Mary Dickenson-Auner

Mary Frances Dickenson was born in Dublin on 24 October 1880 and died in Vienna on 25 May 1965. She came from the Irish MacDonnell family; her grandfather Sir Hercules MacDonnell was rector of the University of Dublin and a co-founder of the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

After her father’s death in 1883 she grew up in Wiesbaden and, from 1888, in Düsseldorf, where she received her first violin lessons. In 1897 she became a pupil of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in Croydon; back in Dublin she worked as assistant to Guido Papini at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. In 1899 she took up studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, graduating in violin under Émile Sauret in 1902, and then studied with Otakar Ševčík in Prague.

In 1905 she made her debut under Oskar Nedbal with the Czech Philharmonic in Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. A concert career followed that took her to Dublin, London, Düsseldorf, Berlin and Vienna; her repertoire included the violin concertos of Bruch and Beethoven as well as Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy.

Vienna and the modernists

She settled in Vienna in 1909. In 1912 she married the diplomat and archivist Michael Auner and moved with him to Hermannstadt in Transylvania; in 1917 the family fled via Vienna to the Netherlands, returning to Vienna in 1920.

During the 1920s she was in close contact with musical modernism. In 1922 she gave, with Eduard Steuermann, the Austrian premiere of the First Violin Sonata Op. 21 by Béla Bartók, and presented the work in Salzburg together with Bartók in the same year. She was a member of Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances and appeared under his direction.

Music education

From 1925 she developed the “Hörstunden” within the Vienna school reform, through which children in primary schools were introduced to classical music. By 1938 the project had been extended to some seventeen schools.

Late work

In 1938, as a British citizen, Dickenson-Auner was banned from performing and teaching. In the years that followed her work shifted to composition. String quartets, several symphonies, solo concertos, operas and two oratorios were written. Her musical language combines a polyphony oriented on Bach with impulses from the Schoenberg circle and a harmonic thinking that reaches beyond the triad; she repeatedly drew on Irish folk melody. Several of her works were broadcast by Viennese radio after 1945. Her estate is held at the mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

An Irish-born British composer in Vienna

Dickenson-Auner’s life spans three musical cultures. She was born in Dublin into the MacDonnell family, trained in Croydon, Dublin and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and held British citizenship throughout her life — the reason she was banned from performing and teaching in Vienna in 1938. Her catalogue includes an Irish Symphony, and Irish folk melody recurs across her late works.

Her music is beginning to be taken up again: the Royal Academy of Music in London is preparing critical editions and recordings of her chamber music. Her estate is held at the mdw in Vienna, and the Sophie Drinker Institut maintains the work catalogue.

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, 1942

The autograph title page bears the composer’s own dating “Nov.–Dec. 1942” and her signature; the work was written in Vienna. No orchestral performance is documented.

Duration approximately 20 minutes
Movements I. Allegro non troppo — Cadenza: Tempo moderato · II. Poco Adagio · III. Rondo: Allegro vivace
Scoring solo violin · 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B flat, 2 bassoons, 4 horns in F, 2 trumpets in F, trombones and tuba, timpani, strings
Status premiere outstanding
Performance material the autograph score is currently being digitised; an engraved score and orchestral parts will be available shortly

In her autobiographical text Mein Musikleben, written in 1963, the composer assigns the concerto to her late work and notes that she had heard it only with piano accompaniment and never with orchestra. The catalogue of the Sophie Drinker Institut lists it as the “Second Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” under the year 1942 and without opus number; the designation points to an earlier violin concerto written in 1914.

Daniel Auner, a great-great-nephew of the composer, has deciphered the concerto from the manuscript and studied it for performance.

For orchestras and artistic directors

Daniel Auner is glad to present the work in person — together with a pianist, in the composer’s own version for violin and piano. Such a presentation can be arranged directly for conductors or for the artistic management of an orchestra.

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