Hans Zender

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Hans Zender (born November 22, 1936 in Wiesbaden ; † October 23, 2019 in Meersburg ) was a German conductor and composer .

Life

Hans Zender completed master classes in composition, piano and conducting at the music academies in Frankfurt and Freiburg . While still a student he worked as Kapellmeister at the Städtische Bühnen Freiburg and at the age of 27 he became chief conductor of the Bonn Opera (1964–1968).

From 1969 to 1972 he was general music director in Kiel, from 1971 to 1984 chief conductor of the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra and from 1984 to 1987 general music director of the Hamburg State Opera and from 1984 to 1986 general music director of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra . Afterwards he was chief conductor of the Radio Kamer Orkest of the Dutch Radio (today Radio Kamer Filharmonie ) and first guest conductor of the Opéra National, Brussels , and from 1999 to 2010 permanent guest conductor of the SWR symphony orchestras Baden-Baden and Freiburg .

From 1988 to 2000 Zender was Professor of Composition at the Frankfurt Music Academy .

In 2004, the Zender couple founded the "Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation". In cooperation with the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts , Musica Viva Munich and BR-Klassik des Bayerischen Rundfunks, it has been awarding prizes every two years since 2011, which are intended to promote and support new music.

In 2005/06 he was composer-in-residence of the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He was a member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg , the Academy of the Arts in Berlin and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Zender died in October 2019 at the age of 82 at his home in Meersburg on Lake Constance.

Act

conductor

Zender's decades of international conducting activity are characterized by daring and the breadth of the repertoire. His discography ranges from Bach to Lachenmann , Mozart to Feldman, Bruckner to Yun , Riehm to Rihm . He loved Schubert, Mendelssohn and Debussy, was committed to Messiaen, Nono , Varèse and Bernd Alois Zimmermann , but did not lose sight of Reger and Hindemith; he was committed to the " New York School " and was a pioneer of Giacinto Scelsi's music . Zender sympathized with composers of musical “architecture” as well as with non-constructivists. Zender has made guest appearances at festivals in Berlin and Vienna, conducted “Parsifal” at the Bayreuth Festival and Dallapiccola's “Ulisse” at the Salzburg Festival.

composer

Hans Zender's compositional activity is on the one hand inconceivable without the insights of the interpreter Zender, on the other hand it is very independent. In the early 1960s he initially used avant-garde, i.e. twelve-tone and serial methods, which he combined with principles of medieval isorhythmy in his Drei Rondels after Mallarmé (1961) and the Three Songs based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff (1964). Soon scores emerged which indicated variable and open forms in the title ( Schachspiel , 1969; Modelle , 1971–1973).

At the beginning of the 1970s, Zender reached number V with his Cantos - a series of works that still runs through his work today (logos fragments = Canto IX). Thinking in creative cycles is typical for Zender: other of his series of works are called - in the upper or lower title - Hölderlin read (five compositions), calligraphies (also five) or Lo-Shu (seven). The last-mentioned cycle belongs to the group of the composer's abbreviated and not without self-irony so-called “Japanese” pieces. Zender had come into contact with Far Eastern thinking on guest tours, a sense of time stemming from Zen Buddhism, which, transferred to music, renounced the Western traditions of strict work logic in favor of independent, non-linear "momentary forms" and the greater inclusion of contemplative stretches suggests - but without concessions to an Asian folklorism.

The dialectic of strict formal awareness and a “musique informelle” is a constant in Zender's musical thinking. He thought carefully about the meaning and purpose of art, especially about how you can still compose today without repeating yourself (or others). Today, that is, in a time after postmodernism, when mottos such as “anything goes” brought as much freedom as they caused harm. Uniform time styles or aesthetics seem suspended with such irrevocability that Zender comes to the conclusion that art practitioners must redefine themselves more radically and thoroughly than ever before.

New harmony theory, literature, music theater

His personal redefinition includes the design of a microtonal "counter-striving harmony", a kind of harmony theory that divides the octave not into twelve, but into 72 small intervals. The resulting subtle, harmonious colourfulness also characterizes his large-scale, cantata-like “Opera magna”: the setting of the Old Testament Song of Songs ( Shir Hashirim ; 1995–1997) and the Logos Fragments (2006–2009), a spatial sound music interpreting biblical and Gnostic texts “ Archeology of Consciousness ”.

Zender drew numerous suggestions from the "sister arts" and philosophy. He has dealt compositionally with texts by Joyce, Pound, Hölderlin, Meister Eckhart, Luther, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Michaux, Juan de la Cruz, TS Eliot, Hugo Ball, Japanese poets such as Ikkyū and Bashō and repeatedly the Bible, and appealed to him on philosophical thoughts from Heraclitus to Derrida, Plato to Picht.

His intellectual liveliness made him a particularly history-conscious artist who, like Bernd Alois Zimmermann, pushed for pluralistic, multi-dimensional concepts. His three works for music theater offer complex interconnections of spaces, times and theatrical actions: Stephen Climax (1979/84) simultaneously brings the biblical columnar saints Simeon and Stephen Daedalus from Joyce's “Ulysses” onto the stage and crosses musical history with allusions; Don Quixote de la Mancha (1989/81) arranges “31 theatrical adventures” according to Cervantes in a kind of ingenious modular system, and the “Indian Opera” Chief Joseph (2005) is a parable on the inability of Western civilizations to accept the foreign.

Music education: “composed interpretation” and essay writing

Zender has virtually invented a genre: the “composed interpretation”, the instrumental-intellectual transformation and reinterpretation of important music from the past. Schubert's “Winterreise” (1993), Schumann-Phantasie (1997) and 33 Changes over 33 Changes (2011) combine declarations of love for the original with dialectical “thinking ahead” into the modern age: historical distances are canceled and at the same time made clear, contours sharpened and veiled, forms deconstructed and recreated. These creative changes are able to emphatically point to the once unsettling effect of the originals and thus to the danger lurking in today's "music business" of playing down great music and degrading it to a luxury item.

