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KOELLREUTTER - the music revolutions of a Zen masteremanuel dimas de melo pimenta2 0 1 0

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The arrival in Rio de Janeiro, on the sixteenth of November 1937, a Tuesday – fleeing the horrors that emerged rapidly in Europe with Hitler – was a dramatic change in his life.

But Rio de Janeiro did not live very quiet times. In that same month, Getúlio Vargas had commanded the coup d’etat and established the Estado Novo. Few months earlier in July, Nazi Germany had sent a new ambassador, Karl Ritter, who would cause all sorts of diplomatic conflicts trying to get from Brazil a formal alignment with the axis.


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It was the persecution of Luiz Carlos Prestes, of Campos da Paz and of all members of the Communist Party. Although Getúlio Vargas government has resisted taking a formal alignment with Nazi Germany, there was a declared sympathy with the German government, clearly visible in the text of the new constitution of ten of November 1937, one week before the arrival of Koellreutter.

Like a paradox, Brazil – and especially Rio de Janeiro – already lived a technological change: in 1927, all over Brazil, there were only six hundred forty-three air travelers. That number quickly jumped to more than thirty-five thousand people in 1937!

When he arrived in Brazil, Koellreutter could not read or speak Portuguese. The entire social convulsion passed practically unnoticed to him. Despite the political climate, there was no violence in the streets.


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- The first times? My friend, I had arrived at the paradise! Rio de Janeiro was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It was something no one could imagine. You have no idea. There were relatively few people in the city. Nature was everywhere. Invaded everything. Everything was exuberantly beautiful. Everything was so beautiful that I almost could not work for a year! During the first year I was totally entranced by so much beauty.

Rio de Janeiro, 1938


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Koellreutter escaped from the terror of Kristallnacht, which happened exactly one year later, in November 1938, and the heavier and bloody horrors of Nazism.

Fred Jordan, another dear friend, graphic artist, surely one of the foremost experts on color all over the world, was twelve years younger than Koellreutter, and arrived in Brazil a year before him in 1936, when he was nine years old – he also fled the horrors that few were already able to predict.

Fred Jordan’s father was the first violinist of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. He was expelled and banned from working, because he was a Jew, by an express command signed by Richard Strauss in his passport. Richard Strauss knew personally him very well! They had worked together for years and the attitude of the composer would never be understood or accepted by the father and even by the graphic artist.


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Fred Jordan died in 2001 in São Paulo. Many times, during our meetings in the 1980s and 1990s, he commented about the fascination that the figure of Koellreutter exerted on all, even in those early days of his childhood. «It was something magical. I was very young. Later, I arrived to know Koellreutter personally. I was about eighteen years old. He could never remember. He has always been an important figure. But there also was a lot of political controversy around his figure».

Indeed, Koellreutter did not remember Fred – but he knew him by name, because of his work, and he was delighted to know that they had been together many years before.

One year after his arrival in Rio de Janeiro in 1938, Koellreutter finally began to teach at the National Conservatory of Music.

Some years later, in the 1940s, with Villa-Lobos, he


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helped to found the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, where he was the first flutist.

In 1939, from meetings with musicians and intellectuals at the music store Pinguim, in the rua do Ouvidor, in Rio de Janeiro, he would create the movement Live Music, from a concept coined by his former teacher, Hermann Sherchen in 1933.

Live Music essentially meant music as social function. Three years later, in 1942, together with Francisco Curt Lange, Koellreutter created the magazine Live Music, and only in 1944, he would launch the first Live Music manifest, not by chance on the first of May.

One night at his home in Laranjeiras, he commented about that movement:

- Even in our days there are people asking me if Live Music is something about contemporary


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music, about the so-called New Music. It is not. The movement Live Music was about everything we do not know, anything that is new for each one of us. That was the thought of Hermann Scherchen. It can be a medieval music, Indian, a piece by Bach or John Cage, it doesn’t matter. We must not have preconceptions. What is new can be in any place.

In that manifesto, Koellreutter wrote that «music must be the expression of its time, of a new state of intelligence» through «a new world, believing on the creative power of the human spirit and in the art of the future».

The movement Live Music, which counted with Heitor Villa-Lobos as honorary president, represented the final integration of the principles of atonality, dodecaphonic and integral serialism in Brazilian culture.


