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During his lifetime, Josef Labor was a pianist and organist recognized throughout Europe and a celebrity of the Viennese music scene. At the age of three, he lost his sight due to smallpox. Up to now, Josef Labor has been little researched in musicology. Labor was not an expressive musician along the lines of late Romanticism, who made his own life into the starting point of his art. Nor was he a musical innovator, nor simply a conservative. The linking principle is classicist aesthetics, setting great store by clear formal structure and balanced proportions. In this adherence to the ideals of Viennese Classicism, he shows himself to be unimpressed by the vehement conflicts of the time between New Germans and supporters of Brahms. During his lifetime and in his generation Labor was an outsider as a composer, a kind of musical solitary, who positioned himself in a very special way, independent of the spirit of the age.
