Sotheby’s Sells Composer’s Love Letters

Sotheby’s London has announced the sale of love letters between the composer Egon Wellesz and the poet Elizabeth MacKenzie. The collection unearths new details in the lives of both artists.

What’s happening: The art and luxury auctioneering house Sotheby’s announced the sale of correspondences between composer Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) and poet Elizabeth MacKenzie (1921-2021) from between 1943-1971. The collection includes over 1000 autographed letters as well as facsimiles of concert programs and Wellesz’s compositions, discussions of Wellesz’s opera Incognita (for which MacKenzie wrote the libretto), autographed first editions of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Thor und der Tod (1902) and the libretto of Die Frau ohne Schatten (1911), and a signed photograph of Oskar Kokoschka’s 1911 portrait of Wellesz.

In case you haven’t heard…: Egon Wellesz was an important composer during the Second Viennese School period. He studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and emigrated to England following the Nazi invasion in 1938, establishing himself in Oxford. There he met Elizabeth MacKenzie, a poet and scholar of English Literature at Oxford University.

While the romantic connection between Wellesz and MacKenzie displayed in these letters is undeniable, the two maintained other relationships. Wellesz was married to the Viennese art historian Emmy Stross (1889-1987), with whom he had children and maintained a happy relationship. MacKenzie lived with the medievalist Patricia Kean, to whom Wellesz often sent his love when signing off his letters.

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Sara Schabas

Sara Schabas is a Dora-nominated soprano, writer and yoga teacher. She has performed and created leading roles with companies including Vancouver Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, the Dayton Opera, and Aspen Opera, and is a former member of Barbara Hannigan’s Equilibrium Young Artists. Currently based in Montreal, she is a doctoral student at McGill University — where she recently received the Wirth Vocal Prize — and editor of Art Song Canada magazine.