Egon Kornauth

Egon Kornauth (14 May 1891 – 28 October 1959) was an Austrian composer and music teacher.

Kornauth was born in Olmütz, Moravia. A cellist and pianist from his youth, he went in 1909 to Vienna, where he studied with Robert Fuchs, Guido Adler, Franz Schreker (with whom he quarrelled) and Franz Schmidt.

After teaching music theory at Vienna University from 1919, Kornauth embarked on an international career as pianist, accompanist and conductor that took him to Indonesia (1926-9) and to South America (1934-5). In 1940 he resumed a teaching career in war-time Vienna and Salzburg. He joined the Nazi-sponsored Reichsmusikkammer, but continued to support his teacher Adler, who was held under house arrest as a Jew, until the latter's death in 1941. In post-war Austria, Kornauth became director of the Salzburg Mozarteum (1946-7), and was elected to the Austrian Arts Senate in 1954. He died in Vienna in 1959.

Kornauth composed extensively and won a number of prizes including the Austrian State Prize (1913) (for his Viola Sonata op.3), the Gustav Mahler Foundation prize (1919), and the Austrian Würdigungspreis (1951). His style was however conventional; when the English composer Humphrey Searle visited Vienna in the 1930s he was displeased to find that the only modern music played by the main orchestras was that of Schmidt "or lesser composers like ... Kornauth." Kornauth himself recognised in his 1958 autobiography that "epigonism was inherent in my personality." Most of Kornauth's output consists of lieder, chamber music and piano pieces, but there are also five orchestral suites amongst other larger scale pieces.

A recording of some of Kornauth's piano works by Jonathan Powell was released by Toccata Classics in 2013.