As Schönberg’s cantata Gurre-lieder is in the public domain in Australia, and has been since January 1, 2002, I claim Australian copyright © 2002 on my choral score. All rights are reserved, particularly reproduction, redistribution, and performance. The edition may not be used in any legal jurisdiction other than the Commonwealth of Australia. The MIDI files are also copyright © 2002, Philip Legge, however as these are of no use to anyone except in combination with a full score, vocal or choral score, or partbook, these may be used in any jurisdiction.
In 2002 I offered to edit a new chorus score for Gurre-lieder to be used at the performance organised for the 50th year of the Perth International Arts Festival as the existing chorus part-books (not the Universal-Edition piano/vocal score) were known to be fairly awful to rehearse from. I am aware that one approach taken by choirs is to simply photocopy the relevant pages of the piano/vocal score, in preference to using the part-books. The need for a chorus score is thus manifest: the choir simply do not need all 238-odd pages of the vocal score, but the part-books are grossly insufficient. My 64-page chorus score also represents a critical re-working of the music for the choir.
The concert, and my chorus scores were, a vast success; where the latter is concerned, the critical edition of Gurre-lieder has finally been published, allowing me to make several final corrections (but unfortunately, the score was not available before the printing of the copies for Symphony Australia). The chorus scores allow any chorister to see what the other parts are doing, which therefore permits the chorusmaster to easily reinforce between sections and/or choirs. The chorus part-books on the other hand do not, having no accompaniment, no context, and little in the way of useful cues. My chorus score has a piano reduction which I devised myself from the full orchestral score, which shows the main orchestral textures that are likely to be heard by the choir in performance. It is also much easier to read or play than the orchestral or vocal reductions in the Universal-Edition piano/vocal score.
At the time I received legal opinion that my edition was permissible under Australian copyright law as Gurre-lieder was in the public domain; I have since received contrary legal advice that my edition would technically breach copyright if it were used in the United States [hereafter the US] (and I surmise the same would apply in the European Union [EU]); finally, yet another legal opinion argues that using the score anywhere would still constitute a breach; so I have concluded my easiest course is to withhold the edition from being used outside Australia, until the legal ambiguity is resolved.
The only printed set of copies of my choral score are retained in the library of Symphony Australia. As no other sizeable concert-giving organisation is likely to have the resources to perform Gurre-lieder in Australia, then likewise the only legal copies of my chorus score that I know to be in existence are those held by Symphony Australia. A few individuals may have retained single copies from the two recent performances, but they do not have right of reproduction.
I steadfastly maintain however, that as far as I can discover, Gurre-lieder is in the public domain, and I am frankly vexed beyond belief at having put in a large amount of work on this score based on what might have been a mistaken belief in the work’s legal status, and thus being prevented from giving it wider publication. I invite interested parties to read the following chronology of the work and its copyright history (and if I have made any error in re-counting this, I am most happy to be corrected).
In March 1900 Schönberg began work on the Waldemar and Tove songs with an aim to enter them in a song-cycle competition by May, probably at the prompting of Alexander Zemlinsky (who was soon to be Schönberg’s father-in-law); I presume he initially started writing for voices and piano, and then later turned it into an extensive composing draft in short score. Having missed the deadline for the competition, by mid-1900 Schönberg had plowed on, intending to set the entirety of Arnold’s translation of the Gurre-sange as an extended orchestral and vocal work; by this point he had finished composing Parts One and Two in draft. In mid-1901 Schönberg resumed work on Gurre-lieder, drafting Part Three, and having ordered 48-stave music paper in the mean time, also set to work on orchestrating Parts One and Two. Schönberg finally abandoned work on orchestrating Gurre-lieder in 1903 owing to various musical and non-musical reasons; by this stage Part One and Two were complete, and a large portion of Part Three had been scored.
In 1910 Alban Berg and Anton von Webern collaborated on a two-piano arrangement of Part One, which was performed privately, and convinced Schönberg to complete the remaining orchestration of Part Three, which he did the following year, 1911; the advancement in his compositional and orchestral technique since 1903 were tellingly evident in the final section of the Wild Hunt of the Summer Wind, with the soloist’s part notated in Sprechstimme. 1913 saw the first performance in Vienna, conducted by Franz Schreker, and Schönberg himself conducted the next three performances, once in Leipzig in 1914, and two post-war performances in Vienna in 1920; the work was then published in its final form.
1912: Universal Edition published a limited edition of 500 copies of the composer’s autograph full score in facsimile, which serves to prove what a magnificent work of art Schönberg was capable of; he wrote out the score with great care and frequently uses calligraphic flourishes. It appears to have been copyrighted to Universal Edition bearing the year 1912. This was the principal source for the performances of 1913 and 1914. The facsimile has in 2003 been reprinted as part of the complete edition.
1913: Universal Edition published parts and a preliminary version of the Alban Berg vocal score (now with a single-piano accompaniment and occasional reductio partituræ of the choir parts.
1920: Universal Edition re-published the full score in Vienna and Leipzig, now incorporating minor revisions and freshly typeset, as U.E. Nr. 6300. The score is now marked with "copyright 1920 Universal-Edition" and this implicitly grants copyright to Schönberg also (again dating from 1920, even though Gurre-lieder in its finished state was already "eight years old" by this point, minor revisions notwithstanding).
