At 96 years old
Composer and conductor Friedrich Cerha died
The composer Friedrich Cerha died at the age of 96. photo
© Herbert Neubauer/APA/dpa
He was considered one of the most important contemporary composers in the world. Musically he was looking for his own way.
The Austrian composer and conductor Friedrich Cerha is dead. He died in Vienna on Tuesday at the age of 96, as his family told the German Press 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”. Berg himself died before completion.
Musically, Cerha was close to the so-called Viennese school, which von Berg also represented, but also sought other musical paths. At the beginning of his career, the composer turned to neoclassicism, twelve-tone composition and serialism. With the orchestra cycle “Spiegel” he freed himself from such traditions in the early 1960s and created his own world of sound.