Wolfgang Fortner: 100th Anniversary of birth

12 October 2007 marks the 100th birthday of Wolfgang Fortner, a composer whose comprehensive oeuvre includes operas, ballets, orchestral, chamber and vocal music, and who, as a teacher, influenced a whole generation of composers. Among his students were Hans Werner Henze, Rudolf Kelterborn, Arghyris Kounadis, Robert HP Platz, Manfred Stahnke, Wilfried Steinbrenner, Nam June Paik, and Hans Zender.

After studying composition and organ at the Leipzig Conservatoire and musicology, philosophy and German studies at the University of Leipzig, Fortner was appointed lecturer at the Evangelisches Kirchenmusikalisches Institut in Heidelberg where he taught until 1954. Other important stations of his extensive teaching activities was the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music, over which Fortner had considerable influence until the late fifties, the Detmold Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie where he taught until 1957, and above all the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg/Breisgau where Fortner worked until 1973. On his initiative, the Hochschule set up the Institute for New Music in 1964. In the same year, Fortner succeeded Karl Amadeus Hartmann in becoming director of the important musica viva concerts in Munich, and together with Ernst Thomas ran the series until 1978.

As early as 1929, whilst still a student, Fortner concluded a contract for Die vier Marianischen Antiphonen which marked the beginning of his professional relationship with Schott. His opera Bluthochzeit after Federico García Lorca (world première in Cologne in 1957) became one of the most successful operas in German after 1945.

Fortner's development as a composer ranges from the beginnings of neoclassicism via the application of serial techniques, the incorporation of structures of the medieval isorhythmical motet (Machaut-Balladen, 1973), jazz elements (e.g. in Mouvements, 1953) or orchestral improvisations (In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplín Belisa, Elisabeth Tudor) to his last opera That Time after Samuel Beckett (world première in Baden-Baden in 1977) in which he used live electronics.

Wolfgang Fortner died in Heidelberg on 5 September 1987.

 Wolfgang Fortner - biography, works, information