Mosco Carner

Mosco Carner , originally Mosco Cohen, (born April 15, 1904 in Vienna , † August 3, 1985 in Stratton , Cornwall ) was an Austro-British musicologist and music critic.

Life and activity

Carner was born as Mosco Cohen as the son of Rudolf Cohen and his wife Selma, geb. Liggi, born. After attending school, he studied music theory, composition, piano and conducting at the Vienna Conservatory from 1923 to 1928, as well as musicology with Guido Adler and at the University of Vienna . In 1928 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the form of the sonata in the work of Robert Schumann .

From 1928 to 1929 Cohen taught briefly as a lecturer at the New Vienna Conservatory. From 1929 to 1930 he then worked as a conductor at the State Theater in Opava . In 1930 he moved to the same position at the Danzig City Theater, where he conducted from 1930 to 1933.

In July 1933, Cohen moved to Great Britain on a tourist visa, where he settled in London and changed his last name to Carner. In London, he was guest conductor with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra , the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1942–1955) and the London Symphony Orchestra for the next twenty years . He also wrote as a freelance music correspondent for various European newspapers and magazines, for example for the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna (1933 to 1938) and the Swiss music newspaper (1933 to 1940). From 1939 he was interned as an enemy alien . In 1940 Carner was naturalized in Great Britain.

For unexplained reasons - conceivably because of his Jewish ancestry or his listing in the reference work Displaced German Scholars from 1936 - Carner was targeted by the National Socialist police authorities in 1940 at the latest, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the Special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were considered particularly dangerous or important by the Nazi surveillance apparatus, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, the special SS commandos following the occupation troops will locate and arrest them with special priority should be.

Since the 1940s Carner developed an extensive journalistic activity on musicological topics: His first larger monograph was a study published in 1944 on the tendencies in musical harmony in the 20th century. In 1958 he published his most famous work, a highly regarded biography of the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini , which is regarded by many experts as one of the most important English-language works on the latter. The book has been translated into numerous languages ​​and reissued several times in revised and expanded versions. For the Italian translation of this work, Carner was awarded the silver medal of the Italian government in 1964. In 1974 Carner also published a translation of Puccini's letters that he had obtained. For the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series, a series of handbooks on famous operas, Carner also contributed the volumes on Puccini's operas Madame Butterfly (1979) and Tosca (1985).

His other work as a music writer includes numerous contributions as a music critic for the journals Time and Tide (1949–1962) and London Evening News (1957–1961) as well as for the daily newspapers Times (1961–1970) and Daily Telegraph . He later published a large number of his essays and reviews in collected form in the volumes Of Men and Music (1944) and Major and Minor (1980). Finally, there is also his biography of the Austrian composer Alban Berg , published in 1975 .

Carner died of a heart attack in 1981 while on vacation in Cornwall.

family

Since 1944 Carner was married to the pianist Helen Lucas Pyke († 1954), whose memory he dedicated his biography to Puccini in 1958. In his second marriage, he was married to Hazel Sebag-Montefiore since 1976.

Works

• Studies on the sonata form with Robert Schumann , Vienna 1928. (Dissertation; published under his maiden name Cohen)
• "The Church Music", in: Antonin Dvořák: his Achievement, V. Fischl (ed.), Lindsay Drummond, 1942.
• A Study of Twentieth-Century Harmony , Vol. 2, Joseph Williams, 1944.
• Of Men and Music , Joseph Williams, 1944.
• The Waltz , (The World of Music Vol. 5), Parrish, 1948.
• "Béla Bartók" in: Ralph Hill (ed.): The Concerto , Pelican Press, 1952.
• "Béla Bartók", in: A. Robertson (Ed.): Chamber Music , The White Friars Press, 1957.
• Puccini: A Critical Biography , Gerald Duckworth, 1958 (revised several times and reissued; the last constitution he concerned was published posthumously in 1992)
• "The Mass from Rossini to Dvořák c.1835-1900", in: A. Jacobs (Ed.): Choral Music , Pelican Press, 1963.
• "Music in the Mainland of Europe: 1918-1939", in: Martin Cooper (Ed.): New Oxford History of Music , Oxford University Press, 1974.
• Alban Berg: The Man and his Work , Gerald Duckworth, 1975. (extended version 1983)
• Major and Minor , Gerald Duckworth, 1980.
• Hugo Wolf Songs , University of Washington Press, 198.
• Giacomo Puccini: Tosca , Cambridge University Press, 1985.

As editor:

• Letters of Giacomo Puccini , Harrap, 1974.

literature

Reference works :

• James G. Lesniak: Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures , 1992, p. 88.
• Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 1: A-I. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 194.
• Who's Who in the World, 1978-1979 , 1978, p. 160.
• "Carner, Mosco", in: Michael Kennedy / Joyce Bourne (Eds.): "Carner, Mosco", Tin: The Oxford Dictionary of Music , Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 153.

Obituaries :

• "Mosco Carner, Musicologist; Wrote Biography on Puccini", in: New York Times, August 7, 1985. (Obituary)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mosco Cohen in the database Britain, Enemy Aliens and Internees
2. ^ Stanley Sadie: "Carner [Cohen], Mosco", in: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , 2001.