Kurt Roger
Kurt Roger ( May 3, 1895 in Auschwitz, Galicia; † August 4, 1966 in Vienna) was an Austrian-American composer and musicologist.
Life
Kurt Roger grew up in Vienna and studied with Karl Weigl and Arnold Schoenberg composition and musicology with Guido Adler. In 1921 he received his doctorate in the latter Dr. phil. 1923-38 he worked as a teacher of music theory and composition at the New Vienna Conservatory. In 1938, after the "Anschluss" of Austria to the German Reich, Roger fled from the Nazis to London. As his efforts to find a permanent residence permit in England were in vain, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, where he taught at the University of Washington, among others. 1945, he was awarded American citizenship. In 1958 he taught as a summer course at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and in 1964 as Visiting Professor at Queen 's University in Belfast, Ireland. On 4 August 1966 Kurt Roger died on a visit to his former home city of Vienna. He was buried in a grave of honor at the local Central Cemetery.
Works
Rogers compositional output includes 116 works, including compositions for orchestra ( symphony and concerts), choral works, songs, chamber music and moved to Vienna's Doblinger organ Gothic Passacaglia from the year 1936. Stylistically he stands his first composition teacher, the Nachromantiker Karl Weigl, closer as Arnold Schoenberg, whose step into the atonality he does not mitvollzog. Nevertheless, Rogers shows counterpoint influences by the typical for Schoenberg's composing " motivic work ". The expressivity of Rogers music reminds occasionally to the tense expression of art his second teacher. Finally, given Schoenberg's have rubbed great openness to new sounds and its undogmatic openness for all Independent and Original at least ideally on Roger. Because this occurred in his Vienna years music as a writer as an apologist of new music in appearance. So he sat down, for example, Stravinsky's one.
Although Roger remained committed to the tonality, he knew this but ever new facets wrest. With its relatively tradition-bound musical language that is somewhere between the German - Austrian romance and a moderately modern neoclassicism, he found a quite own sound. Many prominent artists recognized the high quality of his music and led on it, so the Rosé Quartet conductor Erich Leinsdorf or, Rafael Kubelik, Charles Groves and Jac van Steen. After Rogers 's death, his widow gave his compositional legacy to archive the Friends of Music in Vienna.