This avant-garde conductor and composer, constantly in search of new musical paths, had developed his work since the post-war period, but his recognition would only come a few decades later.
Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, who revived musical creation in Austria after the war, died on Tuesday February 15 at the age of 96, his family announced to the APA press agency.
Born in Vienna on February 17, 1926, this teacher quickly developed his own style, inspired by serialism, this invariable succession of sounds, then by impressionism, which consists of the pictorial use of sounds. In the early 1960s he wrote a large orchestral cycle, Spiegel, becoming an avant-garde figure constantly in search of new musical paths. With a well-identified figure: shoulder-length hair, square glasses and a smirk.
Brilliant and innovative
But he will have to wait almost twenty years to achieve international success with his opera. Baalafter Bertolt Brecht, whose premiere took place at the Salzburg Festival in 1981. He also incorporated sounds from non-European music, thus watering his compositions at the Vienna Opera, the Venice Biennale, where it will be honored with a Golden Lion in 2006, and prestigious European cinemas until 2016.
Saying dial”as he breathes“, he found inspiration at dawn, “when no longer sleeping soundly but not yet awake“, as he will say in one of his last interviews granted to the daily Kurier. Father of a range of varied scores, we also owe him the orchestration of the missing parts of the third act of Luluby Alban Berg, presented in Paris by Pierre Boulez in 1979.
long misunderstood
Also a conductor, he participated in the late 1950s in the creation of an ensemble, Die Reihe, offering musicians from his country to play something other than the usual repertoire. Atheist in a conservative and Catholic country which considers itself the temple of classical music, a deserter in 1944 not to serve the Nazi regime, he was not always understood until the 1970s and suffered from being called a “destroyer of Austrian traditional music“.
On February 14, Austrian State Secretary for Culture, environmentalist Andrea Mayer, praised “a journey and a work“illustrating”in a bright and obvious way” her “personal courage“to give music a”new start” after the Second World War. “Thanks to him, we realized how much new music needed a democratic spirit as a condition for it to flourish.“, she added in reference to the difficult Austrian memory work.