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Claudio Santoro, who was also his student, had some dodecaphonic compositions before had knew Koellreutter, but the old master had a very precise opinion on what happened in Brazil in relation to the techniques developed by the Second Viennese School.

- There were some efforts, some attempts. But people did not understand the true spirit of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. People had heard about something... but they did not really know the technique, they did not understand with clarity the concept.

In the moment when Brazil joined the Allies and declared war against Germany, in August 1942, Koellreutter was arrested in São Paulo, along with many other Germans, on suspicion of espionage. He spent three months in jail, until his innocence was proved. Inside the prison, where in


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fact there were many Nazis, he was accused of being “the Jewish Communist”.

This was the fact that still marked Fred Jordan’s memory many years later.

In 1948, he traveled to Europe and taught at the International Institute of Music of Darmstadt, in Germany, where Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez studied, among many others, and at the Centro Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea di Milano, in Italy, where Luigi Nono was his student.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was twenty years old.

In the following year, Koellreutter personally know John Cage, in Geneva, Switzerland, at the International Meeting of Dodecaphonic Composers, in 1949.


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The climate lived in Rio de Janeiro dramatically changed after the end of the Second World War. If before a composer like Heitor Villa-Lobos, then openly connected with Getúlio Vargas, pro-fascist, dictator and fundamentalist could support a young flutist and composer of left and even accept to be president of a movement like the Live Music, later such flexibility would prove to be increasingly impossible.

In 1950, disgusted by the fact that Koellreutter refused to become a member of the Communist Party, the composer Camargo Guarnieri launched his fury against him, accusing him of corrupting the youth – the fame that would follow him by the end of life.

That year, seven of November, Guarnieri launched his famous Open Letter to Musicians and Critics in Brazil where he shouted, without mincing words: «Considering my major responsibilities as Brazilian composer, before my people and the new generations of creators in musical art, and deeply


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concerned about the current orientation of the music of young composers who, influenced by erroneous ideas, are affiliated to the dodecaphonic – formalist movement that leads to the degeneration of the national character of our music – I took the resolution to write this open letter to the musicians and critics of Brazil. (...) It is time to raise a scream to stop the formalist and anti-Brazilian harmful infiltration (...) Like monkeys, like vulgar imitators, like creatures without principles, they prefer to import and to copy noxious foreign novelties, simulating, in this way, that are ‘original’, ‘modern’ and ‘advanced’ and deliberating and criminally forgetting that we have an entire Amazon of folk music – a living expression of our national character – waiting to be studied and divulged for the aggrandizement of the Brazilian culture (...) It is necessary to tell to these young composers that dodecaphonic, in music, corresponds to abstraction in painting, to hermetic in literature, to existentialism in philosophy; and to charlatanism in science».


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Oswald de Andrade and Patricia Galvão, Pagu, were furious with Guarnieri. Koellreutter suggested a public debate on December seven. Guarnieri simply did not appear.

In December twenty-eighth, Koellreutter published his answer in the form of a new open letter: «... the twelve-tone is not a style, not an aesthetic tendency, but yes the use of a compositional technique designed to structure the atonality, musical language in formation, logical consequence of evolution and of the conversion of quantitative changes of chromaticism in qualitative, through mode and tonality. (...) It is no more nor less ‘formal’, ‘cerebral’, ‘anti-national’ or ‘anti-people’ than any other technique based on traditional counterpoint and harmony. (...) Contrarily to what Mr. Guarnieri said, which seems me alarming is the situation of mental stagnation in which the Brazilian musical scene lives, from which educational institutions, with its retarded and ineffective program, has knew no representative value in recent years. (...) The exalted and exasperated nationalism


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which blindly and in hateful way condemns the contribution that a group of young composers tries to give to this country’s musical culture, leads only to the stirring up of passions that give rise to disruptive forces and separate human beings. The fight against those forces that represent the backwardness and reaction, the sincere and honest struggle for the sake of human progress in art is the only worthy attitude of an artist».

With a highly ideological speech, Camargo Guarnieri, whose first name was Mozart, the son of an Italian immigrant, represented São Paulo that quickly emerged as a future cultural center in Brazil, against Rio de Janeiro, still very characterized by the dominance of French culture.

