Oskar C. Posa: Lieder, Violin Sonata, String Quartet – Edwin Fardini

Oskar Posa is one of music’s great enigmas. A post-Romantic Austrian composer, he co-founded the Society of Creative Musicians in Vienna alongside Schönberg and Zemlinsky, premiering his Soldatenlieder with them at the Musikverein in 1905. His Lieder—fusing the legacies of Brahms and Wagner—captivated audiences across Europe and the United States with their harmonic sensuality and pianistic density. Critics, astonished, spoke of “piano compositions with voice accompaniment”. The failed premiere of his Violin Sonata in 1901, deemed superhumanly difficult, left a lasting scar. Principal conductor of the Graz Opera and later a professor in Vienna, Posa was banned from musical life in 1938 for being Jewish. On the eve of his death, he composed a String Quartet—his farewell to fin-de-siècle Vienna. This recording and its accompanying texts, born of four years of research, reveal for the first time his music and his fate.