Egon Joseph Wellesz, CBE, FBA (21 October 1885 – 9 November 1974) was an Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist, notable particularly in the field of Byzantine music.

[1] This desire to pursue a music career had been formed after attending a performance of Carl Maria von Webers Der Freischütz under the baton of Gustav Mahler at the Vienna State Opera on October 21, 1898; a present from his parents on his 13th birthday.

[2] In 1905, at the age of 19, Wellesz began studying harmony and counterpoint at Eugenie Schwarzwald's school with Arnold Schoenberg while simultaneously attending law classes at the university.

There he became the conductor of a school choir and he met and befriended the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the architect Adolf Loos, and the painter Oskar Kokoschka; the latter of whom painted his portrait in 1911.

[1][2] Adler had founded the Musicological Institute at the University of Vienna and was a leading editor of the Austrian Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich.

[3] The main focus of Wellesz's early musicological research was Baroque opera; particularly those by composer Giuseppe Bonno who was the subject of his dissertation at the University of Vienna.

[4] This interest initially arose from dialogues and debates with the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski who at this time was putting forward a new theory that many of the elements of Early Christian architecture, such as the rounded dome, originated not in the West but in the East; ideas published in his Orient oder Rom.

Wellesz was the first pupil of Schoenberg to gain independent success as a composer, receiving a contract from Universal Edition before Berg or Webern.

Operas such as Alkestis (1924) and Die Bakchantinnen (1931) take their subject matter from ancient mythology and, in contrast to the Wagnerian tradition, use techniques such as dance pantomime and coloratura singing derived from Claudio Monteverdi and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

[10] Once in England he worked for a time on Grove's Dictionary of Music, but in July 1940 he was interned as an enemy alien, ultimately in Hutchinson Camp in the Isle of Man.

He gained his release later that year, on 13 October,[11] thanks to intercessions by Ralph Vaughan Williams and H. C. Colles, the long-standing chief music critic of The Times.

[12] Following his internment in 1940 Wellesz found himself unable to compose, a creative block eventually broken by the composition of the String Quartet No.

[13] His response to the great English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins also helped re-kindle his urge to compose, resulting in his setting of The Leaden and the Golden Echo in 1944.

[14] Despite his composing, Wellesz remains best known as an academic and teacher, and for his extensive scholarly contributions to the study of Byzantine music and opera in the 17th century.

[15] His pupils there included Herbert Chappell, Martin Cooper, Kunihiko Hashimoto, Spike Hughes, Frederick May, Wilfrid Mellers, Nigel Osborne and Peter Sculthorpe.

Rather than follow his teacher Schoenberg's Expressionist style, Wellesz found inspiration in music from the pre-modern era (with the exception of Mahler), becoming a forerunner to the anti-Romantic currents of the twenties.