Mark Brunswick

Mark Brunswick ( January 6, 1902 – May 25/26, 1971) was an American composer of the twentieth century. He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen's The Master Builder when he died suddenly in London in May 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick. Brunswick had been at work on the opera for several years, and Act I had not long before received a concert performance as a work in progress at the City College of New York.

Born in New York City, Brunswick was the third of four children of secular Jewish parents. His father, of an Alsatian family background, was a successful manufacturer in the garment industry. His mother was an educated German-born woman, trained as an opera singer, who encouraged Mark's artistic interests and his pursuit of an education that diverged from the conventional.

He attended the Horace Mann School in New York, and later Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Though he took some courses in the extension division of Columbia University, he never formally acquired a college degree. Having by the age of 15 decided on a career of musical composition and theory, he sought out private musical study: piano with Victor Wittgenstein; harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Rubin Goldmark (himself a student of Dvořák); and composition with Ernest Bloch in Cleveland (where he met fellow student Roger Sessions, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship) and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

In 1924, Brunswick moved to Vienna. There he fell in love with Ruth Mack, a student, analysand (since 1922), and collaborative colleague of Sigmund Freud's, and married at the time to Dr. Herman Blumgart, a cousin of Mark's. As a teenager, Brunswick had actually been a guest at their wedding years earlier in 1917. Their marriage was by now in serious trouble, however, and in 1928, Mark and Ruth were married in Vienna. Freud served as their witness – one of the few weddings he ever attended.

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