Mátyás Seiber - Elegy for viola and small orchestra (1954)

Mátyás György Seiber (sometimes given as Matthis Seyber; 4 May 1905 – 24 September 1960) was a Hungarian-born British composer who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1935 onwards. His work linked many diverse musical influences, from the Hungarian tradition of Bartók and Kodály, to Schoenberg and serial music, to jazz, folk song, and lighter music.

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Cecil Aronowitz, viola and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mátyás Seiber

Seiber's music is eclectic in style, showing the influences of Bartók, Kodály, Schoenberg, serialism, jazz, and Hungarian folk song, and his output includes film and lighter music. Often, individual pieces use a combination of these influences. For instance, the two Jazzolettes for wind and percussion (1929 and 1932, composed in Frankfurt) make liberal use of jazz effects and rhythms that displace the bar lines, but also show his first explorations of twelve-note techniques. His wartime, Fantasia concertante for violin and orchestra, premiered in 1945 and recorded by Andre Gertler, and the later work Permutationi a Cinque (1948) for wind ensemble, illustrate Seiber's very free use of serialism. Permutationi a Cinque explicitly uses permutations of motifs that eventually come together to reveal a twelve-tone series - but it is all done with lightness and humour.

Seiber's vocal output includes the large-scale cantata Ulysses (1947) on words by James Joyce, another Joyce-related work, Three Fragments from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", and choral arrangements of Hungarian and Yugoslav folk songs. He also wrote one opera, Eva spielt mit Puppen (1934), and the ballet The Invitation. Other works include the two orchestral Besardo suites, a clarinet concertino, three string quartets, and scores to animated films produced by Halas & Batchelor, including Animal Farm (1954). The substantial Sonata for violin and piano, a commission for the Cheltenham Festival, was completed just before his death in 1960.

Two comic operas, A Palágyi Pekek and Balaton, were composed for the Hungarian theatre in London, the "Londoni Pódium". A Palágyi Pékek, (libretto, György Mikes) (1943), was the first collaboration of Mátyás Seiber and George Mikes. Balaton, (libretto, György Mikes) (1944), as George Mikes has reported, was aired during the war by the BBC and, after the end of the war even made it to Budapest. A setting of the Scottish "poet and tragedian" William McGonagall's work, The Famous Tay Whale was written for the second of Gerard Hoffnung's music festivals in 1958.

Seiber used a pseudonym for his jazz works and popular music: G. S. Mathis or George Mathis (a rearrangement of his name using Anglicised forms). In 1957 he was awarded the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for "By the Fountains of Rome," which was a hit that year in the UK Single Charts, making it to the Top Twenty. (The lyrics were by Norman Newell, and it was sung by David Hughes).