Page 159 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim | Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific.
Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-425-5.159-166
© 2025 Jera Petriček

The Conductor Gertrud Herliczka

Jera Petriček
Univerza za glasbo in uprizoritveno umetnost na Dunaju
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (PhD Student)

The conductor Gertrud Herliczka was born 1904 in Vienna and has con-
ducted over 100 concerts with professional orchestras between 1927 and
1939. She has left no scores, and we have no recordings of her conducting. I
am currently writing my PhD thesis entitled “The Conductor Gertrud Her-
liczka – Viennese Traces of an International Career” in historical musicol-
ogy with Prof Dr Melanie Unseld as my mentor. My main sources are the
private estate of the Hrdliczka family as well as Gertrud Herliczka’s estate
in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. They com-
prise mainly of programme papers and newspaper clippings of concert re-
views. In this paper, the word conductor from the title of my presentation
will be just as important as presenting a glimpse of Gertrud Herliczka, and
the focus will be on Theodore Schatzki’s theory of artistic bundles.
In writing about the conductor Gertrud Herliczka, I am asking myself
several questions. What is the nature of a conductor’s work? How can we
describe it in its complexity? There is another aspect which raises interest:
Why does being a woman on the podium matter? Having read a great num-
ber of reviews of Herliczka’s concerts, I found none without mentioning her
gender. I decided to focus on these aspects and illustrate my thinking with
quotations of the reviews of one concert, conducted by Gertrud Herliczka
with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra on 21 November 1938, 11 years
st
after her debut in the Musikverein with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

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