Marij Kogoj

Marij Julij Kogoj (Trieste, 1892 – Ljubljana, 1956) was one of the central figures of the Slovenian musical avant-garde of the interwar period, as well as a composer and author of writings on music. His career, marked by illness, was cut short before he could complete several of his most ambitious projects.

Orphaned at an early age, he was mistaken for a deceased brother because of a defective baptismal certificate issued by the authorities. He studied in Gorizia between 1907 and 1914, a period during which he was largely self-taught and during which, by about 1910, he was already composing. He then studied with Franz Schreker at the Vienna Academy of Music (1914–1917) and, in 1918, with Schoenberg at the Schwarzwald School. Before 1932 he lived mainly in Ljubljana, where he worked as a répétiteur at the opera of the Slovenian National Theatre (1924–1932) and as a music critic. Between 1919 and 1922 he was one of the most prominent members of the Slovenian avant-garde. His career was prematurely interrupted when he fell ill with schizophrenia, and the new harmonic system he was planning, the 'permutation of chords', was left unfinished.

As a composer of vocal and piano music, his style combined bold expressivity and dense textures, the product of a confluence of late Romanticism, polytonality and emancipated dissonance. The choral work Trenutek (1914) anticipated expressionism in Slovenian music, and the opera Črne maske (1928) represents his culmination. From 1928 he moved towards neoclassicism, with a linear style of writing and a more transparent diatonic sound. His major works of this period, such as the opera Kar hočete and the cantata Himna trpečega ljudstva, were left incomplete.