The WERGO Label Celebrates Its Fortieth Birthday [2002]

A long-playing record with the three times seven melodramas of Arnold Schönberg’s "Pierrot lunaire" combined into a kind of monograph of his work - a pioneering achievement of the 1960s. It was not just librarians who spoke of the "studio-reihe neuer Musik" (Studio series of new music), the record publisher WERGO, then based in Cologne, had pressed by Vox-Imago beginning in 1962, as a new kind of "unity of media."

An art enthusiast and entrepreneur from Baden-Baden, Werner Goldschmidt, demonstrated the necessary daring. He pursued an idea suggested by the Cologne musicologist Helmut Kirchmeyer that would have frightened off any "normal" businessman: publishing a series of recordings accompanied by scholarly commentary and devoted entirely to twentieth-century composition - something the bourgeois musical life of the time still went out of its way to avoid.

Edited by Werner Goldschmidt and labeled with a shortening of his name, WERGO, the new "studio-reihe" aroused the interest of an intellectual minority that wanted to learn more about the musical thought of Schönberg and his students as well as the equally ostracized compositional art of Bartók, Hindemith, and Stravinsky in order to understand better the newest ideas of Boulez, Nono, or Stockhausen. At the time, such listeners had no options other than to listening to the late-night programming of the radio stations.

The intellectual investment capital for the label was Schönberg’s "Erwartung" and "Pierrot lunaire" with speech-song and song-speech by Helga Pilarczyk, who at the time had no competition as an interpreter of Berg and Schönberg. The educational value of the series was enhanced by records with musical examples and spoken texts by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, spokesman of new trends in music since the 1920s, which provided introductions into the sound world of the avant-garde. One prize-winning bestseller was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s "Kontakte" in a recording made by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk that remains in print today. In parallel with the new sounds of the first and second generation of composers, WERGO also published portraits of interpreters of the avant-garde, including the Kontarsky brothers, the Schola Cantorum of Stuttgart (directed by Clytus Gottwald), and the American virtuoso singer Cathy Berberian.

Even so, the economic interests of the publisher and the scholarly ambitions of the edition’s director could not be reconciled over the long term. The isolation of New Music within the public had decreased. Concert series and festivals for New Music had been established in many places. The recording industry followed. Without the anchor of the publisher B. Schott’s Söhne (now Schott Musik International), which became a part owner of the company, meanwhile relocated to Baden-Baden, in 1967 and bought it out entirely three years later, the "studio-reihe" would have gone under without fanfare.

WERGO in Mainz gave the series a new cover, derived from American Pop Art, but retained the dual goals of the "studio-reihe": filling gaps in the repertoire in the areas of High Modernism and documenting current trends in sound. The series "Große Interpreten neuer Musik" (Great interpreters of modern music) was filled with historical recordings by the conductor Hans Rosbaud of the works of Messiaen, Strauss, Schönberg, and Stravinsky. Among the greatest achievements of the series in the 1970s were three surveys: the bronze Cage Edition with works not previously published, a documentation of the "Maulwerke" (Mouth Works) and other works by Dieter Schnebel, and a portrait devoted to György Ligeti that traced the line of his creative output after his emigration from Hungary.

As the ideology of progress faded and postmodern tolerance mitigated cliquish thinking, the profile of the program of Schott’s subsidiary began to change and branch out. Peter Michael Hamel and his group Between occupied a place between pop and serious music - a spot that would room for many colorful figures from varied beginnings: from Gunter Hampel and Manfred Schoof, who brought modern jazz to WERGO’s repertoire, to the song writers and spoken word artists on the "Songbird" label, on to Guerino Mazzola and Meredith Monk, who recorded under the "Spectrum" label. As exploration replaced study, the academic title "studio-reihe" was dropped. Encouraged by the response that the complete edition of the symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann received among buyers and critics, WERGO undertook a comprehensive documentation of the work of György Ligeti.

The fruits of the harvest in the jubilee year 2002 are overwhelming. Arranged by types of music, WERGO’s complete list of productions, including around five hundred titles, are presented in six thematic catalogs. The intimidating term New Music is avoided; the core repertoire carries the name "Music of Our Time". It includes some 160 CD portraits and individual works, along with several CD-ROMs, ranging from A for Adorno to Z for Bernd Alois Zimmermann, with several emphases standing out: John Cage alone is represented by eighteen CDs, and Paul Hindemith by 27. György Ligeti’s oeuvre is nearly complete on nine CDs, in exemplary interpretations. The Penderecki portrait, divided by genre, fills five CDs. The catalog also includes other series that WERGO publishes: the "Edition zeitgenössischer Musik des Deutschen Musikrats" (Contemporary Music Edition of the German Music Council); the new arrival of "Edition ZKM", which documents radio plays and multimedia works produced by the music studio of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe; and the growing compendium "Digital Music Digital - Music with Computers". The main catalog is supplemented by a midprice catalog, "Music of Our Time - Special". Among the CDs collected in the latter are complete editions of the piano works of Debussy and Ravel.

A separate, central thematic group consists of sound documents of non-European musical cultures, which calls itself "Music of World Cultures", in order to avoid the vague description "world music". The eighty odd editions of CDs in this category - which includes traditional music from the rural areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia as well as music from the urban centers of the Indian subcontinent, Japan, and China - were for the most part produced in collaboration with the House of the Cultures of the World in Berlin and the Music Department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

The "ear" of the green edition series "Natural Sound" is Walter Tilgner’s dummy-head stereo microphone. The scores of these sound images were written by nature itself. The sound messages of "Gentle River", "Serenidad", "Rainbowland", and "Wounded Knee", which along with Michael Vetter’s overtone songs make up the orange catalog "Music from Paradise", are produced by relaxation therapists and authors of spiritual inclination. Finally, the sea blue CD list "Music of Our Lives" includes everything that spills over the edges of the categories listed above.

A fact: WERGO today is a pantheon of new and timeless music.