Alexander Goehr

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Alexander Goehr
Colour photograph of a clean-shaven, smiling, white-haired man, resting his chin on his hand, with book shelves in the background
Goehr in 2007
Born
Peter Alexander Goehr

(1932-08-10)10 August 1932
Berlin, Germany
Died26 August 2024(2024-08-26) (aged 92)
Cambridgeshire, England
EducationRoyal Northern College of Music
Occupations
  • Composer
  • academic teacher
OrganizationsUniversity of Cambridge
WorksList of compositions
Children4, including Lydia Goehr
ParentWalter Goehr

Peter Alexander Goehr (German: ['ɡøːɐ̯]; 10 August 1932 – 26 August 2024) was a German-born English composer of contemporary classical music and academic teacher. A long-time professor of music at the University of Cambridge, Goehr influenced many notable contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Robin Holloway.

Born in Berlin, Goehr grew up in London surrounded by musicians, including his father, the conductor Walter Goehr. Goehr emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers, including Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, in his early twenties. He joined Olivier Messiaen's masterclass in Paris in 1955. Back in England and working for the BBC, he experienced an international breakthrough in 1957 with his cantata The Deluge in 1957, conducted by his father Walter Goehr. He composed Little Symphony in 1963 as a memorial to his father, arriving at a serialism that allowed expressive freedom. He combined avant-garde techniques with elements from music history in works of many genres including the Piano Trio (1966), his first opera, Arden Must Die (1966), the music-theatre piece Triptych (1968–1970), the orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance (1974), and the String Quartet No. 3 (1975). He founded the Music Theatre Ensemble in 1967.

Goehr first lectured in the United States, at the

Southampton University from 1970. He was professor of music at the University of Leeds from 1971 and at Cambridge University from 1976 to 1999. Goehr returned to a more traditional way of composing with Psalm IV in 1976. He wrote the opera Arianna in 1995, setting the libretto of Monteverdi's lost opera
. He focused on chamber music in later years.

Life and career

Youth and studies

Peter Alexander Goehr

Messiaen and Monteverdi. The family moved to Britain a few months after the boy was born.[3][7] His father became an influential conductor in London, leading the world premiere of Tippett's A Child of Our Time.[5] The boy attended Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, where he was known as "an anti-establishment political activist, flirting with the Communist Party".[4] He received lessons from a composer colleague of his father, Allan Gray.[8] Although these premises pointed to Goehr's future in music, his efforts as a composer were not encouraged by his father.[4][5]

Goehr worked for the music publisher Schott after leaving school. A girl he met on the train to work recruited him for a left-wing Zionist party, and he spent two years in a training kibbutz in Essex. He was then sent to Manchester for political work, where he wrote his first piece, described as "a sort of Zionist pageant with songs".[4]

Goehr studied composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1952 to 1955, with Richard Hall.[6] He became friends there with Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, trumpeter Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon.[5] He influenced Davies, a clarinetist, and Birtwhistle who studied to teach, to focus on composition.[4] As students, the five founded the New Music Manchester Group,[2][3][4] which performed works by its members and also introduced compositions of the European avant-garde.[5] In 2024, Andrew Davies described the group as a "distinctive, progressive force in what was the generally parochial and conservative world of British music in the early 1950s".[5]

A seminal event in Goehr's development was hearing the UK premiere of Messiaen's

Prokofiev.[6] The piano sonata in one movement was played at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1954 by Hedi Stock-Hug.[9]

In 1955, Goehr left Manchester to go to Paris and study with Messiaen

twelve-tone works by Anton Webern
, forbidding references to any other music:

Choice, taste and style were dirty words; personal style, one could argue, is necessarily a product of repetition, and the removal of repetition is, or was believed to be, a cornerstone of classical serialism as defined by Webern's late works ... All this may well be seen as a kind of negative style precept: a conscious elimination of sensuous, dramatic or expressive elements, indeed of everything that in the popular view constitutes music.[11]

Return to the UK, 1956–1976

For Goehr's notable students, see List of music students by teacher: G to J § Alexander Goehr.

