Program Advisory Board

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Until 1982, the program of steirischer herbst was managed and coordinated by various bodies. Presidium I consisted of Hanns Koren as president, the current mayor of the City of Graz as first vice president, Emil Breisach as second vice president, state councilor Kurt Jungwirth, who became Koren’s successor in 1976, as well as other members from local politics in Graz. In 1969, the Verein der Freunde des Steirischen Herbstes (Association of Friends of steirischer herbst) was established as a source of income (until 2005), with the industrialist Hans Meyer-Rieckh as its president (until 1976) and Paul Kaufmann as executive director.

In addition to Koren, the twenty-member Program Advisory Board of 1969‒73 included Breisach, Kaufmann, Erich Marckhl, and Wilfried Skreiner, the later artistic director Horst Gerhard Haberl (1990‒95), the later president Kurt Jungwirth (1976‒2006), and Carl Nemeth, the director of the artistic production office of the Volksoper (People’s Opera) in Vienna and subsequently the artistic director (1972‒90) of the Vereinigte Bühnen Graz (United Theaters Graz). While the Presidium was primarily composed of representatives from politics and business and managed the festival from a legal and financial perspective, the Advisory Board, with individuals from the field of culture, formed the body responsible for the program of steirischer herbst.

Apart from the program series musikprotokoll, the Steirische Akademie (Styrian Academy), and the trigon biennial—which were organized by the Austrian broadcaster ORF, the State Cultural Department, and the Neue Galerie, respectively—the individual institutions involved decided on their respective program themselves. There were also concerts and exhibitions in private and public galleries. As a result of the decentralized structure and lack of a thematic superstructure, the overall program of the early years of the festival was correspondingly heterogeneous. Starting in 1973, the program booklet used color coding to distinguish between the main program and the framework program, which began before the main program started and continued after it. Commenting on this, Hanns Koren wrote: “This program booklet for steirischer herbst ’73 offers a new image. The time-related and thematic distinction between the individual event groups; the one forming the actual core, and the other program that surrounds and frames it.” The program was also translated into English for the first time that year.

The organizational structure of the early years clearly shows the close connections between politics, business, and culture behind steirischer herbst, and the close relationships, some of which continued over decades, between the individual actors as well as within the cultural scene in Graz and in the festival’s history. Paul Kaufmann, for instance, remained the executive secretary until 1990, and the subsequent artistic directors Peter Vujica and Horst Gerhard Haberl had been involved since the early years.

Innovative impulses were provided in particular by the Forum Stadtpark with its interdisciplinary program of contemporary literature and art, to which the Grazer Filmtage (Graz Film Festival) and the Grazer Fernsehtage (Graz Television Festival) were added in 1973, and by the trigon biennial under Wilfried Skreiner, who with his cocurators Umbro Apollonio (Venice) and Vera Horvat-Pintarić (Zagreb) “created the archetype of a thematically staged workshop situation consisting of walk-through environments, in which topics that were linked in a timely manner to current social and cultural-political debates about the future” were addressed.1 Specific examples of this are the exhibitions Intermedia Urbana (1971) and Audiovisuelle Botschaften (Audiovisual Messages; 1973). Besides the trigon, what set standards with up-to-date topics and international artists were above all some of the exhibitions curated by Horst Gerhard Haberl within the context of the pool group, such as Körpersprache—Bodylanguage (1973), which was presented in an exhibition tent.

Among the stage highlights of the early years were the premiere of Ödön von Horváth’s text Zur schönen Aussicht (The Belle Vue), directed by Gerald Szyszkowitz; the first staging in Austria of Elias Canetti’s Hochzeit (The Wedding) at the Grazer Schauspielhaus (1969); the opera Karl V. (Charles V) by Ernst Krenek (1969); and György Ligeti’s Aventures & Nouvelle Aventures in a scenic version by Hans Neugebauer (1970).

Under the direction of Peter Vujica (until 1973), musikprotokoll played an important role, particularly in the early years. While works of the prewar avant-garde (Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Béla Bartók), which the Nazis had declared “degenerate,” were presented to the audience in Graz in 1968, a link was made to Neue Musik the following year. Peter Vujica articulated his experience in Graz as follows: “There were reasons—historical and commercial—for the rarity with which a drop of Neue Musik music now and then spiced up the quite vibrant concert life in Graz in the postwar period. There was barely any verdict from the Nazi period that was perceived in musical life in Austria as less disruptive than the one that prohibited the presentation of works of newer ‘degenerate’ music.”2

To venture a comparison with documenta, which brought the art of modernity back to Germany in 1955 and then turned to European and American contemporary art in the exhibition that followed in 1959, one might say that musikprotokoll achieved a long-overdue reappraisal of the musical avant-garde with a comparable pedagogical approach—with a focus on Austria, in particular the Second Viennese School, and Eastern Europe. Pieces by Josef Matthias Hauer, Krzysztof Penderecki, and György Ligeti were presented as well as ones by composers such as John Cage, Anestis Logothetis, and Mauricio Kagel. The program of musikprotokoll, which received international acclaim and was described as “outstanding,” became part of the European Association of Music Festivals in its second year, which also bolstered steirischer herbst as a whole, even though many residents of Graz wished for a somewhat more folkloric program.

1

Horst Gerhard Haberl, “Das nomadische Prinzip,” in Nomadologie der Neunziger: steirischer herbst Graz 1990 bis 1995, ed. Horst Gerhard Haberl and Peter Strasser (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1995), p. 11.

2

Peter Vujica, cited in ibid., p. 29.

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