Continental Briton: Egon Wellesz (1885-1972)

Egon Wellesz was successful as a composer, a teacher, and a musicologist. Born in Vienna on 21 October 1885, he studied in his home city with Arnold Schoenberg and the musicologist Guido Adler. Between 1913 and 1938 he taught as lecturer and later as professor at the University of Vienna. Other major influences on his work were opera and the music of Mahler. He was also deeply interested in Byzantine music. In 1921 Wellesz authored a book about Schoenberg before embarking on a detailed study of Baroque opera. Fleeing to England in 1938, he lived in Oxford where he was appointed Reader in Byzantine music at Lincoln College. In 1940 Wellesz was interned, first at Bury and then on the Isle of Man but was released after an intervention by Ralph Vaughan Williams and H.C. Colles. Whilst interned he gave lectures on opera and modern Viennese music.

During the pre-war years Wellesz composed several operas, ballet music and a corpus of piano works. He stopped composing music after his exile to England, which seemed to shock him into silence. In 1943 Wellesz wrote his Fifth String Quartet and after that became prolific until his death. His catalogue includes nine symphonies which form an important cycle. Despite his practical and historical appreciation of opera he was not involved in the post-war revival of the genre pioneered by Britten and Tippett.

His compositions include works written using serialism, turning later to a more diatonic style sometimes suggestive of Mahler. In England, his pupils included Edmund Rubbra and Wilfred Mellers. Wellesz’s involvement with the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) led to performances of music by Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Bliss on the continent.

On his death on 9 November 1974 Egon Wellesz was buried in his beloved Vienna.

If you can only hear one work by Egon Wellesz…

A good place from which to approach Wellesz’s music is the beautiful Vorfrühling, op.12 (‘The Dawn of Spring’). This piece is not typical of the composer but is a magical work with ‘exquisite tonal colourings’ that demands a place in the current orchestral repertoire. The dominant mood is that of impressionism. The listener will immediately note the influence of Claude Debussy: Wellesz had been amongst the first conductors to introduce the Frenchman to Viennese concertgoers. The subtle orchestration of Vorfrühling owes much to Debussy’s La Mer. Critics have also identified the impact of Arnold Schoenberg’s pre-serial music such as the gorgeously romantic Pelléas und Mélisande, op.5 (1903), and Anton Webern’s atypical early work, Im Sommerwind (1904). Vorfrühling was composed in 1911 but had to wait ten years before its première by the Bochum State Orchestra under Rudolf Schulz-Dornberg.

It has been given a single recording on Capriccio Records (C67077) with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester conducted by Roger Epple. This recording has been uploaded to YouTube.

With thanks to the English Music Festival and their Spirited journal where this text was first published on 2016.
Photo by Georg Fayer - ÖNB, Bildarchiv Austria.