German Composer Aribert Reimann has Died, Aged 88

A distinguished composer of the post-war generation, Reimann wrote over 70 works and was well-known for his operas 

Aribert Reimann was born in 1936 in Berlin. His mother was a singer and his father served as a professor of church music and director of the Berlin Domchor cathedral choir. 

Growing up in a musical home, Reimann’s future in music was set from an early age. While accompanying his mother’s singing students, he made the acquaintance of pianist Michael Raucheisen, who mentored him for a time. 

Later on, Reimann studied counterpoint with Ernst Pepping and composition with Boris Blacher, who encouraged him to create his own compositional style. 

Mastering serial and twelve-tone techniques, Reimann used micropolyphony and the formation of clusters as compositional mediums, and would constantly search for freedom and possibilities in meter and notation.

Though not a political composer, his works addressed occurrences of the time — his Requiem Wolkenloses Christfest was written in 1974 during the war in Vietnam. Additionally, he was one of the first composers to create music for settings of texts by the post-WWII poet Paul Celan, whom he had encountered in Paris in 1957. 

That same year, he gave his first concerts as a pianist and lied accompanist, and in 1958, he attended the University of Vienna to study musicology.

In 1978, Reimann made his breakthrough with his opera Lear, based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. The GRAMMY Award-winning baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau had inspired the work and sang the title role at its world premiere in Munich. Often performed today, Lear’s success at the time saw it staged internationally.

Reimann’s other operas included those centered around key female protagonists, such as those in Melusine (1970), Troades (1985), Bernarda Albas Haus (1998/2000), and Medea (2007/09). 

Also collaborating with singers Elisabeth Grümmer and Brigitte Fassbaender, he made numerous recordings as a lied pianist.

Published exclusively by Schott Music since 1960, Reimann’s compositions include solo works for cello, clarinet, and, oboe; chamber music; two Piano Concertos (1961, 1972); and his Violin Concerto for Gidon Kremer (1995/96). Among others, his large-scale orchestral music includes his Variationen für Orchester (1975), and Zeit-Inseln (2004). 

His works inspired many younger composer colleagues over the years, as Wolfgang Rihm expressed on Reimann’s 80th birthday in Berlin’s Deutsche Oper. Reimann also taught for several years at the Hamburg Music Academy and the Berlin University of the Arts.

Among his accolades include the 2011 Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Prize and the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1988, he founded the Busoni Composition Prize to promote young composers.

“It is with great respect that we bid farewell to a great artist whose empathetic sense of humanity will continue to live on in his works,” Schott Music wrote in a tribute. 

Our condolences to Mr. Reimann’s family, friends, students, and colleagues.