Egon Wellesz

Egon Wellesz was born in Vienna in October 1885, into a prosperous Hungarian-Jewish family. He read musicology at the University of Vienna under Guido Adler, took his doctorate in 1908 with a thesis on Giuseppe Bonno, and studied composition privately with Schoenberg from 1904 — making him, along with Webern, one of Schoenberg’s earliest pupils. His parallel academic and compositional careers became the defining feature of his working life.

His scholarly work, particularly his pioneering studies of Byzantine music and his editions of seventeenth-century Italian opera, established him as one of the leading musicologists of the inter-war period. His compositional output — six operas (including *Alkestis* of 1924, on Hofmannsthal’s libretto), nine symphonies (composed 1945–71), nine string quartets, and a substantial body of choral and chamber music — combined Schoenbergian harmonic language with classical forms and Mediterranean material. The Anschluss in 1938 forced his emigration; he settled in Oxford, where he was appointed Fellow of Lincoln College and the first University Reader in Byzantine Music, and remained for the rest of his life.

Wellesz was made an Honorary CBE in 1957 and an Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. He died in Oxford in November 1974. Music Preserved’s archive includes a selection of his vocal and chamber work in twentieth-century British performance.