Egon Wellesz was the shamefully overlooked "fourth" in the triumvirate of composers making up the Second Viennese School, taking up composition lessons just after Berg and before Webern. Arguably more significant in his achievement in de-coding early Byzantine notation, and thus in the deciphering of the early roots of Euroclassical music in the Middle East, Wellesz was musically and socially an important link between the modernist trends in the first decade of the 20th century to which he himself contributed, being mentored by Bartok, and, later, introducing (or claiming to having introduced) his teacher Schoenberg to Josef Hauer, the actual inventer of 12-tone music, before pursuing an independent aesthetic path whose nearest in style and temperament was possibly fellow Austrian Zemlinsky. It seems to have been as much down to luck as judgement that Wellesz managed to escape the fate of fellow Jewish composers during the Third Reich: from the excellently comprehensive account linked to below, complete with recorded excerpts of music and the composer talking with Derek Cooke, it seems that his worst treatment was at the hands of the wartime and postwar authorities here, where he was exiled for the last 30 plus years of his life, composing music in the tradition of Mahler and Schoenberg and engrossed in his vital research at Oxford.
A Google search will find many clips of his most representative work, from start to finish of his output, but for starters I cannot recommend the link below too strongly to anyone with an interest in musical history, from its origins to its course through the 20th century.
A Google search will find many clips of his most representative work, from start to finish of his output, but for starters I cannot recommend the link below too strongly to anyone with an interest in musical history, from its origins to its course through the 20th century.
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