Dora Pejacevic composer

Dora Pejacevic (* 10 September 1885 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary; † 5 March 1923 in Munich) was a composer who grew up in Slavonia and lived in Munich.

Dora Pejacevic grew up in Nasice (Slavonia). Her father was the Croatian Ban Count Teodor Pejacevic, her mother the Hungarian Baroness Elisabeta-Lilla Vay de Vaya, a trained pianist and singer. Dora Pejacevic received her first music lessons from the organist Károly Noszeda (1863-1944) in Budapest. She continued her education at the Croatian Music Society in Zagreb with Václav Huml (violin) and Ciril Junek (theory), and at the Zagreb public school of Dragutin Kaiser (instrumentation). From 1909 she took private lessons in Dresden with Percy Sherwood (1866-1939) and in Munich with Walter Courvoisier (composition) and Henri Petri (1853-1914; violin). Essentially, however, she was self-taught; she sought her inspiration in an exchange of ideas with other artists. Her circle of acquaintances included Annette Kolb, Karl Kraus (to whose magazine Die Fackel she subscribed), Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife Clara Westhoff, and the pianist Alice Ripper. Dora Pejacevic's diary documents further readings that awakened her interest in philosophical and social issues: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann.

Her place of residence in Croatia was Pejacevic Castle in Našice. She spent her childhood there until the whole family moved to Zagreb in 1903. In 1907 she returned to Našice, but two years later she began her studies in Dresden. She then moved to Munich in 1911. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, she helped in Našice throughout the war as a nurse caring for the wounded. At the same time she composed intensively. Some of her best works were written during this time.

At times she also lived in Budapest, Prague, Vienna and finally - from her marriage to Ottomar Lumbe in 1921 until her death in 1923 - in Munich.

Her works, of which she published only a few, were performed both in her home country and in other European countries: Performers were the pianists Walther Bachmann, Svetislav Stancic and Alice Ripper; the violinists Joan Manén, Václav Huml and Zlatko Balokovic; the singer Ingeborg Danz; the conductors Oskar Nedbal and Edwin Lindner; the Thomán Trio, the Croatian String Quartet, the Zagreb Philharmonic, the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra and the Dresden Philharmonic.

Gifted in many ways, at times also active in literature herself, Dora Pejacevic lived mainly in music and for music (Koraljka Kos). Highly sensitive by nature, she composed "similar to a seismograph that reacts to the finest stimuli" (Koraljka Kos): in what she herself called a "trance of musical obsession". She was the first woman in Croatia to write orchestral works. Because of her late Romantic, harmonically and instrumentally refined tonal language, she is considered a representative of the fin de siècle; occasionally her style has been compared to that of Rachmaninov.