by Bortkiewicz himself. The Bortkiewicz Society was dissolved on 6 March 1973. On 26 February 1952 the Bortkiewicz Society along with the Ravag Orchestra celebrated the 75th birthday of the composer at a concert in the Musikverein Hall in Vienna. Bortkiewicz conducted the orchestra with Felicitas Karrer playing the Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 16, the violinist Jaro Schmied played his Des Frühlings und des Pans Erwachen—ein lyrisches Intermezzo nach Gemälden von Sandro Botticelli, Op. 44, and the concert was concluded with his Symphony No. 1, Op. 52, "Aus meiner Heimat", which contains a quotation from "God Save the Tsar" in the finale. This was to be his last great concert and the excitement of the event was illustrated in a letter to van Dalen dated 18 March 1952: Finally I had the opportunity to show, in a large hall with a large orchestra and soloists, what I can do. Not only the critics, but others who know me, were surprised and amazed. [. . .] I can always feel happy to have found so much recognition at the age of 75 years, which really comes in most cases after death to someone who really earned it. [. . .] Bortkiewicz had been suffering for some time from a stomach ailment and, on the advice of his physician, he decided to undergo an operation in October 1952. He never recovered and died in Vienna on 25 October of that year. His wife, Elisabeth, who was childless, died eight years later on 9 March 1960 in Vienna. Bortkiewicz and his wife are buried at the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna. Works Bortkiewicz's piano style was influenced by Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, early Scriabin, Wagner, and Ukrainian folklore. The composer never saw himself as a modernist, as can be seen from his Künstlerisches Glaubensbekenntnis, written in 1923. According to Boris Schwarz: [Bortkiewicz's] craftsmanship was meticulous, his imagination colorful and sensitive, his piano writing idiomatic; a lush instrumentation underlines the essential sentimentality of his melodic invention [...] Bortkiewicz mastered the skills of the past without adding anything distinctly personal or original [...] When van Dalen died in 1967, he bequeathed to his family manuscripts of several Bortkiewicz compositions and an autobiography Erinnerungen (published in German in Musik des Ostens, 1971, pp. 136–69, in Dutch by Hugo van Dalen in De Zevende Dag, July–August 1939, and in English by B. N. Thadani, Recollections, 2nd