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.
