Egon Wellesz

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Issued by ORF to document the 1982 edition of the Musikprotokoll festival - the experimental music component of Graz's Steirischer Herbst, one of Europe's most consistently radical new-music platforms - this LP preserves performances dedicated to the legacy of Egon Wellesz (1885-1974), a figure whose career traced one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary arcs. Student of Schoenberg, pioneer of the twelve-tone method, and simultaneously the foremost musicologist of Byzantine chant, Wellesz carried the entire weight of Viennese musical modernity into exile when he fled to Oxford in 1938, where he would remain, composing and teaching, for the rest of his long life.

His music - nine symphonies, string quartets, operatic works - belongs to a strand of European modernism that never entirely shed its Romantic roots, maintaining a lyrical warmth within post-Schoenbergian procedures that set it apart from both the Darmstadt orthodoxy and the neo-classicist reaction. That the Musikprotokoll saw fit to honor him in 1982 speaks to a growing recognition of what had too long been overlooked: a composer of genuine depth, caught between worlds, who gave to both. ORF, 120 705.