It is a common phenomenon in music history; a fate many com-posers share: to be frequently performed during one’s lifetime only to be neglected after one’s death. In a new series of articles, we present unjustly forgotten works that would especially deserve a place in the modern international performance canon. We begin with two namesakes who could not be more different:Egon Kornauth: Chamber Music, Op. 31Egon Wellesz: Prosperos Beschwörungen

Egon KornauthDuring his entire life one of the most frequently performed Austrian composers of his time, the interest in Egon Kornauth’s music quickly lessened after his death. Kornauth was no musical innovator, one could rather define his oeuvre as a careful combi-nation of the Romantic tradition and contemporary techniques. Franz Schmidt and Joseph Marx could be viewed as soulmates, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold is extremely close not only alpha-

betically. Always referring to fundamental keys, Kornauth fills them with many chromatic accumulations with ever new linear developments and harmonic effects. In the formal configuration we see his rootedness in classical models, sonata movements (with elaborate deve-lopment sections), song forms and rondos dominatingespecially his chamber music. Kornauth’s music is formed by strong affinity to nature, simplicity, and a fundamen-tally lyrical attitude.

Due to their audience appeal his works were officially valued by the Third Reich and Kornauth remained true to his principles during this time. One can see the opportunism so prevalent during that time only rarely in him – e. g. in the form of taking part in commissions of the Reichsmusikkammer; remarkable is his renewing his contacts to his Jewish teacher, Guido Adler, shortly before the latter’s death in the early 1940s, when Adler was under house arrest.

In the 21st century the timelessness of melodic inventive talent and the often virtuosic technical demands may form the basis for new generations of musicians finding their way to Kornauth’s œuvre.

Chamber Music (nonet) for wind quartet and string quintet, Op. 31 (1924) (fl., ob., clar., hn., 2 vln., va., vc., db.)Chamber Music (nonet) for wind quintet and string quartet, Op. 31a (1924)(fl., ob., clar., hn., bn., vln., va., vc., db.)Chamber Music (decet) for wind quintet and string quintet, Op. 31b (1924)(fl., ob., clar., hn., bn., 2 vln., va., vc., db.)

‘In this varied three-movement work that seems flooded by Southern sun, the winds come to the fore in concertante manner before the string quintet background; which latter meets them as a mostly compact ensemble while the wind quartet more tends to soloist lines and imitatory complexity; this is due to their more differentiated timbres… The melodies are truly Kornauthian, the Andante romantically idyllic, the final move-ment crisp and gripping.’ (Asow: Egon Kornauth, p. 56)

This piece was most recently performed in 2015 in Husum at the festival ‘Raritäten der Klaviermusik’, which also presents chamber music. The artistic director of the festival, Peter Froundjian, declared, ‘We play music that is worth hearing,’ at the same time dispelling misgivings: ‘We present rarely performed works. But it is not higher mathematics, but attractive music!’

Forgotten – Forgiven and in Vain?

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by Renate Publig

© Archiv Doblinger

Egon WelleszEgon Wellesz was born on 21 October 1885 in Vienna. Half Je-wish, half Hungarian and entirely Austrian he soon assimilated the most venerable, but cosmopolitan tradition. He learned to play the piano at an early age, studied musicology with Guido Adler and, from 1905 through 1906, counterpoint with Arnold Schoenberg, whose first biographer he became in 1920.The Three Sketches for Piano, Op. 6 (1911) are foretaste of Wellesz’s confident brevity and expressive directness. The material is reduced to the essentials, no ornament or embellishment dis-tracts from the dominating musical message. This formal economy results in a stylistic relation to the expressionism of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.Prosperos Beschwörungen, Op. 53 (1936), is a key work. Bruno Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic at the world premiere on 19 February 1938 in the Vienna Musikverein. The piece’s suc-cess led to a performance in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw on 13 March 1938—the day the Nazis annexed Austria. Wellesz did not return to Austria from the Netherlands, but went to England, becoming a Lincoln College Fellow at Oxford University, where he had received an honorary doctorate some six years earlier – the first Austrian since Haydn to do so.

