Marij Kogoj

His music and milieu is receiving renewed attention in the 21st century, but he remains little known internationally.

Kogoj was born an orphan in Trieste, where he was misidentified as his deceased brother Marij (27 April 1895 – 31 January 1896). In 1910, he began composing as a self-taught musician while at school in Gorizia (1907–1914). He studied counterpoint and composition with Franz Schreker at the Vienna Music Academy (1914–1917) and then continued his studies with Arnold Schoenberg at Eugenie Schwarzwald's school (1918). In 1919, he married Marija Podlogar. Among the Slovenian avant-garde, Kogoj was an especially prominent figure between 1919 and 1922. He performed his own music as part of the September 1920 Novomeška pomlad (Novo Mesto Spring), an exhibition sponsored by Fran Windischer and painter Rihard Jakopič in Novo Mesto that brought together many avant-garde artists such as futurist poet Anton Podbevšek, painter Božidar Jakac, singer Zdenka Ziková, and poet Miran Jarc. This gathering is considered to be the beginning of the avant-garde in Slovenia. It arose from nascent futurist and constructivist artistic activity in the region, often with some left-wing political affinity. In 1922, Podbevšek, Kogoj, and theater critic Josip Vidmar issued a journal named Trije labodje (Three Swans) after the example of Der Blaue Reiter. Veno Pilon painted Kogoj in The Portrait of the Composer Marij Kogoj (1923), an oil on canvas now at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana. Polona Tratnik wrote that Pilon captured Kogoj's "eccentricity and enigmatic nature"—perhaps signs of his later mental illness, she speculated. He spent most of his life in Ljubljana, where he was a music critic. He was also a répétiteur at the Slovenian National Theatre Opera (1924–1932). For a time, he wrote expressionist music and enjoyed immense national popularity. Kogoj's late 1920s opera Črne maske (Black Masks) was an artistic success and is his most prominent work. Vidmar compared it to Alban Berg's Wozzeck as another notable expressionist opera he knew. Kogoj's career ended abruptly with a 1932 schizophrenia diagnosis. He remained institutionalized until his death in 1956. His plans for a systematic approach to atonal harmony via "chord permutations", which anticipated the compositional procedures of Schoenberg and Josef Matthias Hauer, remained unfinished. Like many artists of Slovenian avant-garde circles, he is now little known.