and full of sunlight! while [really in the original] it was a stark contrast between the two little children--one black, one white--who love each other and kiss each other, and in the tree the black man's swinging, the victim of a lynch mob. And this went completely by his understanding and, I think, the others that composed it, likewise, because schaukeln, in Vienna, just doesn't bring up that picture of hanging.

COLE: Two other composers set a very similar mood, a happy one basically.

ZEISL: Besides, we also probably didn't know too much about this.

COLE: Isn't it true that once Erie had come to America, he received a communication from Frank Home, the author of this poem?

ZEISL: Yes, I tried very hard, because I could not find this poem in the libraries. (I found the [Langston] Hughes poem, the original. And I saw that the "Love Song" ["Harlem Night Songs], for instance, is a little bit different, but Eric had left out something.) I found other poems by Borne, and so I wrote to the publisher, and the publisher brought me into contact. Horne was at that time in Washington and had quite a fine position there, in the government, and--I forgot what it was.

COLE: He got into housing.

ZEISL: Ja, he was in some of the branches of the govern ment in Washington, and he answered me and sent me the poem in its original text. But it was very hard to place these poems here because of this fact. And no publisher wanted to do it because the first one was discomposed.

COLE: The other interesting facet is what happened to the third chorus, a marvelous Langston Hughes poem called Aunt Sue's Stories. n Once again the name Kestranek surfaces.

ZEISL: Yes. All his life, Eric was never sure of himself. The slightest remark of ever so unfit a person--if the maid in the kitchen [or] the cook would say, "I don't like that song," he would tear it up. And he had absolutely no real assurance or confidence. And that came from his background, where always in the family he had met with so much indifference or neglect or ridicule. And he had composed it and, I think, excellently composed it. It is a woman holding a child at her breast, and the music is very wild because the nature of the woman is very near to nature and not tamed or anything. And now Kestranek thought that was ridiculous. He thought the woman cannot be alone. That must be a whole bunch of people dancing. And so he immediately told Eric to forget that and he would change it. And so he invented the Dance of Kyulila, around whom the whole crowd is dancing, instead of just one moment of a mother rocking her child at her breast.

COLE: He even shifts the scene, doesn't he?

ZEISL: Ja. He shifted the scene to Africa, I think, instead of the back porch in Louisiana, or wherever it was. And Eric immediately consented, because that's the way he was. When I was going to marry him, his brother said to me, hook here, I think you will be quite happy with Eric, but one thing I must tell you: when he says ., he comes at five o'clock and is on his way and he will meet somebody else who says, 'Go somewhere else,' he will go somewhere else if that person is [persuasive] enough, and you will wait in vain." And it wasn't quite like this, later on, but he was like this: he was so easily persuaded. Probably, this way a lot of things were lost that should have lived.

COLE: The other composition from 1930, a piece that's quite different from the African Songs, is the First String Quartet. Now this is interesting from many points of view. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about how it was put together originally and what happened to the first two movements.

ZEISL: I'm not quite sure whether they are here or not, and I would have to look for them. Maybe they were lost, too. He always wanted to write chamber music but never felt quite secure enough to do it. And to write the quartet, he went to 1Hugo] Kauder, a teacher who had a lot of patience and was very nice. I think Eric appreciated him very much. And he brought Eric through that and he finished the quartet, which was something that Stohr wasn't able to do. And Marx, I think, never attempted because Marx himself was mostly a lieder composer. And at that time he brought it to the Galimirs, who were a young, rising quartet and very good, and they took it and played it quite a bit. Now, among the performances was also a The movements in question were located. performance in the