Classical Cloud of Sound 21

The Linz Bruckner Student Mathilde Kralik von Meyrswalden

„I was born in Linz on the Danube on 3 rd December 1857. My father Wilhelm Kralik of Meyrswalden was a glass maker (…) I owe my musicality and my love of music to my father and mother (…) After we moved to Vienna (…) I became the private piano pupil of Professor Julius Epstein. He took an active interest in my compositions and advised me to study further with Anton Bruckner for counterpoint, whose private teaching I enjoyed for a year before being admitted to the composition school of the Vienna Conservatory in October 1876“. With these words the Bruckner pupil from Linz, Mathilde Kralik von Meyrswalden, a vibrant personality in fin-de-siècle Vienna, presented herself in an autobiographical note of 19 th October 1904. Her violin concerto of the 1930's and her Symphony in F minor, which was the reworking of a work written 40 years earlier and premiered in Prague in 1904, show the Bruckner pupil as a composer with a distinctive musical language. The women of the Female Symphonic Orchestra Austria under their founder and conductor Silvia Spinnato are joined for the violin concerto by the violinist Francesca Dego, in demand worldwide, and for the symphony by the organist Magdalena Hasibeder, also from Linz, and the internationally acclaimed soprano Jacquelyn Wagner. Together they will take up the cudgels for an important Linz composer.