1940: Universal Edition re-published the vocal score in Vienna, now freshly typeset, as U.E. Nr. 3696. The piano reduction was credited solely to Alban Berg, though as noted above for the 1910 performance some of the two-piano arrangement had been contributed by Anton von Webern. Various forms of copyright would subsist with Alban Berg (and presumably also with Anton von Webern) in addition to the original composer and publisher. Berg had died in 1935, and Webern was to die in 1945.
1948: By this year Schoenberg was living in the US, where copyright law was slightly different to the original countries of publication, Austria and Germany. In the US, copyright on a work lasted only 28 years from the original year of claim, unless the author or composer renewed copyright, in which case another 28-year term applied, making a total of 56 years; thus Schoenberg renewed his copyright on Gurre-lieder in order to extend its protection in the US until 1976. It is a moot point as to whether the copyright in Gurre-lieder should stem from the date of first publication of the work (1912), or the date of publication of the revised version (1920) – what revisions there are appear to be extremely minor. It would therefore seem to me that Schoenberg ought to have renewed copyright in 1940, and therefore the work’s copyright expired. The Belmont orchestral full scores from 1948 onward now bear the marking "copyright renewed 1948 Arnold Schoenberg" (or something similar).
1951: Schönberg died, and thus in jurisdictions where copyright is taken to be the author or composer’s life plus 50 years, protection of his work under copyright law was extended to 2001. (The Australian law has a slightly different wording: copyright of an author’s work extends to the end of the calendar year in which the 50th anniversary of the author’s death occurs; in Schönberg’s case this date was December 31 2001, although the actual anniversary date was sometime earlier.)
1962 to 1976: the US Congress began enacting bills to extend the renewal period, so that although Schönberg’s copyright on Gurre-lieder should have expired after the extended 56 year period at the end of 1976, the acts passed from the early 1960s onwards extended the extension period (!) from 28 years up to 47 years, so that the work would enjoy 75 years of copyright protection in total, rather than 56. By my calculation, if copyright were still in effect, the copyright ought to have extended to the end of 1995, so that Gurre-lieder would have entered the public domain in the US on January 1, 1996. Gurre-lieder may have been in copyright when the 1976 overhaul occurred, which guaranteed "life plus 50 years" for works written post-1977 (as the effective date of the 1976 act was January 1, 1978); but for works copyrighted prior to or during 1977 this did not apply, but rather the extensions guaranteeing a minimum of 75 years of copyright protection.
1976 to 1998: None of the previous discussion takes account of various changes to the copyright law in the EU, which is a completely separate affair. The most recent changes have certainly extended the copyright term in Europe to the author or composer’s life plus 70 years, so that if the copyright did not expire after 1976 or 1995, then it will still be in effect (in the European Union, at least) until 2021. It is just too murky for a non-lawyer to then decide whether the "Sonny Bono" Copyright Term Extension Act [CTEA] applies or not, which basically added 20 years on to the term of "life plus 50 years". The CTEA took effect on October 27, 1998, which means that any copyrighted work from 1923 or later was still enjoying a 75 year period on that date, and thus had its copyright life extended to 95 years.
Whatever the answer is to the morass of law above, an initial publication date of 1923 or later is usually taken as implying copyright still persists, whereas works from 1922 or earlier reached the public domain before the CTEA took effect. But what about a 1912/1920 work which might have been protected by the Berne Convention when the European Union decided to go with "life plus 70 years"? This would seal Gurre-lieder as entering the public domain on January 1, 2022; it would also affect Dover reprinting the piano/vocal score (ISBN 0-486-41090-0), or anyone photocopying sizeable parts thereof.
2002: Now when I started my work, I knew that under Australian copyright law Schönberg’s work would have fallen out of copyright at the end of the previous calendar year, and that publication of Gurre-lieder was prior to the critical year 1923, so that I could legitimately make a contribution to a work for which the existing chorus scores are problematic; our copyright law is still author’s life plus 50 years although there is considerable pressure for Australia and most other countries to do everything the United States tells us to... err, I’ll rephrase that, to have "harmony" in copyright laws across the world.
2005 update: Australia succumbed to US pressure to sign a "free trade agreement" which extended copyright terms by 20 years. However, it cannot retrospectively grant copyright status to works which had previously entered the public domain.
Back to the rant: In practice, no real parity exists in the fine detail of the laws. At the same time that Schönberg’s works ought to have entered the public domain in Australia, the question could not be answered anywhere near so easily in terms of the US or European law. Therefore I have had differing legal advice as to whether my edition breaches the US or EU law or not, owing to Australia’s assignation to the Berne convention; and hence my decision to withdraw it from being publicly available on the Internet – owing to these jurisdictional issues.
There is no guarantee the US or the EU laws won’t be changed yet again to extend the copyright term before the end of 2021... and again... and again... ad infinitum, so Gurre-lieder, and many other works like it, could be copyrighted for all time!
Questions regarding these Gurre-lieder pages should be addressed to Philip Legge (remembering to replace the capital letters in the address with the appropriate characters).