Upon his return to Britain, Goehr experienced an international breakthrough as a composer with the performance of his cantata The Deluge in 1957, conducted by his father.[4] The work was inspired by writings of Sergei Eisenstein. While the music could be seen as derived from Webern's twelve-tone cantatas, it strives for the harmonic tautness and sonority of Prokofiev's cantatas based on Eisenstein. It was regarded "to have more harmonic coherence and considerably more dramatic impact than most serial music of the time", as his obituary in The Telegraph noted.[4]

Goehr worked for the

Leeds Festival
. Goehr listened to criticism and described his position:

If one wishes, one can just say that music has to be autonomous and self sufficient; but how to sustain such a view when people who sing for pleasure are deprived of true satisfaction in the performance of new work? ... We can talk about music in terms of the ideas that inform it; we can talk about structure and techniques; we can talk about aesthetics or ethics or politics. But we have to remember that while all this, realistic or not, is of great importance to composers and to anyone who likes to follow what composers are doing, what is being discussed is not the music itself but the location of the music, the place where it exists.[12]

Goehr was encouraged by his friend, the choral conductor

modality, to become an approach for years to come.[4] His quest for expressiveness led him to his Little Symphony, Op. 15 (1963), composed as a memorial to his father who had unexpectedly died. It is based upon a chord-sequence derived from music from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, "Catacombæ" and "Cum mortuis in lingua mortua", of which his father had written a harmonic analysis.[4][13] Boulez, who had facilitated performances of Goehr's works, refused to program Little Symphony. Goehr composed works of many genres including the Piano Trio (1966).[4] He wrote Romanza, a cello concerto, in 1968 for Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim.[3] The orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance was premiered in 1974 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink.[3] He composed the String Quartet No. 3 in 1975–1976.[4]

Besetzungszettel for the premiere of Arden Must Die

Goehr founded the

Jacobean morality play by Erich Fried.[4][6] The opera was premiered in German at the Hamburg State Opera in 1967.[6]

In 1967 he founded the Music Theatre Ensemble,[3][5][7] as a pioneer of musical theatre in England;[5] in 1971 he completed a three-part cycle for music theatre Triptych of three works, Naboth's Vineyard (1968) and Shadowplay (1970), both explicitly written for the Music Theatre Ensemble,[5] while the third part, the cantata Sonata about Jerusalem was commissioned by Testimonium in Jerusalem and performed there in 1971 by the Israel Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Gary Bertini.[14]

From the end of the 1960s Goehr held prestigious academic appointments. In 1968–69 he was the first composer-in-residence at the

Cambridge University[3] and taught there until he retired in 1999.[7] His students included some of England's most notable composers to come, such as Thomas Adès,[4] Julian Anderson,[5] George Benjamin and Robin Holloway.[4] In Cambridge he became a fellow of Trinity Hall.[7]

1976–1996

In 1976, Goehr composed Psalm IV in a "bright modal sonority",[3] in a departure from serialism, towards more transparent sounds. He found a fusion of modal harmonics and the tradition of figured bass.[3] Over the following twenty years he applied this approach to traditional genres such as symphonies, composing Sinfonia in 1979 and Symphony with Chaconne in 1987. In 1985 he composed ... a musical offering (J. S. B. 1985) ..., written in memory of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was premiered by Oliver Knussen, who remained a close collaborator.[3]

Goehr focused especially on vocal music,

Varèse".[16]
He described his process for Arianna:

The impression I aim to create is one of transparency: the listener should perceive, both in the successive and simultaneous dimensions of the score, the old beneath the new and the new arising from the old. We are to see a mythological and ancient action, interpreted by a 17th-century poet in a modern theatre.[17]

In 1987 the BBC invited Goehr to present the

Reith Lectures. In a series of six lectures, titled The Survival of the Symphony he traces the importance of the symphony, and its apparent fall from grace in the 20th century.[5][6] Goehr's Colossos or Panic was premiered in 1992 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa.[3]

