![]() “He was one of the last musicians of a great tradition – a great Austrian and fully aware of this spiritual inheritance, like Rainer Maria Rilke and like his favorite poet, Georg Trakl.” Egon Wellesz wrote those words in 1966 about Anton Webern, but he might have been describing himself, particularly the part about being aware of the spiritual inheritance of the Austrian tradition. Interludes appear when suggested by the content, for example, not the form. Wellesz did not find a single musical shape to mirror the structure of the sonnets. The harmonic context, however, is diatonic as often as not and the writing rhapsodic.He did make dramatic use of angular lines and free atonality, however, particularly for text setting – this is readily apparent in the Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a setting of five of Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.Although Wellesz revered (and emulated) Schoenberg’s teaching, actual tone rows and 12-tone techniques appear sparingly in his own music. Wellesz was born in Vienna and studied composition with Schoenberg. ![]()
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