For more than seventy years, Arnold Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) occupied a position at the center of international musical life. Composer, scholar, critic, teacher, Wellesz was co-founder, with Rudolf Réti, of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), but he was as at home with the tropes of Byzantine church music as he was with the rules of twelve-tone technique; as erudite in his understanding of the music of Ravel and Milhaud as he was staunch in his defense of his teacher (he was Schoenberg’s first biographer); as comfortable in the halls of Lincoln College, Oxford, where he taught from 1940 to 1972, as in his native Vienna. Here was a truly cosmopolitan music figure, one who managed, in a world of swollen egos, to remain on good terms with everyone. And one who, suffering the trials of the Austrian political emigré on the eve of the Second World War, contributed much to the postwar reconstruction of Austria’s musical life.

Among the many riches of Wellesz’s correspondence—all of it preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna and none of it yet available to the public—there are several extraordinary letters, from the years 1921 and 1922, between Wellesz and major figures of the early modernist era, especially Arnold Schoenberg. These letters were the rare survivors of a 1938 Gestapo raid on the family residence in Vienna, in which much of Wellesz’s early correspondence was lost. I am indebted to Elizabeth Kessler, Wellesz’s daughter, for granting