1996–2024

Although the last fifteen years of Goehr's output received less coverage in both academic analysis and performances, they represent an interesting phase of his work. He wrote the opera

kyogen humorous interlude; he adapted the Japanese texts that date back to the 15th century.[18][19] The music is inspired by the relationship between music and drama found in Noh theatre.[18]

In the years following, Goehr focused on

British Composer Awards.[3] Goehr wrote …between the lines… in 2013 for the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin.[3]

After a hiatus of almost ten years, Goehr returned to opera again with Promised End (2008–09), based on Shakespeare's

Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt", BWV 705, that Messiaen had pointed out to him. To These Dark Steps/The Fathers are Watching was written for tenor, children's choir and ensemble in 2011–12,[3] setting texts by the Israeli poet Gabriel Levin about the bombing of the Gaza Strip during the Iraq War; it was premiered in a concert of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Knussen marking Goehr's 80th birthday.[21]

Largo Siciliano (2012) was a trio praised for its balance between violin, horn and piano. The chamber symphony ...between the lines... (2013), written on a commission from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, is a monothematic work in four movements played without break, inspired by Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. Two Sarabandes was composed for the Bamberg Symphony who premiered it conducted by Lahav Shani.[3] A string quartet Ondering was premiered by the Villiers Quartet at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2023.[3] Goehr died at his home in Cambridgeshire on 26 August 2024, at the age of 92.[1][3][4][5]

Works

Main article: List of compositions by Alexander Goehr

Musical style

Many of Goehr's works are studies in the synthesis of disparate elements.

Beethoven piano sonata (Metamorphosis/Dance, 1973–1974) to a painting by Goya (Colossus or Panic, 1990), to the sinister humour of Bertolt Brecht (Arden Must Die, 1966) or to the Japanese Noh theatre (Kantan and Damask Drum, 1999).[22]

Just as The Deluge takes its cue from an unfinished project (Eisenstein never finished the planned film), many of Goehr's works include a synthesis of fragments or unfinished projects left by other artists. The cantata The Death of Moses resonates with Schoenberg's unfinished Moses und Aron; the opera Arianna (1995) is the setting of the libretto of a lost opera by Monteverdi, and posthumously published prose fragments by Franz Kafka inspired or appear in Das Gesetz der Quadrille (1979).[6]

On a strictly technical musical level, Goehr's tried unifying the

contrapuntal rigour and motivic workings of the First Viennese School and Second Viennese School with a strong sense of harmonic pacing and sonority.[5] Goehr remained indebted to Messiaen, apparent in his lifelong commitment to modality as an integration of serialism and tonality, as well as in melodic writing inspired by bird-song.[3]

Honours

Goehr was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Churchill Fellow.[3] In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Plymouth.[23] He became an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society. His manuscripts are held by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.[3]

Recordings

Writings

Sources:[24][25]

Books
Articles
Reviews

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b British Music Society 2024.
  2. ^ a b c Williams 2017.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z Peter 2024.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Telegraph 2024.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Clements 2024.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Schott 2024.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Cambridge 2024.
  8. ^ Amersham Museum 2024.
  9. ^ Internationales Musikinstitut 2024.
  10. ^ Grünzweig 2012.
  11. ^ Goehr 1998.
  12. ^ Goehr 1998, p. 5.
  13. ^ Goehr 1998, pp. 291–292.
  14. ^ Schott Jerusalem 2025.
  15. ^ Schott 2019.
  16. ^ Goehr 1992.
  17. ^ Goehr 1995.
  18. ^ a b University of Cambridge 2002.
  19. ^ British Music Collection 2024.
  20. ^ Hoffman 2010.
  21. ^ Birmingham Contemporary Music Group 2024.
  22. ^ Holloway 2003.
  23. ^ University of Plymouth 2024.
  24. ^ Boynton 1992, pp. 201–208.
  25. ^ Williams 2001.

Sources

Further reading
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