He was considered one of the most important contemporary composers. His young musical career was interrupted by the Second World War. After that he searched and found his own way musically.
The Austrian composer and conductor Friedrich Cerha is dead. He died three days before his 97th birthday on Tuesday in Vienna, as his family told the German Press Agency. Cerha was considered one of the most important contemporary composers in the world. The artist created more than 200 orchestral, chamber music and solo works. He became known, among other things, as the composer who completed Alban Berg’s opera “Lulu”.
“I have developed from an outsider to a non-conformist,” Cerha told the Austrian news agency APA on his 80th birthday. Originally he was turned to neoclassicism, twelve-tone composition and serialism. With the orchestral work “Spiegel” he freed himself from such traditions in the early 1960s and created his own world of sound.
“I needed music, how to breathe or how the heart beats,” said Cerha in 2014 in a conversation recorded by the City of Vienna. The son of an electrical engineer began violin lessons at the age of six and created his first compositions while still at school. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 before he could graduate from high school. However, the convinced anti-fascist deserted and then lived underground. After the Second World War he worked as a mountain guide before studying composition, violin and German studies in Vienna.
Instead of recognition, Cerha repeatedly met with rejection at the beginning of his career as a composer, for example for the “Spiegel” cycle. “After the first performances, it was called an intellectual experiment, head music,” he said in a 2013 conversation with his music publisher, Universal Edition. In reality, the work arose from “a basic need for expression” and helped him to free himself from his wartime experiences, he said.
But Cerha didn’t just create his own music. In 1958, together with his wife Gertraud Cerha and composer colleague Kurt Schwertsik, he founded the chamber ensemble Die Reihe, which set itself the task of making modern composers such as Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg known. “Born in 1926, he made us aware of how much New Music needs the democratic spirit as a prerequisite in order to be able to develop,” said Austria’s State Secretary for Culture Andrea Mayer on Tuesday.
Cerha first appeared as an opera composer in 1981, when his work “Baal” premiered at the Salzburg Festival and helped him gain international fame. This was followed by the operas “The Pied Piper” and “The Giant from Steinfeld”, among others.
In 2012, Cerha received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, which is worth 200,000 euros and is considered one of the most important music awards. Despite this and many other honors, the composer with the distinctive mustache always remained modest. “I always felt very comfortable in my place between the chairs,” he said in an interview with ORF. (dpa)