About Aribert Reimann

Aribert Reimann’s music assimilates an essential artistic constellation in the first modern period, namely the issue of the character of a work and the autonomy of art in view of an externally and internally disjointed society. Art can no longer be of comfort … (Wolfgang Rathert)

Life and Artistic Development

Aribert Reimann was born on 4 March 1936 in Berlin. He grew up in a musical family; his father was an organist and director of the Berlin State and Cathedral Choir, his mother was a renowned oratorio singer and singing teacher. Reimann composed his first lieder with piano at the age of ten.
After having passed his Abitur [higher education entrance examination] in 1955, he worked as repetiteur in the Studio of the State Opera House in Berlin and simultaneously studied composition with Boris Blacher and Ernst Pepping and piano with Otto Rausch at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He gave his first concerts as pianist and lied accompanist in 1957. A year later, he attended the University of Vienna to study musicology. His ballet Stoffreste based on a libretto by Günter Grass received its premiere at the Städtische Bühnen in Essen in 1959.
Music theatre and lieder provided the nucleus for Reimann’s further artistic development. As early as 1971, the composer was awarded the German Critics’ Prize for his complete oeuvre up to that date. From 1974 to 1983, he held a professorship at the Hamburg Musikhochschule with a focus on contemporary song. In 1983, he was appointed to the Berlin Hochschule der Künste in the same capacity; his work there ended in 1998. Aribert Reimann lived in Berlin until his death on 13 March 2024.

Vocal and Instrumental Works

The affinity for the human voice provides a strong impulse for Aribert Reimann’s compositional activity. Over many years, he wrote song arrangements for soprano and string quartet, including “… oder soll es Tod bedeuten?” after Mendelssohn (1996) and Frauenliebe und Leben after Schumann (2019). Alongside lied settings of texts by authors such as Paul Celan, James Joyce, Joseph von Eichendorff and Louïze Labé, the composer has also produced numerous chamber music works, solo concertos and orchestral works such as Miniatures for string quartet (2004/05), the two Piano Concertos (1961 und 1972), Seven Fragments for Orchestra (in memoriam Robert Schumann, 1988) and the orchestral work Zeit-Inseln (2004).

Operas and Music Theatre

Reimann’s operatic output began in 1965 with the first performance of Ein Traumspiel based on a text by August Strindberg in Kiel. This was followed by Melusine, based on the play by Yvan Goll, premiered at the Schwetzingen Festival in 1971. With his opera Lear (1978, Bayerische Staatsoper), Aribert Reimann was able to win over not only specialists and critics but also a wider public for his characteristic personal style: the work has been performed internationally in more than thirty productions.
With its basis on the play by William Shakespeare, the composer created music with an almost physical directness which is at all times aware of its existence on the borderline to being struck dumb. In 1984, Die Gespenstersonate, also on a text by August Strindberg, was premiered in Berlin and, in 1986, Troades based on the play by Euripides in the version by Franz Werfel.
Reimann undertook a further ambitious literary project from 1990 to1992 with his opera Das Schloß based on the novel by Franz Kafka (first performance 1992): the nightmarish and labyrinthine atmosphere of the text is reflected in a chamber musical and fragile texture of the music. The premiere of Bernarda Albas Haus, based on the text by Federico García Lorca, took place at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in 2000.
Considered as one of the leading German-speaking opera composers, Aribert Reimann has received a commission from the Vienna State Opera to compose an opera on Medea based on the play of the same name by Franz Grillparzer which has been awarded "World Première of the Year" by German magazine "Opernwelt". His latest music theatre work, L'Invisible, is based on three dramas by Maurice Maeterlink and was premiered in autmn 2017 at Deutsche Oper Berlin.

Awards and Honors

Aribert Reimann received a large number of honours and awards. Among others, the composer was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1985, the Prix de composition musicale de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 1986, the Bach Prize of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg in 1987, the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin in 1988, the Frankfurt Music Prize in 1991, the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1995, and the Golden Needle of the Dramatiker Union in 1999. In the same year, Reimann was appointed Commandeur de l’Ordre du Mérite Culturel de la Principauté de Monaco. In 2002, he received the Berlin Art Prize for Music and the plaque of the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg, followed by the Arnold Schönberg Prize in 2006, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2011 as well as the German Music Authors’ Prize in the category Opera/Song Composition, and the Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music in 2016.
In 2018, he was awarded the German theatre prize DER FAUST for his lifetime achievement; in 2024, he received the GEMA Music Authors’ Prize, likewise for his lifetime achievement. He was a member of the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, an honorary member of the German Music Council, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Free Academy of Arts in Hamburg and the Saxon Academy of Arts.