Autograph Card with Quote from Gurre-Lieder
Mattsee. 11 July 1921

In 1921, after an interruption due to the war, Schönberg traveled to the summer resort again. His stay in Mattsee near Salzburg soon met with opposition. Several newspapers reported on the community’s efforts to establish a “summer resort free of Jews“ (Reichspost 28/183 [6 July 1921]). Schönberg’s conversion to Protestantism, which had already taken place in 1898, as well as his uncompromising identification with the German cultural sphere did not matter: he was attacked in the open street and harassed by a threatening anti-Semitic letter. The composer finally found himself forced to flee and settled in Traunkirchen on 14 July. A few days before his departure, he fulfilled the request for an autograph from a music enthusiast who had witnessed his conducting of Gurre-Lieder at the Vienna State Opera the year before. The music quotation belongs to the song “You wondrous Tove!“ and forms the instrumental introduction to Waldemar’s words “It is so calm inside me | So strangely calm.“