Musicologica Austriaca (Feb 2024)
“Baroque” in Early Musicology and Art History: Egon Welleszʼs Concept of an Austrian Tradition
Abstract
In 1909 Egon Wellesz published the article “Renaissance und Barock” in which he applied the term “Baroque,” which originated in art history, to music. With this he introduced the name for this music-historical epoch to musicology at least ten years before Curt Sachs, whose essay “Barockmusik” (1919) is still commonly referred to as the first mentioning of “Baroque Music.” Wellesz was one of the first musicologists to systematically deal with the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in his case with a particular emphasis on Vienna. In his work he contributed significantly to defining the Baroque era as an independent music-historical stye period and thus made a valuable contribution to the early history of the discipline of musicology. This article will attempt to reconstruct Welleszʼs general understanding of the Baroque period, its temporal delineation, as well as his demarcation of a distinctly “Austrian” or “Viennese” Baroque tradition. In Wellesz’s writings it becomes clear that his methods and terminology derived not only from his teacher Guido Adler, but also adopted aspects of contemporary art-historical approaches.
