Hauer, Joseph Matthias (EN)

Hauer Joseph Matthias, *19 March 1883 Wiener Neustadt, †22 September 1959 Vienna, Austrian music theorist and composer. He began his musical training with his father (zither lessons). Between 1897 and 1902, he studied at the Wiener Neustadt Teacher Training Institute and, at the same time, took private lessons in piano, organ, violin and cello. He was self-taught in composition and music theory. Between 1904 and 1909, he passed the state examinations qualifying him to teach singing, violin and piano in schools. From 1902, he worked in Krumbach and Wiener Neustadt as a teacher, organist and choral conductor. Between 1914 and 1918, he served in the military. In 1919, due to poor health, he retired. He devoted himself to theoretical work and composition. In the 1920s, he established contact with the Viennese artistic elite (he met, among others, P. Altenberg, H. Bahra, K. Kraus, J. Itten, and A. Loos). In 1917, he met A. Schoenberg in person, to whom he proposed in 1923 that they establish a joint school of composition. Towards the end of 1923, however, a disagreement arose between the two composers regarding priority in the discovery of the “law of the twelve tones”; in 1925, Hauer even sought formal legal confirmation of the priority of his discovery and obtained it. The growing fascistisation of Austria in the 1930s brought Hauer’s activities to a halt; his works, deemed decadent and socially harmful, were included in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich. In 1927, Hauer received the City of Vienna Award; in 1954, he was appointed professor; and in 1956, he received a state award.

In the early period of his career (1912–1919), Hauer focused on developing a tone colour theory in relation to tonal music (Über die Klangfarbe…, 1918), which was an attempt to synthesise tonal qualities with tone colour. According to Hauer, the intervals that arise between the fundamental tone and its series of harmonics determine the tone colour quality. Consequently, drawing on Goethe’s Farbenlehre and acoustic principles, Hauer presented a colour-sound circle in which specific sound colours and ethoses [qualities of character] were assigned to particular keys. Hauer’s compositions from this period (Opp. 1–18) are characterised by a free atonality also typical of the early developmental phase of the Vienna School, and his first works may have been influenced by Schoenberg. As early as 1912–1913, Hauer employed twelve-tone complexes, which in his theory from this period were linked to the concept of atonal twelve-tone melody, freed from harmonic function and from tensions and resolutions, rhythmically indifferent and undifferentiated in terms of dynamics and tone colour. The slightly later concept of atonal Melos (Deutung des Melos…, 1923), central to Hauer’s theory, had its philosophical implications in the extra-musical “primordial basis of speech” [all translations of quotations are provided by the translator of this entry], the “artistic and ethical measure of all things”.

Hauer’s second creative period (1919–1939) is associated with his original discoveries regarding the “law of the twelve-tone system”. In 1919, several years before the creation of Schoenberg’s first dodecaphonic works, Hauer employed a strict twelve-tone technique (Nomos, Op. 19, for piano), which he began to develop from 1921 into an extensive and formalised theory of tropes (Vom Melos zur Pauke…, 1925, Zwölftontechnik…, 1926). From the 479,001,600 possible twelve-tone rows, Hauer selected 44 groups, each representing a superordinate category, or so-called tropes. Hauer formulated numerous rules for the transformation of tropes (e.g. transposition, inversion, permutation, hexachord reordering, and others), and also explored the relationships between them. The works from this period (Opp. 19–89) constitute the realisation of these theoretical principles. They highlight Hauer’s growing tendency towards a form of abstractionism and the elimination of more innovative sonoristic means. During this period, Hauer also developed a new type of tablature musical notation (Vom Wesen des Musikalischen…, 1920).

Hauer’s third creative period is associated with the concept of Zwölftonspiel, an idea that takes a highly fetishistic approach to twelve-tone patterns – “a cosmic play with twelve tempered semitones” – in which the technique of tropes was further developed into a procedure of total preformation of the sound material.

The aesthetic foundations of Zwölftonspiel were based on cosmological and absolutist principles: “Perfect music must be neither too high nor too low, neither too loud nor too soft, neither too fast nor too slow; it must be performed with good temperament and intonation” (Zwölftonspiel Manifesto, 1952).

Hauer’s focus on articulating pure twelve-tone patterns in terms of melody, harmony and rhythm led to the deliberate elimination of other compositional techniques. Hauer himself did not regard Zwölftonspiel as a musical composition in the traditional sense, but rather as an “organic constructing” and a musical realisation of divine laws.

The significance of Hauer’s work lies primarily in the development of the twelve-tone doctrine. As the first theorist of twelve-tone music, Hauer formulated and resolved many significant problems before they were taken up by the composers of the Vienna School (including the constitutive significance of the interval in twelve-tone patterns, and the structural unity of melody and harmony), thereby indirectly influencing Schoenberg’s concept of serial dodecaphony. Devoid of individual characteristics, Hauer’s work emerged on the fringes of the transformations of Expressionism and New Objectivity, and received a lukewarm reception from the musical community. Schoenberg wrote of Hauer’s works in Harmonielehre (1922), stating that they were more “examples” than musical compositions. Another reason for Hauer’s isolation was the vague aesthetic basis of his theory — the eclectic nature of aesthetics of music formulated by him. Various intellectual currents intersect in it: ancient Chinese maxims and medieval mysticism, Greek philosophy and Hebrew Kabbalah, as well as theosophy and psychoanalysis. Schopenhauer’s philosophy had a more significant influence on Hauer’s ideas; from him, Hauer adopted a cosmological and noetic vision of music as a special kind of art, its metaphysical understanding leading to the blurring of boundaries between religion and art, and the rejection of programmatic music. A key feature of Hauer’s musical aesthetics is a deliberately ahistorical understanding of music, leading to the absolutisation of its own norms. Hauer gathered a small circle of students around him, two of whom in particular disseminated and continued his theory: H. Heiss, Hauer’s collaborator during the period when he was developing his theory of tropes, and O. Steinbauer, the creator of the so-called Klangreihenlehre. After the war, the Hauer Seminar (founded by J. Schwieger, a student of Hauer’s) and the Hauer Studio (directed by V. Sokołowski, a collaborator of Hauer’s) were established in Vienna. The figure of Hauer, a neurotic fanatic of new musical ideas, inspired many writers: O. Stoessl (the biographical novel Sonnenmelodie), F. Werfel (Verdi), H. Hesse (The Glass Bead Game), H. Bahra (unpublished novel fragments), and T. Mann (Doctor Faustus).

Literature: H. Pfrogner, Die Zwölfordnung der Töne, Zurich 1953; R. Stephan, Über Joseph Matthias Hauer, “Archive für Musikwissenschaft” XVIII, 1961; M. Lichtenfeld, Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Zwölftontechnik bei Joseph Matthias Hauer, «Kölner Beiträge zur Musikforschung» XXIX, Regensburg 1964 (includes an extensive bibliography); W. Szmolyan, Joseph Matthias Hauer, “Österreichische Komponisten des XX. Jahrhunderts”, vol. 6, Vienna 1965 (contains the most comprehensive catalogue of Hauer’s works and writings); R. Flotzinger, G. Gruber, Musikgeschichte Österreichs, vol. 2, Graz 1979; M. Gołąb, Dodekafonia. Studia nad teorią i kompozycją pierwszej połowy XX wieku, Bydgoszcz 1987, excerpts also appear in “Muzyka” 1980, no. 1; 1981, nos. 3–4; 1983, nos. 2, 3, 4.