During the First World War Pejačević reached creative maturity and composed on an intensive basis. Between 1913, when she wrote her G Minor Piano Concerto, op. 33 (the first Croatian work in this genre), and 1918 she produced several of her largest and most significant works, including the B Minor Piano Quintet, op. 40, the Symphony in F Sharp Minor, op. 41 and the Second Sonata in B Flat Minor for violin and piano op. 43 (Slavic Sonata). In this period several highly regarded performances of her works were arranged in Croatia: the Piano Concerto was given at the so called historic concert in the Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb, along with compositions by Franjo Dugan the Elder, Božidar Širola, Antun Dobronić, Krešimir Baranović and Svetislav Stančić, heralding the advent of a new generation of Croatian composers. A recital of her chamber music in the Croatian Society of Music drew together the very best of the country’s performers, including Svetislav Stančić, Zlatko Baloković, Václav Huml and Juro Tkalčić.
Pajačević’s successes abroad culminated on 25 January 1918 when the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra performed two movements from her Symphony under the baton of Oskar Nedbal. The complete Symphony, in its revised version, was not given until two years later, when it was premièred in Dresden on 10 February 1920. During this entire period Pejačević made many journeys that took her to Vienna, Munich, Budapest, Prague and other musical capitals. After each of these journeys she invariably returned to Našice to find peace and concentration in the comfort of her family palace.
Beginning in autumn 1921, when she married the Austrian officer Ottomar von Lumbe, Pejačević lived in Dresden and Munich, where she died of kidney failure on 5 March 1923 following the birth of her first child. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried outside the family vault in Našice.
Pejačević’s unusual career and personal charisma should by no means divert our attention from her oeuvre. Like the music of her male contemporaries (e.g. Blagoje Bersa and Josip Hatze), her works represent the Croatian Modern in music, along with the analogous literary movement and the Secession in the visual arts. In their best pages her scores bear witness to a distinctive artistic personality that constantly sought new veins of expression, gradually parting company with earlier romantic forebears and drawing room mannerisms and attaining the authentic core of an independent musical idiom.
Although Pejačević lived in an era of radical musical upheavals, she remained fundamentally attached to tradition and never abandoned tonality, though she did not shun harmonic audacities in her mature years. She therefore belongs to that circle of fin-de-siècle composers who added new expressive nuances to European music while never severing connections with her venerable heritage.

Koraljka Kos (c) Croatian Music Information Centre

Citiranje: Kos, Koraljka, „Dora Pejačević“. Introduction to the sheet music: Dora Pejačević. Trio u C-duru za violinu, violončelo i glasovir op. 29, Croatian Music Information Centre, Zagreb 2018, str. VIII-IX.