The essayist Hans Zender devoted himself to music exegetical and philosophical questions, whereby his rhetoric became more acute when he tackled the malaises and misery of the art business and politics or the most depressing expressions of the global entertainment delirium. An extensive collection of his texts was published in 2004 under the title The Thinking Senses ; Another collection of essays, Waches Hören , was published in 2014.

Awards

Works

  • Canto I – VI for various instrumentations
    • I: for choir, flute, piano, strings and percussion (1965)
    • II: for soprano, choir and orchestra based on Canto XXXIX by Ezra Pound (1967)
    • III (The Man of La Mancha): for soprano, tenor, baritone, 10 instruments and live electronics based on texts by Cervantes (1968)
    • IV: 4 aspects for 16 voices and 16 instruments. Texts: Old and New Testament, Thomas Müntzer, Martin Luther, Teilhard de Chardin (1969/1972)
    • V (continuum and fragments) after Heraklit: for voices with percussion instruments ad lib. (1972/1974)
    • VI: for bass baritone, mixed a cappella choir and tape ad lib. Text: Psalm 22 and 23 in Hebrew (1988)
  • Chess game for two orchestral groups (1969)
  • Models for variable cast (1971–1973)
  • Streams of Time for Orchestra (1974)
  • Elements , tape assembly for two loudspeaker groups (1976)
  • Hölderlin read I for string quartet with speaking voice (1979)
  • Hölderlin read II for speaking voice, viola and live electronics (1987)
  • "Denn wiederkommen" (Hölderlin read III) for string quartet and speaking voice (1991)
  • Mnemosyne (Hölderlin read IV) for female voice, two violins, viola, cello and tape (2000)
  • Five Haiku (LO-SHU IV) for flute and strings (1982)
  • Dialogue with Haydn for two pianos and three orchestral groups (1982)
  • Stephen Climax , opera (1979–1984, world premiere 1986)
  • Don Quixote de la Mancha , opera (1989–1991, first performance 1993; new version 1994, first performance 1999)
  • Schubert's Winterreise - A composed interpretation for tenor and small orchestra (1993)
  • Shir Hashirim - Lied der Lieder (Canto VIII) , oratorio for solos, choir, orchestra and live electronics (1992/1996, overall world premiere in 1998)
  • Schumann Fantasy for large orchestra (1997)
  • Calligraphy I for orchestra (1998)
  • BARDO for cello with round arch and orchestra (2000)
  • Chief Joseph . Musical theater in three acts (first performance 2005)
  • Logos-Fragments for 32 singers and three orchestral groups (2007)
  • Adonde? Where? for violin, soprano and ensemble, based on texts by Juan de la Cruz (WP: September 12, 2009)
  • Issei no kyo - Singing from one note , with piccolo (2011)
  • 33 changes about 33 changes , about Beethoven's Diabelli Variations (2011), dedicated to Alfred Brendel and the Ensemble Modern

Fonts

  • Jörn Peter Hiekel (Ed.): Hans Zender. Think the senses. Texts to the music 1975-2003. Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-7651-0364-0 . (Almost a complete edition of Zender's texts)
  • Happy New Ears. The adventure of listening to music. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1991, ISBN 3-451-04049-2 .
  • We never step in the same river. How listening to music is changing. 2nd Edition. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, ISBN 3-451-04511-7 .
  • Wake up listening. About music. Hanser, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24613-3 .
  • Hear thinking - hear think. Music as a basic experience of life. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-495-48863-8 .

Interviews

  • For me, music is a very strongly musical word - Hans Zender on his ways of composing, the "Cantos" and the "Logos Fragments". An interview by Dietrich Heißenbüttel. In: New magazine for music. No. 5, 2013, pp. 8-11.

literature

  • Wilfried Gruhn: Looking for lost warmth? For Hans Zender's composed interpretation of Schubert's “Winterreise”. In: Musica. Vol. 48, 1994, pp. 148-154.
  • Wilfried Gruhn: Hans Zender. In: Hanns-Werner Heister , Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer (ed.): Contemporary composers. Loose-leaf dictionary. Munich 1992, 32nd subsequent delivery November 2006.
  • Wilfried Gruhn: Music about music. Communication aspects of the string quartet "Read Hölderlin" by Hans Zender. In: Music and Education. Vol. 17, 1985, pp. 598-605.
  • Volker Wacker: Hans Zender's opera "Stephen Climax". Considerations and aspects. In: Constantin Floros , Hans Joachim Marx , Peter Petersen (eds.): Music theater in the 20th century. (= Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 10). Laaber 1998, pp. 239-258.
  • Werner Grünzweig , Jörn Peter Hiekel , Anouk Jeschke (eds.): Hans Zender. Polyphonic in itself. (= Archives for the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, Volume 12). Wolke, Hofheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-936000-25-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Academy of the Arts mourns Hans Zender October 25, 2019
  2. ↑ State Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra mourn Hans Zender. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , October 26, 2019, p. 25. Author abbreviation HA.
  3. ↑ Awarding of the Happy New Ears Prize for Composition 2015 , PDF from the BADSK website
  4. ↑ Hans Zender died , SR, October 23, 2019
  5. ↑ Villa Massimo | Scholarships. Retrieved August 22, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Breitkopf & Härtel ( Memento of the original from December 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.breitkopf.com
  7. ↑ How to outbid Beethoven. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . November 14, 2011, p. 27.
personal data
SURNAME Zender, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German conductor and composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH 23 October 2019
Place of death Meersburg