Egon Wellesz studied music only briefly with Arnold Schoenberg but remained forever captivated by his personality. Yet, unlike Alban Berg or Anton Webern, he always maintained a certain distance to his teacher.
In the 1920s, Egon Wellesz emerged as a distinctive opera composer, and after emigrating to Britain in 1938 became a prolific symphonist who also produced sensitive settings of English poetry. Schoenberg resented this lack of loyalty and refused to acknowledge Wellesz as a pupil. Moreover, Schoenberg's general mistrust of musicologists extended to Wellesz, who had trained at Vienna University with Guido Adler and later helped to shape the study of music in British universities. Yet, as the first biographer, Wellesz did much to promote Schoenberg's cause, especially in France and England. Bojan Bujić weaves these strands together in this account of a fraught relationship that brings into focus the outstanding intellectual and musical currents of the day in both Austria and Britain.
Bojan Bujić: Arnold Schoenberg and Egon Wellesz. A Fraught Relationship. London 2020
