Heinrich Jalowetz

Heinrich Jalowetz (1882-1946) was an Austrian musicologist and conductor who settled in the USA. He was one of the core members of what became known as the Second Viennese School in the orbit of Arnold Schoenberg.

A musicology pupil of Guido Adler, Jalowetz was among Schoenberg’s first students in Vienna, 1904-1908. From 1909 to 1933 he worked as a conductor in Regensburg, Danzig, Stettin, Prague, Vienna and Cologne (as successor to Otto Klemperer). After emigrating to the USA in 1938 he taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Though his name is less widely known than that of many of Schoenberg’s more famous students, Schoenberg regarded Jalowetz very highly indeed. He is one of the seven ‘Dead Friends’ (the others being Berg, Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos) to whom he once envisaged dedicating his book "Style and Idea", with the comment that those men ‘belong to those with whom principles of music, art, artistic morality and civic morality need not be discussed. There was a silent and sound mutual understanding on all these matters’.