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Friedrich Cerha
Photo: Mirjam Reither / picture alliance / Mirjam Reither / picturedesk.com
The Austrian composer and conductor Friedrich Cerha is dead. He died in Vienna on Tuesday at the age of 96, his family told the dpa news agency.
He was considered one of the most important contemporary composers in the world.
Cerha, who has received numerous awards, wrote more than 200 orchestral, chamber music and solo works.
He is best known as the artist who completed Alban Berg's opera »Lulu«.
Cerha, born in Vienna in 1926, began taking violin lessons at the age of six and created his first compositions while still at school.
He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 before he even graduated from high school.
In Denmark he came into contact with the anti-fascist resistance and deserted.
After an odyssey through Germany and Pomerania, he managed to escape on foot to Tyrol in 1945, where he initially lived as a hut keeper and mountain guide.
In November 1945 he returned to Vienna and from 1946 studied philosophy, musicology and German at the University of Vienna and composition at the Academy of Music.
»Doyen of New Music«
After graduating, Cerha initially worked as a concert violinist and music teacher.
In 1958, together with his wife Gertraud Cerha and fellow composer Kurt Schwertsik, he founded the chamber ensemble »die reihe«, which set itself the task of popularizing modern composers such as Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg.
"Born in 1926, he made us aware of how much New Music needs the democratic spirit as a prerequisite in order to be able to develop," said Austria's State Secretary for Culture, Andrea Mayer, on Tuesday.
With the orchestral cycle »Spiegel«, he created his first major work in the early 1960s.
Due to the lack of performance opportunities in Austria, the cycle only became known ten years after its completion.
He achieved another triumph with his completed version of Berg's »Lulu«.
The complete three-act opera was first performed at the Paris Opéra on February 24, 1979 - more than four decades after the first performance of the fragment left by Berg - and was hailed as one of the greatest musical events of the 1970s.
Parallel to his work as a composer and conductor, Cerha also worked as a university lecturer and taught at the University of Music in Vienna from 1976 to 1988.
The numerous honors bestowed on him include the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his life's work and the Golden Medal of Honor of the City of Vienna.
The »Kurier« paid tribute to Cerha on his death as »the doyen of new music in Austria, who not only supported the music scene in becoming more cosmopolitan and curious«.
hpi/dpa