Wolfgang Pasquay

Wolfgang Pasquay (born February 10, 1931 in Cottbus ; † April 8, 2006 in Solingen ) was a German pianist , composer and music teacher .

youth

Pasquay received piano lessons as a child. From 1941 he attended the "Musische Gymnasium" in Frankfurt am Main , where he studied piano with August Leopolder and conducting and composition with Kurt Thomas . At the age of 13 he was awarded the Halle Youth Prize for Composition in 1944 for his piano variations on a theme by Hugo Distler . At the age of 14, he first appeared publicly as a pianist in Stuttgart in 1945.

pianist

In the following three decades, Pasquay devoted himself mainly to his pianist career. In 1950 he formed a piano trio with Berthold Ende (violin) and Hans Hendler (violoncello) in Düsseldorf , which performed the entire repertoire for this line-up in the years that followed. Numerous solo appearances followed throughout Europe, including in Berlin, London, Vienna and Paris. Pasquay's concert repertoire included the piano concertos by Mozart , Beethoven , Brahms , Chopin , Schumann , Grieg , Tchaikovsky , Rachmaninov , Stravinsky and Bartók as well as works by Bach , Schubert , Debussy , Franck , Mussorgsky and other composers.

Resident in Solingen since 1954 , where he taught piano, he married the cellist Liselotte Hauptner in 1955, with whom he had three children: Andreas (* 1955), Karola (* 1957) and Friederike (* 1962).

composer

Since the 1980s, Pasquay turned more to the compositional work. Works for orchestral instrumentation, chamber music works and, in particular, at the suggestion of his wife, numerous works for several cellos, especially 33 canons and concert canons and the "figurine suite" were created. This genre of art, invented by Pasquay, is a full-length work for at least 20 cellists who slip into musical masks - figurines - and present their musical thoughts in costumes and translate them into pantomime.

Pasquay's main work is the "Peace Sensoratorium". In this multi-movement work for choir and orchestra, the convinced pacifist Wolfgang Pasquay combined quotations from Erasmus von Rotterdam's "Peace Writings" and excerpts from poems by Bertolt Brecht to form an impressive appeal for peace. Between 1988 and 2003 he himself directed numerous performances of the work, including in Düsseldorf, Bonn and Dresden.

Sound carrier

• Wolfgang Pasquay (piano): Aspects of Romanticism. Piano music by Franck, Saint-Saëns, Schumann, Chopin and Tchaikovsky. (1986) con brio (LP)
• Wolfgang Pasquay: Peace Sensoratory. Erasmus Choir and Orchestra Rhineland (2003) Kreuzberg Records kr 10086 (CD, recording of a concert in Altenberg Cathedral on November 25, 2001)

Works

• Serenade for flute and two cellos (1982)
• Figurine Suite for Violoncello Ensemble (1987)
• Andante quasi una Fantasia for flute and two cellos (1990)
• Concerto for string orchestra (1994)
• Trio in Memoria di un amico for string trio (2000)
• The world of canons (canons for variable cello instrumentation, created from 1982, published 2003)
• Peace Sensoratory. Oratorio against the war based on the words of Erasmus von Rotterdam and Bertolt Brecht (written since 1988, initially under the title "Erasmus Oratorio"; complete version 2003)

Web links

• Works by and about Wolfgang Pasquay in the catalog of the German National Library