Video of the world premiere of Georg Tintner's Three Partsongs. Performed by Sydney Conservatorium of Music Chamber Choir.

Date	8th August 2017
URL	https://vimeo.com/246409030#t=45m40s
Format	Video

Georg Tintner was born in Vienna in 1917 and joined the famed Vienna Boys Choir at the age of nine. It was here that he began writing works for his fellow choristers to sing (conducted by himself), apparently without any tuition in composition. At 13 he went to the Vienna State Academy, joining the second-year composition class of Joseph Marx as a composition prodigy, and later studied conducting with Felix Weingartner. At 19 he was appointed to the Vienna Volksoper, but lost his job after the Nazis arrived in March 1938. He fled Austria, arriving in New Zealand in 1940, and thereafter held conducting positions in Australia, South Africa and England (Sadler’ s Wells) before moving to Canada in 1987.

By the 1960s his compositional life was all but finished, a victim of personal tragedies, the compositional problems of the mid-20th century, but most of all the loss of his culture. The only form of which there are examples from most periods of his life is choral music. The three part -songs were written in 1957 and 1958; there is a small probability they were written for what was then known as the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum, where Georg conducted a choir of inmates – one of the programs for social good begun by his friend Hephzibah Menuhin.

Georg submitted the works to the ABC for performance and were accepted by John Antill, who judged them “three very effective part songs”. He wondered, however, if the words of the third song, ‘ Love Me and Never Leave Me’ , would require censoring, “or can we rely on bad diction?” It was subsequently deemed too risqué for Australian listeners and rejected for broadcast. In the end none of the pieces seems to have been performed. 

© Tanya Tintner

The poetry of these three songs are by Australians: Mary Ponnifax, Belinda Harrison, and Ronald McCuaig. This performance of Three Partsongs is approximately 6 minutes 20 seconds long.