Dora Pejačević

Dora Pejačević [Pejacsevich]
(b Budapest, 10 Sept 1885; d Munich, 5 March 1923). Croatian composer. She studied at the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb then briefly in Dresden with Sherwood and in Munich with Courvoisier.

For the most part, however, she was self-taught and developed her musical talents through contact with other artists and intellectuals, such as Karl Kraus. Her ancestral home was at Našice (near Osijek), but she also travelled extensively to Budapest, Munich, Prague and Vienna. After 1921 she lived mainly in Munich.

Her works were performed most frequently outside Croatia; part of her Symphony, for example, was first given in Vienna (25 January 1918) and the complete work was performed later in Dresden. Her late Romantic idiom, enriched with Impressionist harmonies and lush orchestral colours, evolved as she strove to break free from drawing-room mannerisms and conventions. She introduced the orchestral song into Croatian music, though among her vocal works her greatest achievement is the Drei Gesänge op.53 for voice and piano. Her late piano miniatures are lyrical and meditative evocations, such as the two nocturnes op.50, or else robust dance movements containing grotesque elements, as in the Humoreske und Caprice op.54. The Piano Quintet op.40, String Quartet op.58, the Symphony and the Piano Concerto display both an accomplished technique and a striving towards integration of motivic and thematic material. In the Phantasie concertante op.48 for piano and orchestra and in the Piano Sonata in A, op.57, she followed the Lisztian concept of the single movement sonata-fantasy.

In Croatia her work concurred with the modernist movement in literature and the secession in the visual arts: without breaking new ground she helped to bring a new range of expression into the traditional musical language. Almost all of her 57 known compositions survive as a single collection, in the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb.