The most prolific East German composer on both sides of the Iron Curtain died in Berlin on December 28, at the age of 90.
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German composer Paul-Heinz Dittrich died in Berlin on December 28 at the age of 90. Very prolific (126 works are referenced in the catalog established by the Swiss musicologist Daniela Reinhold), he has designed scores with always unusual numbers without neglecting the electronic medium (approached in the studios of the SWR in Friborg-en-Brisgau, but also , at IRCAM by Pierre Boulez, during a residency in Paris, in 1984).
A time affiliated with the current of New Complexity – whose spearhead was the British Brian Ferneyhough, this radical musician (within the limits authorized by the censorship of his new homeland, the GDR) has long sought, in his own words, to “push performers to the limits of their possibilities”, before considering forms of expression more accessible.
Almost as little played today as his younger brothers Georg Katzer (1935-2019) and Friedrich Goldmann (1941-2009), Paul-Heinz Dittrich is undoubtedly the only composer of the ‘ex-GDR to have imposed itself abroad before (by creations on the poster of p the main avant-garde festivals in France and Germany) and after (through repeated invitations to teach in many countries) the fall of the Wall. His participation in the Requiem for Reconciliation (writing of the Dies Irae), created in Stuttgart in 1995, with the assistance of such prestigious composers as the Italian Luciano Berio (1925-2003) and the Hungarian György Kurtag, testifies to the international consideration of which he benefited.
Teacher and choir director
Paul-Heinz Dittrich was born in Gornsdorf, Germany, on December 4, 1930. Music, which he played as a family, offers a first teaching job, from 1948 to 1950, in the small village of Saxony which he has not left since his birth. In 1951, he went to Leipzig (Saxony) to study composition with Fidelio F. Finke (1891-1968) at university and choral conducting with Günther Ramin (1898-1956).
In 1956, with his composition diploma in hand, he went into practice as the conductor of a choral group of popular essence, for two years in Weimar. In 1958, he continued his training at the Berlin Academy of the Arts with Rudolf Wagner-Regény (1903-1969), a Hungarian-born composer open to new trends. In Berlin, Dittrich resumed in 1960 his activity as choir director, this time with two professional training: the Ernst Moritz Arndt ensemble (from 1962 to 1965) and the Berlin Chamber Choir (in 1967-1968).
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