Aribert Reimann, at 88, German opera composer
Aribert Reimann, whose powerful operas based on works by Willam Shakespeare, franz Kafka, federico García Lorca, and others made him one of the most significant opera composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, died march 13 in berlin. He was 88.
His publisher, Schott music, announced the death.
A prolific composer with widely performed works, particularly his operas and songs, mr. Reimann was revered for his ability to fuse complex and often challenging modern music with lyrical texts. His works were frequently devastating in their emotional impact, sounding like organic expressions of the human voice.
“Like few other composers of his generation, Reimann knew how to tell stories in his operas which directly affected us humans living in the 21st century,” Dietmar Schwarz, manager of the Deutsche Oper berlin, said in a statement.
mr. Reimann enjoyed a close relationship with the opera house. five of his stage works were performed there, most recently his ninth and final completed opera, “L’Invisible,” which was based on texts by the belgian Symbolist maurice maeterlinck and premiered in 2017.
Another stage work, based on Oscar Wilde’s “the picture of Dorian Gray,” was planned for 2025 but was unfinished.
mr. Reimann used serial-music principles, though not rigidly; his catalog of more than 130 compositions included many pieces free of traditional beat and meter. the result was a musical language that sounded at once brazenly contemporary, archaic, and timeless — a powerful conduit for drama and extreme emotions.
He also wrote a requiem in 1982, several concertos, and assorted chamber music, but only one symphony. He taught as a professor of contemporary lieder, or German art song, at the Hochschule für musik in Hamburg and the Hochschule der Künste, now the Universität der Künste, or University of the Arts, in berlin.
His best-known opera, “Lear,” based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, debuted in 1978 in munich at the bayerische Staatsoper, or bavarian State Opera; three years later, it premiered in the United States, in San francisco. Since then there have been more than 30 productions of the work, despite it being less than 50 years old.
the thunderous title role, which mr. Reimann wrote for German baritone Dietrich fischer-Dieskau, a frequent collaborator, is noted for its musical difficulty. Its climax is the shattering aria “Weint! Weint! Weint! Weint!” (“Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl!”), a cantorial threnody mourning Lear’s daughter Cordelia. Contemporary singers, including Gerald finley and Christian Gerhaher, have been drawn to the role for its musical and expressive challenges.
Aribert Reimann was born into a musical family in berlin on march 4, 1936, when the nazis held power. His father, Wolfgang Reimann, was an organist and director of the berlin State and Cathedral Choir. His mother, Irmgard Rühle, was an alto and singing teacher. A brother five years his senior was killed in an Allied bombing raid in march 1944.
“After the war, we spent four months on the road as refugees, pushing our belongings in a cart, like mother Courage,” mr. Reimann said in a 2021 interview for Deutsche Oper berlin. “I was 9. the only thing we had to survive on was a box of Knorr stock cubes.”
After the war, mr. Reimann grew up in the Zehlendorf section of what was then West berlin. At 10, he had a formative experience that would set him on the path to composing, singing a primary role in a production of Kurt Weill and bertolt brecht’s opera “Der Jasager.”
“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 it opened up a tonal but completely new sound world,” mr. Reimann said in a 2018 interview for his former secondary school’s annual publication.
He also began composing short works for piano at 10. Shortly after, he accompanied his mother’s vocal students at concerts.
In 1955, after graduating from high school, he worked at the newly founded opera studio of the Städtische Oper berlin, now the Deutsche Oper, while taking composition and piano classes at the city’s music conservatory. He also briefly studied musicology at the University of Vienna.
mr. Reimann, who was gay, was not married at his death and had no children. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.