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Concept
Hans Gál
Summary
Hans Gál OBE (5 August 1890 – 3 October 1987) was an Austrian composer, pedagogue, musicologist, and author, who emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938.
Gál was born to a Jewish family in the small village of Brunn am Gebirge, Lower Austria, just outside Vienna, the son of a doctor, Josef Gál. In 1909, his piano teacher Richard Robert (who also taught George Szell, Rudolf Serkin and Clara Haskil) appointed Gál as a teacher when he became director of the New Vienna Conservatory. From 1909 to 1913, Gál studied music history at the University of Vienna under music historian Guido Adler, who published Gál's doctoral dissertation on the style of the young Beethoven in his own Studien zur Musikwissenschaft. From 1909 to 1911, Gál studied composition privately with Eusebius Mandyczewski, who had been a close friend of Johannes Brahms, and with whom he later edited ten volumes of the Complete Edition of Brahms's works, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1926. Mandyczewski became a "spiritual father" to him.
In 1915, Gál was the first recipient of the new Austrian State Prize for Composition for his first symphony, though he later discarded this work and its successors, as well as a large number of works composed up to that time. During World War I he served in Serbia, the Carpathians and Italy. He returned from the war with a completed opera, Der Arzt der Sobeide, which was performed in Breslau (modern Wrocław) in 1919 under the conductor Julius Prüwer.
After World War I, the political situation in Austria was extremely difficult, exacerbated by runaway inflation. Gál was appointed to the (initially unpaid) post of Lector for music theory at the University of Vienna (a post once held by Anton Bruckner). Despite the financial difficulties he married Hanna Schick (a relative of the philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Jerusalem). His second opera, Die heilige Ente (The Sacred Duck), received its première in Düsseldorf in April 1923 under Szell and was performed with continued success in 20 theatres.
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