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Music
Gál composed in virtually every form, from operas to piano pieces. Although the basis of his style is traditional Austro-German (post-Brahmsian) tonality, he was guardedly open to 20th-century developments and in his mature works appears, as he is, a distinct contemporary of such composers as Korngold, Weigl and Zemlinsky, with post-Romantic and neo-classical features. Gál on composing: “One ought to take it for granted that musical creation must proceed from genuine feeling. It’s better not to compose lies, if only because it takes so many notes. And I can’t understand how so much music can be written to suit some passing fashion: that can only be deliberate suicide.”
Life
Perhaps better-known as a musicologist than a composer, though he had a successful career in both professions, Gál was the son of a doctor and brother of the opera singer Erma Gál; a fellow-pupil at school was Erich Kleiber. He studied with Guido Adler and Brahms’s protege Eusebius Mandyczewski at Vienna University (1908–13) and after war service he taught there (1919–1929). While still a student he edited works of Johann Strauss (both I and II) and for his doctoral thesis wrote a book on Beethoven’s early style which was later published. With Mandyczewski, he was co-editor of the first Complete Brahms Edition published in the 1920s. He went on to become director of the Conservatoire in Mainz; driven from there by the Nazis in 1933 he became conductor of the Vienna Bach Choir. After the Anschluss he fled to Edinburgh, where Sir Donald Tovey appointed him a lecturer at the University. Apart from a brief period of internment as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man during World War II, he lived and taught in Edinburgh until his death at the advanced age of 97. Capaciously learned in what seemed the entire repertoire, he appeared capable of playing absolutely anything, impromptu, from memory. In addition to his compositions he wrote a number of books, including popular but scholarly studies of Brahms and Schubert.