The image of Hans Pfitzer, unlike that of his fellow composers Mahler, Strauss or Schoenberg, still is under a veneer of myth-making: Benevolent biographers stylized him as a national fighter, the last romantic or the other-worldly loner while critics generalized individual negative traits and regarded him as a querulous person and misanthropist, a reactionary and conservative. In fact, his thinking and music-making were rooted in the 19th century, and it is only today that the independence and ...