Boris Yoffe
Boris Yoffe (also spelled Ioffe) is a German composer, violinist, violist, conductor, music writer, and essayist. He was born in Leningrad on December 21, 1968. He began violin lessons at eight and composition lessons at ten at Children’s Music School No. 11, where he studied with J. L. Metallidi. He later studied violin at the school affiliated with the Leningrad Conservatory and took theoretical subjects with Adam Stratievsky. After moving to Israel, he graduated with distinction in composition from the Tel Aviv Music Academy in 1995. From 1997, he studied with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe.
Yoffe lives in Karlsruhe, Germany. His wife, pianist Angela Yoffe, is also a musician; they have three daughters, and he has an older son from a previous marriage. The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts awarded him a prize in 2000.
Yoffe has written chamber and vocal works, including pieces set to texts by John Donne, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, Andrei Platonov, and Osip Mandelstam. His operas include The Story of the Rabbi and His Son (2003) and Esther (2006), based on Racine’s tragedy. His Book of Quartets, begun in 1995, developed into an unnumbered cycle of more than 365 short pieces. Yoffe described its composition as a process involving intuition and the subconscious as well as deliberate thought. In 2017, his cantata Madame Lenin, based on a play by Velimir Khlebnikov, received its premiere in Germany.
Performers of Yoffe’s chamber music include violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, cellist Sol Gabetta, pianist Konstantin Lifschitz, the Hilliard Ensemble, and the Rosamunde Quartet. Yoffe has also performed in ensembles as a violist with Kopatchinskaja, Gabetta, and Lifschitz. His writing includes two major monographs and numerous essays on music theory, aesthetics, and philosophy, much of it focused on twentieth-century music. His books include Musical Meaning (2012) and In the Flow of the Symphonic: A Journey of Discovery through the Soviet Symphony (2014).