Magnus Ortwein
1845-1919
This morning a string of contradictions.
When we think of monastic music we tend to let our minds drift back to the mediaeval period. So here’s a 19th/20th century composer who spent much of his life in a Benedictine Abbey.
That Abbey was Marienberg Abbey. Not as you might expect in the town of Marienberg, in Saxony, but in fact in the southern Tyrol. An area that for most of Ortwein’s life was in Austria, but today is part of Italy.
Ortwein himself hardly set the world of classical music alight. He is studiously overlooked for the most part.
His own music borrowed heavily from Wagner, he had an interest in the leitmotiv. Not an obvious source of inspiration for a Benedictine monk!
Not keen on this, slightly creepy pseudo Wagner.
The monastery strongly reminds me of a very odd place in the Bavarian Alps called Schloss Elmau where I worked as a dishwasher for a summer aged 18-G7 meeting was held there a few years ago. Some memories of climbing above the mist to Ludwig's hunting lodge at Schachen, and hearing cow bells, remote mountain lodges supplied by mule train, a girl called Lorna, and a really strange (even by hotelier standards) proprietor called Sieglinde.
And hey, yes, it's quite nice not to be limited by characters like Twitter
Oh Lord, “borrowed from Wagner…”!😬