Guarnieri’s father, Italian, was barber and flutist. His mother, daughter of a traditional family in São Paulo, played piano.


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Two years before, in 1948, Koellreutter received the Brazilian citizenship – but he was still regarded as foreign by the musician of São Paulo.

In some sense, it was as if Guarnieri represent the poor people of São Paulo against the rich bourgeoisie of Rio de Janeiro. In this type of fight there is always plenty of room for the emergence of unfair and absurd situations.

- It was terrible. It was a real war. There were places where I could not go. Everything was very serious. You cannot imagine. People cannot imagine today what all that was. Guarnieri wanted to impose a dictatorship. For him, who was not fighting for the Communist Party was automatically an enemy! Before, we were good friends. Once I got sick and he was the only person who visited me almost every day. – Koellreutter commented on those events with an air of profound seriousness.


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But Koellreutter never was a person to be intimidated. Less than two years after Guarnieri’s violent attack, he would participate in the foundation of the Free School of Music, in São Paulo, where the architect and urban planner Jorge Wilhelm participated as student, who I would also meet in the early 1980s when he collaborated in drafting the first Integrated Master Plan of the city of São Paulo and who I would meet again years later in Lisbon.

In 1954, he created the International Music Seminars in Salvador, Bahia, which would become the School of Music of the Federal University of Salvador. Three years later, he would invite Walter Smetak – the brilliant Swiss musician, born in Zürich, based in Brazil – to be a teacher and researcher at the University of Salvador. Smetak would develop a work that profoundly influenced many of the most outstanding Brazilian musicians.


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They were already old stories. Thirty years had passed. Koellreutter had his eyes lost and full of emotion, admiring the beautiful Corcovado.

It was hot, and everything was very wet, as always.

In 1960, he composed Concretion 1960. Since then, he stopped calling his compositions “works” and started using the term “essays” – «Concretion 1960 is my first essay of planimetric structure», he wrote years later.

In 1962, then forty-seven years old, Koellreutter received a prestigious award by the Ford Foundation “for twenty-five years of services to Brazil” – for which he received even more critics, because it was a prize of North American origin. But that award enabled him to live one year in Berlin. There he was asked to organize the international programs of the Goethe Institute in Munich.


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Two years later, in 1964, it happened the coup d’etat and the military dictatorship in Brazil – and anyone who really knew him know how it would be practically impossible for him to survive in the heavy environment of totalitarianism, whatever its nature. Freedom was something fundamental in his mind.

Thus, between 1965 and 1969, he became director of the Goethe Institute in New Delhi, India, where he lived near Octavio Paz – who was then ambassador to Mexico. They became great friends.

Then, he invites Karlheinz Stockhausen to visit, for the first time, India. A trip that would profoundly influence his career.

He met and lived near Ravi Shankar.

Many years later, already in the 1990s, I personally


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met Ravi Shankar in Lisbon. I told him that Koellreutter had sent him greetings. The Indian musician was very touched to hear from a friend of many years.

- It was a very special time for us. Ravi Shankar is a saint in India. But there are others. There are fabulous musicians. Margarita and I really enjoyed those times. Margarita studied singing and sitar. I also studied a bit of sitar.

Immersed in my youthful naiveté, I asked why Margarita did not study singing since she was a world-renowned mezzo soprano, and he – recognized flutist – did not studied the Indian techniques for transversal flute.

- But Emanuel! This would be impossible. The techniques of singing and flute in India are diametrically opposed to those in Europe! In India one almost doesn’t use the diaphragm. If we did what you suggest we would probably destroy our techniques and never learn theirs


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correctly.

From India, Koellreutter was transferred to the direction of the Goethe Institute in Tokyo, where he lived until 1974. In Japan, he met and lived near many writers and intellectuals.

- Japanese and Germans are the two more similar people, among the many I have known throughout my life. – Koellreutter had a great esteem and deep identity with the way of being in Japan, though his restless questioning spirit, even when young, would be something strange to the Japanese culture.

In 1975, after thirteen years between Europe, India and Japan, Koellreutter finally returned to Brazil to direct the Goethe Institute in Rio de Janeiro, until 1980.

In the last years as director of the Goethe Institute in


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Rio de Janeiro, in late 1970s, Koellreutter gradually intensified his presence in São Paulo – and it was when we met each other.

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