He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen's The Master Builder when he died suddenly in London in May 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick.
Having by the age of 15 decided on a career of musical composition and theory, he sought out private musical study: piano with Victor Wittgenstein; harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Rubin Goldmark (himself a student of Dvořák); and composition with Ernest Bloch in Cleveland (where he met fellow student Roger Sessions, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship) and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
There he fell in love with Ruth Mack, a student, analysand (since 1922), and collaborative colleague of Sigmund Freud's, and married at the time to Dr. Herman Blumgart, a cousin of Mark's.
Though it would later in Freudian analytic circles certainly be regarded as improper, Mark, Ruth and their daughter Til were close friends of the Freuds, and socialized with them regularly.
During his years in Vienna – inspired no doubt by Freud's own collection – Brunswick began acquiring the antiquities and rare old books that so characterized his various residences.
In fall 1938, with fascism ominously ascendant in Germany and Austria, Brunswick became Chairman of the Placement Committee for German and Austrian Musicians, which in mid 1939 was integrated into the newly formed National Refugee Service under the name National Committee for Refugee Musicians.
[1] As chair Brunswick was pivotal in finding placement into musical and academic positions in the U.S. for hundreds of European colleagues fleeing Hitler.
No mention is made in those extant letters of any previous contact, and of course Schoenberg had moved to Berlin in 1924, the year Brunswick arrived in Vienna.
During his tenure as Chairman at CCNY (he retired in 1965), Brunswick was a fierce and active defender of academic freedom amid the McCarthy hysteria of the early 1950s.
An unsolicited letter of appreciation from a Smith College student who had been a visitor to one of his classes epitomizes Brunswick's informal and sensitive teaching style: "You created an atmosphere that I'm quite unused to here at Smith, in which the professor is interested in the students' ideas and feelings, rather than merely a coherent arrangement of cold, objective facts .
Mark Brunswick was not a prolific composer; in fact he found composition difficult, and even complained of being blocked creatively.