Georg Tintner's Trauermusik, originally composed for piano in 1939, rearranged for orchestra by the composer in 1953.

Production	Out of the Shadows Gala Opening Night (Sydney)
Venue	Verbrugghen Hall
Date	5th August 2017
Audience Numbers	420
Stage Layout	Concert hall stage
Audience Testing	No

Georg Tintner escaped from Vienna after the arrival of the Nazis in 1938, spending 1939 in London as a refugee waiting for passage to New Zealand. While there he began a short work indicative of his state of mind, which he called Trauermusik or Musica tragica, completing it 18 months later in Auckland. He thought highly of this work. In 1958, he arranged it for orchestra for a composition competition run by the ABC and APRA. The work made it into the final round and was thus premiered by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nikolai Malko; it won Third Prize of £50. Thereafter the score and parts went missing, and could not be reconstructed because the piano score was also lost (I found it in England after he died, in the possession of an old school friend). Georg was unfortunately careless with his manuscripts, and many remain missing. Despite our combined efforts to find it, the orchestral score remained lost until 2015, when I discovered it in the National Library of Australia, filed under Georg’s competition alias – his real name had never been added to it.

Georg continued composing until the early 1960s, attempting without success to write an opera. The loss of his culture, which he described as “a body blow”, combined with personal tragedies and an inability to find a pathway through the competing compositional styles of the mid-20th century, all contributed to his inability to write anything substantial after that time. It was a matter of enduring grief to him. His was one of the “lost voices” of the inter-war generation.

© Tanya Tintner