For the first five years of his exile, Wellesz was not able to compose, emigration apparently uprooting him musically. Im-pressed by a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins he managed to recommence composing. The wonderful Octet, Op. 67 (1949) is among the first works composed in his new country; it dis-plays his typically shifting inventiveness and a remarkably wide gamut between friendliness and regret up to contemplation and mourning.

In his final years Wellesz was given many European honours and accolades, most importantly in Austria, where he received the Grand Austrian State Award for Music in 1961. He died on 8 No-vember 1974 in Oxford, where he had spent the final 36 years of his life in exile.During his Oxford emigration years, Egon Wellesz’s excellent academic achievements in the field of Byzantine studies oversha-dowed Wellesz the composer. It is only in the last couple of years that his creative output, too, begin to gain belated international attention through a series of new CD productions, concert per-formances and the tireless activities of the Egon Wellesz Fund of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien.

Prosperos BeschwörungenHartmut Krones, chairman of the Egon Wellesz Fund, about the music historical and cultural political importance of the work: ‘On 13 March 1938, the day of Austria’s “Anschluss” to Hitler’s Germany, Bruno Walter conducted Prosperos Beschwörungen, Op. 53., in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, composed by the Schoenberg student Egon Wellesz (1885 – 1974). This work is a cycle of “five symphonic pieces” after Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, first performed only a few days before by the Vienna Philharmo-nic again by Bruno Walter. It was he who asked the Concertge-bouw Orkest to play “Prospero” instead of a piece by Richard Strauss. He went on to conduct the piece, which had origina-

ted in a planned opera of the composer’s and which five mo-vements portray the main characters of the “Tempest”, on 16 March in Rotterdam. – Walter, who himself was forbidden to conduct in Germany since 1933, in the face of the current poli-tical events effectively replaced a piece by the former president of the “Reichsmusikkammer” with one by Egon Wellesz, highly successful until 1933, but newly seen as “entartet”. Because of these historic circumstances, “Prospero” became a fateful piece for the master composer, who was ostracized in Germany since 1933 and now in Austria, too, and who emigrated directly to England from the Netherlands and found a new career as a mu-sicologist and, finally, again as a composer.’

‘In 1934 Egon Wellesz sketched, in his “Prosperos Beschwö-rungen”, five symphonic pieces as musical portraits of the main characters of Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest”. The connecting elements are the airy instrumentation representing the air spirit, Ariel, his omnipresence and agility symbolized by delicate figu-rations; and the themes describing Prospero, who orders Ariel to play his game. Wellesz notes the corresponding lines from the play in the score’s individual movements. The first movement, “Prosperos Beschwörung” (“Prospero’s In-cantation”) is mainly in slow tempo and captures Prospero’s words both in terms of orchestral atmosphere and the often slightly bizarre themes: “Come away, servant, come. I am ready now. Approach, my Ariel, come. My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time goes upright with his carriage.”

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The second piece is titled “Ariel und der Sturm” (“Ariel and the Tempest”) and is a brilliant musical depiction of the winds con-jured up by Ariel. The third piece, “Ariels Gesang” (“Ariel’s Song”) is triggered by Ferdinand’s words: “Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?” It is here that Wellesz comes into his own as an original writer of melodies. However brief the piece is, melodic events keep rising to the spere of delicate song. The fourth piece describes the muddy demon and lout, Caliban, of whom Prospero says: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick”. The corresponding music is nervous and frequently brutal. The fifth piece is titled “Ferdinand und Miranda” (“Ferdinand and Miranda”) and is an extremely delicate drawing of the lovers. This movement leads seamlessly to the epilogue evoked by Prospero’s words: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, and what strength I have’s mine own.” These final measures are highly elegiac, a trum-pet continuing its rhythm like a question mark under the fading-away violin melody, only to sink into nothingness. Egon Wellesz’s art of characterization reached its first climax in “Prosperos Be-schwörungen”’. (Robert Schollum)

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from the 4th movement, ‘Caliban’)