EGK: "Fürchtlosigkeit und Wohlvonnen" indian Legend for tenor, choir orch. Munich Radio SO. KERTESZ

EGK WERNER: "Fürchtlosigkeit und Wohlvonnen" indian Legend for tenor, choir orch. (1931;rev. 1957). Munich Radio SO. Istvan KERTESZ (rec.1960).
The title in english is "Fearlessness and Goodwill" - In italiano "Impavidità e Buona volontà".
Werner Egk (17 May 1901 - 10 July 1983), born Werner Joseph Mayer, was a German composer. He was born in the Swabian town of Auchsesheim, today part of Donauwörth, Germany. His family, of Catholic peasant stock, moved to Augsburg when Egk was six. He studied at a Benedictine Gymnasium (academic high school) and entered the municipal conservatory. Egk demonstrated talents as a composer, graphic artist, and writer, and he moved first to Frankfurt to improve his piano talents and then, in 1921, to Munich. There, working as a theater composer and playing in the pit, he married Elizabeth Karl, a violinist. He derived his pen name "Egk" from his wife's initials: Elisabeth, geborne Karl (Elisabeth, née Karl). His only son, Titus, was born in 1924.
Egk moved to Berlin in 1928, meeting composers Arnold Schönberg and Hanns Eisler (1898-1962). He intended to become a cinema composer and accompanied silent films. When radio broadcasting became available to the public, Egk immediately realised its importance as a mass medium and developed operas and radio plays. He was introduced to Hans Fleisch, an important radio executive (also Paul Hindemith's brother-in-law and a Jew), by composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950). He received his first commission for broadcasting from Fleisch's company.
He returned to Munich in 1929 to work for the local radio station and settled in Lochham, a suburb. He became associated with musicians Fritz Büchtger, Karl Marx, and especially, Carl Orff (1895-1982), whom he had met in 1921. His music of the period shows a debt to the compositional style of Igor Stravinsky. He also became friends with new-music conductor Hermann Scherchen (1891-1966) and the owners of the music publisher, Schott Music in Mainz. After an experiment with the Indian Legend “Fürchtlosigkeit und Wohlvonnen” (1931), performed by Scherchen, his career as a composer continued with the premiere of his radio opera, “Columbus”, in July 1933 (staged in April 1934).
Initially, Munich's cultural administrators had doubts about the compatibility of Egk's Stravinskian style with a Nazi audience, and he encountered difficulty with Munich's representative for Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture), Paul Ehlers.
In 1935, he premiered his first opera Die Zaubergeige (The Magic Violin) in Frankfurt am Main. The work channeled Bavarian folksong and a diatonic idiom far less modernist than his earlier, more angular Columbus. This opera therefore matched Nazi artistic guidelines prescribing folk elements as being close to the people. Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister saw the stylistic change as "opportunistic." The success of the work led to a commission for ballet music related to the 1936 Summer Olympics (for which he received a gold medal in the Art Competition) and his appointment as conductor of the Berlin State Opera - a position he held until 1941. His next major work was the ballet Joan von Zarissa in 1940. In the following decade, it was common to pair the work with Orff's Carmina Burana. In general, Egk's music found much more success in Berlin.
His major career began after the war. In Germany, Egk has been dubbed "Komponist des Wiederaufbaus" ("composer of the reconstruction", which followed World War II). Besides being a conductor and composer, he was head of the Berlin Musikhochschule (1950-52) and important figure of the GEMA since 1950; he was also the first German president of the Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Auteurs et Compositeurs (CISAC). In 1954 he became conductor of the Bavarian State Opera with a 20-year contract.
His later years saw a constant string of premieres at major European festivals, beginning with Irische Legende in 1955, conducted by George Szell and featuring Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. His opera Die Verlobung in San Domingo opened the National Theatre Munich in 1963 and features a libretto by Heinrich von Kleist, pleading for racial tolerance. His late works, however, were almost exclusively instrumental. Exceptional among them are works for winds, including the Divertissement for Ten Wind Instruments (1974) and the Five Pieces for Wind Quintet (1975). Egk died on 10 July 1983 in Inning am Ammersee and is buried in Donauwörth.

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Di grande interesse Orff e Strawinsky fanno capolino qua e là senza ingombrare