Ernst von Dohnányi (b. 1877 in Pozsony, today’s Slovakia – d. 1960 in New York, USA) began his music studies with his father, who was a professor of mathematics and a cellist. He then became a student of piano with István Thomán and composition with Hans von Koessler at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music. In 1897 he requested to take his final exams early, passed with high marks and received his degree before his twentieth birthday. In the same year, he made his debut as a piano performer in Berlin, and became so successful that he toured first Europe and then the United States the following year, to perform with St. Louis Symphony. In 1901, he completed his first symphony and married his first wife Elisabeth “Elsa” Kunwald, with whom he had two children. From 1905 to 1915, he taught at the Hochschule in Berlin, and it was there that he composed The Veil of Pierrette and Suite in F-sharp Minor, along with organizing over a hundred concerts each year. After that, he returned to Hungary to teach at the Budapest Academy and to improve the local musical community by promoting Hungarian composers like Bartók and Kodály. Before World War I, another  “Elza” proved fatal. Elza Galafrés was a German actress and ballerina, and they married in 1919. Von Dohnányi was the director of the Budapest Academy but was quickly forced to resign for political reasons. He then became chief conductor of both the Budapest Philharmonic Society and the New York State Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately, when World War II broke out, he chose to disband the entire Budapest Philharmonic because he did not want to comply with the anti-Semitic regime and fire any member for religious or racial grounds. He moved to Austria before settling down in the United States in 1949 for the remainder of his life. It was there that he married his third wife, Ilona Zachár, and became part of the music faculty at Florida State College in Tallahassee. Dohnányi taught and conducted until his death in 1960. He remains one of the century’s greatest pianists whose playing was influenced by Liszt, while his  compositions, heavily influenced by Brahms, belong more to the German Classicism than to the twentieth century aesthetics.

Passacaglia for solo flute, the last piece that von Dohnányi composed before his death, is one of his lesser-known works. This technically challenging piece hides an interesting story. Dohnányi was friends with Ohio University president John Baker and would occasionally come up from Florida to visit the family. One of the daughters, Elizabeth “Ellie” Baker, was a flutist, and she told Dohnányi that she wished Brahms had composed more solo pieces for flute. He then got to work and as a token of friendship, presented to her Aria, op. 48, No. 1, which is a very beautiful and lyrical piece for flute and piano. After much discussion with Ellie Baker about the technically challenging aspects of the instrumentation, Passacaglia was published in 1959, with a dedication to her. This rather puzzling piece is a theme and variation piece, where the theme is stated  as a twelve-tone row, almost dodecaphonic, with an A minor feel. There are around twenty variations, many dissonant, each one getting progressively more difficult and moving from an A major to A minor feel when the theme is restated. The  piece is most challenging at the end, when arpeggios are repeated at stunningly fast 32nd note value to resolve in an A major arpeggio, despite the chromatics of the theme. This work is not for the faint of heart: be ready to go on a rollercoaster ride!