Dora Pejačević

Dora Pejačević (10 September 1885 – 5 March 1923) was a Croatian composer, a member of the Pejačević noble family. She was one of the composers to introduce the orchestral song to Croatian music.

Biography

Dora Pejačević (in old documents also Pejacsevich) was born in Budapest, a daughter of Croatian ban Teodor Pejačević and Hungarian Countess Lilla Vay de Vaya, herself a fine pianist. Her mother gave her first piano lessons. Paternally, she descended from the old Croatian noble Pejačević family, one of the most distinguished noble families in Slavonia, eastern region of Croatia.

Dora began to compose when she was 12. She studied music privately in Zagreb, Dresden and Munich and received lessons in instrumentation (from Dragutin Kaiser and Walter Courvoisier), composition (from Percy Sherwood) and violin (from Henri Petri in München). She was largely self-taught, however. She married Ottomar von Lumbe in 1921. Although Pejačević led a lonely life, she met many prominent musicians and writers, and befriended Austrian journalist and writer Karl Kraus and Czech aristocrat and patroness of arts Sidonie Nádherná. Dora died in Munich in 1923, a result of complications following a difficult childbirth (of her son Theo), and is buried at the cemetery in Našice, Croatia.