Werner Egk - His Music and His Life

Werner Egk, a prominent German composer, died of heart disease Sunday in Inning, West Germany, his family said. He was 82 years old. 

Mr. Egk's music, cast in a personal, essentially conservative fusion of 20th-century influences, Stravinsky chief among them, was full of translucent textures, lively rhythms and a mordant sense of irony. He was chiefly a composer for the theater, principally opera and ballet, but his catalogue includes orchestral and chamber works, as well. 

Among his better-known operas were ''Die Zaubergeige,'' ''Peer Gynt,'' ''Der Revisor'' and ''Die Verlobung in San Domingo.'' ''Der Revisor,'' based on Gogol, was given its American premiere under the title ''The Inspector General'' by the New York City Opera in 1960, with the composer conducting. Ross Parmenter, writing in The New York Times, admired its ''wry cleverness'' and ''meticulous craftsmanship,' but dismissed it as ''thin gruel.'' 

Donal Henahan, reviewing ''Die Verlobung in San Domingo'' in 1974, thought Mr. Egk ''a skilled workman in the genre'' and felt that the St. Paul Opera production ''lighted considerable dramatic fire.'

Mr. Egk was born in Auchsesheim on May 17, 1901. His original last name was Mayer. Some said his adopted acronym stood for ''ein grosser Komponist'' or even ''ein genialer Komponist'' - ''a great composer,'' or ''a great genius of a composer.'' But he always explained the name as a tribute to his wife, Elisabeth Karl, with the g added ''for euphony.'' 

The composer studied music in Munich, where his teachers included Carl Orff. Mr. Egk participated in avant-garde festivals before 1933, but afterward he played an active role in German musical life during the Nazi period. He was commissioned to write a piece for the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, conducted at the Berlin State Opera between 1938 and 1941, and served as head of the German Union of Composers from 1941 to 1945. He was permitted to return to public life after a de-Nazification trial in 1947. 

In 1948, a ballet on the ''Faust'' theme, ''Abraxas,'' with a text based on Heinrich Heine, was banned by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture as obscene. Mr. Egk served as director of the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik from 1950 to 1953, and in 1968 he became president of the German Music Council.