Constantin Regamey

Constantin Regamey (born January 28, 1907 in Kiev ; † December 27, 1982 in Lausanne ) was a Swiss indologist and linguist as well as a self-taught composer .

Regamey came from a family of musicians; his parents ran a music school in Kiev. He was born in 1907 as the son of a father from Vaud and a Russian mother in the Russian Empire and received musical instruction from an early age.

In 1920 he moved to the Polish capital Warsaw , where he studied theory and piano a. a. studied with Józef Turczyński and at the university . For several semesters he did oriental studies in Paris. In 1935 he received his doctorate from the University of Warsaw. A year later he submitted his habilitation in ancient Indian philology and taught as a private lecturer and lecturer until the outbreak of war. From 1937 to 1939 he was the chief editor of the music magazine Muzyka polska . In the course of the German occupation of Poland (from 1939) and the associated closure of the university, he became active in the resistance. After the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he was arrested and taken to the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk. Because of his Swiss passport , he was able to escape to Switzerland.

In 1945 he became a lecturer at the University of Friborg (Switzerland) and the University of Lausanne . In 1946 he received an extraordinary and in 1951 a full professorship for comparative linguistics and in 1960 for oriental languages ​​in Freiburg. From 1949 to 1957 he was associate professor and from 1957 to 1977 full professor for Slavic and Oriental languages ​​and cultures in Lausanne. From 1962 to 1971 he was President of the Swiss Society for Asian Studies.

From 1954 to 1962 he was editor of the Feuilles musicales (together with Pierre Meylan ). After he had been Vice President from 1960, he was President of the Swiss Tonkünstlerverein from 1963 to 1968, where he was also responsible for the Swiss section of the International Society for New Music (IGNM). He was also a member of the presidium of the IGNM. He was already composing autodidactically during the Second World War.

Fonts (selection)

• Buddhist philosophy. Francke, Bern 1950.
• Buddhism of India. Christiana-Verlag, Zurich 1964.

literature

• Heinrich Riggenbach: Regamey, Constantin. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Michael Baumgartner:  Regamey, Constantin. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 13 (Paladilhe - Ribera). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2005, ISBN 3-7618-1133-0  ( online edition , subscription required for full access)

Web links

• Literature by and about Constantin Regamey in the catalog of the German National Library