Aribert Reimann, master German opera composer, has died at the age of 88

“The encounter with Weill’s music, which I had never heard before because it was not allowed to be played in the Third Reich, was absolutely overwhelming for me because a tonal but completely new sound world opened up,” he said in an interview in 2018 .for the annual publication of his former high school.

At the age of 10 he also started composing short works for piano. Shortly afterwards he accompanied his mother’s singing students in concerts.

In 1955, after graduating from high school, he worked at the newly established opera studio of the Städtische Oper Berlin, now the Deutsche Oper, while taking composition and piano lessons at the city’s music conservatory. He also briefly studied musicology at the University of Vienna.

One of his professors at the Berlin Conservatory was the influential German composer Boris Blacher, who advised Mr Reimann to avoid the avant-garde centers of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen – hotbeds of modern music with a reputation for being experimental but dogmatic – and instead to forge his own music. Private road. This distinguished him from older contemporaries, and throughout his long career he remained radically individual, even lonely, as an artist who never belonged to a musical movement or school.

From the age of 20, Mr. Reimann accompanied Mr. Fischer-Dieskau and the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in recitals and wrote music for them. Throughout his career, he remained a sought-after and often recorded accompanist, championing young composers through the creation of the Busoni Composition Prize in 1988 and the Aribert Reimann Foundation, which was established in 2006.

In 1962, his concert piece “Fünf Gedichte von Paul Celan,” or “Five Poems by Paul Celan,” premiered at the Berliner Festwochen, an annual performing arts festival, with Mr. Fischer-Dieskau as soloist. Mr. Reimann had met Mr. Celan, a Jewish-Romanian poet who had survived the Holocaust, in Paris in 1957 and was among the first to set his haunting German-language poems to music. Mr. Reimann returned to Mr. Celan’s poetry in 1971, a year after the writer died by suicide, for “Zyklus,” a setting of six poems in one movement of about 20 minutes.