Vilma von Webenauaus expressionism + impressionism + modern

Vilma von Webenau (* 15 February 1875 in Constantinople; † 9 October 1953 in Vienna) was an Austrian composer.

Life

Vilma von Webenau grew up in Vienna, where she was a piano pupil of Cäcilie (von) Frank (1851-1936?), who ran an illustrious musical salon in the 1st district and was piano accompanist to the Hellmesberger Quartet and Arnold Rosé. She received extensive artistic training from her and gave a number of public performances, which were reviewed in local newspapers. Cäcilie (von) Frank’s flat was also an important meeting place for the Viennese musical world. Vilma von Webenau’s fellow pupils included Grete Hinterhofer and Rosa Lemberger. In Vienna, Vilma von Webenau was probably Arnold Schönberg’s first private pupil. She took harmony and composition lessons with him from 1898/99 to 1902 and followed him when he moved to Berlin in 1900. At the end of 1899, she also gave successful concerts in London.

She then lived as a music teacher in Vienna, where her works were performed in public for the first time in 1907.

Another of her teachers was Fritz Cortolezis in Munich, where she lived for several years around 1910 in Krailling-Planegg (Dürerstraße 41F) and probably earned her living as a music and piano teacher. She was a member of the Club der Wiener Musikerinnen (Club of Viennese Women Musicians), which to this day advocates coexistence between women and men within the women’s movement. Alongside Maria Bach (1896–1978) and Mathilde Kralik von Meyrswalden (1857-1944), she was one of the club’s most prominent personalities. In 1917/18, Vilma von Webenau held the music theory lecture series on music past and present at the Verein der Musiklehrerinnen, the predecessor organisation of the Club der Wiener Musikerinnen. The six lectures took place in the New Women’s Club at Tuchlauben 11 in Vienna. According to her biographer Rochus Kralik von Meyrswalden, she probably had a lesbian relationship with Mathilde Kralik von Meyrswalden.

Nothing is yet known about Vilma Webenau’s life during the National Socialist era. She died after spending several days in Vienna’s Wilhelminenspital and was buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery, although a grave can no longer be found. An estate file, however, has been preserved. Her musical estate can be found in the music collection of the Austrian National Library, where it was brought four years after her death by her nephew Alexander Petschig.

The obituary of the Damenklub stated: ‘She lived and died in poor circumstances, dependent on the income from her small pension, in a modest cabinet in the 21st district. She never complained, she was happy and grateful for any attention, and her last joy was the artistically perfect rendition of her six songs from the cycle ‘Earthly and Heavenly Love’. None of us knew of her illness, of her approaching end. The loving Christmas greeting from the management of the women’s club came back unopened. Modest as she was in life, she left us.’
Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilma_von_Webenau