Beat Furrer

Beat Furrer is an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher of Swiss origin. He was born on December 6, 1954, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. In 1975 he moved to Vienna, where he studied composition with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and conducting with Otmar Suitner at the Vienna Conservatory.

In 1985 Furrer founded the ensemble Klangforum Wien and led it until 1992. In the early 2000s, together with Ernst Kovacic, he organized the international academy for contemporary music for ensembles and composers, Impuls. He also taught composition in Frankfurt. From 1991 to 2023 he was professor of composition at the University of Music in Graz.

Furrer's works have been performed by major European orchestras under conductors including Claudio Abbado and Peter Eotvos. He has also maintained an ongoing artistic collaboration with the stage director Christoph Marthaler.

His selected works include Poemas for mezzo-soprano, guitar, piano, and marimba on poems by Pablo Neruda (1984), String Quartet No. 1 (1984), the Trio for flute, saxophone, and clarinet (1985), Voicelessness. The snow has no voice for piano (1986), String Quartet No. 2 (1988), and Ultimi cori for choir and percussion (1988).

Among his stage and large-scale works are the opera The Blind / Die Blinden, with a libretto based on texts by Maeterlinck, Plato, Holderlin, and Rimbaud (1989); Studie - Ubermalung for large orchestra (1990); Face de la Chaleur for flute and orchestra (1991); the opera Narcissus, after Ovid's Metamorphoses (1994); nuun, a concerto for two pianos and orchestra (1996); and The Books of Orpheus / Orpheus' Bucher for choir and orchestra on texts by Virgil, Ovid, and Cesare Pavese (2001).

Later works include the opera Desire / Begehren, with the composer's own libretto after Virgil, Ovid, and Cesare Pavese; Invocation, with a libretto by Ilma Rakusa after works by Marguerite Duras, Ovid, Cesare Pavese, and Gunter Eich (2003); String Quartet No. 3 (2004); FAMA, a monodrama for sound theater on texts by Ovid and Arthur Schnitzler (2005); Night Songs / canti notturni for two sopranos and orchestra on texts by Carlo Emilio Gadda (2006); the opera Book of Deserts / Wustenbuch, based on works by Ingeborg Bachmann and Jan Assmann, premiered in a production by Christoph Marthaler at the Basel Theatre (2010); and Studie fur Klavier (2011).

Furrer has received broad recognition for his work. His honors include the Young Generation in Europe Prize (1984), the Young Composers Forum Prize in Cologne (1989), the Siemens Encouragement Prize (1992), the Duisburg Prize (1993), the Vienna Prize (2003), the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale for the opera FAMA (2006), the Erste Bank Composition Prize (2012), the Grand Austrian State Prize (2014), and the Ernst von Siemens Prize (2018). He also became a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.