Jürg Baur
Jürg Baur was a German composer, born in Düsseldorf on November 11, 1918. He studied piano and organ from childhood and began composing as a teenager. His first string quartet was performed by the Walter Schulze-Prisca Quartet in 1935, while he was still finishing secondary school.
In 1937, Baur entered the Cologne Conservatory, where he studied composition with Philipp Jarnach, organ with Michael Schneider, and piano with K. G. Pillney. After returning to Germany in 1946, he began teaching music theory at the Düsseldorf Conservatory while completing his studies in Cologne, where he received his diploma in 1948. From 1948 to 1951, he studied musicology at the University of Cologne under K. G. Fellerer.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Baur worked as an organist at a Düsseldorf church, taught at the Church Music School of Rhineland-Palatinate, and wrote music for productions at the Düsseldorf Theater. He directed the Düsseldorf Conservatory from 1965 to 1971, then taught composition at the Cologne University of Music from 1971 to 1990. He received repeated fellowships from the German Academy in Rome, and Italian influences appear in many of his works.
Bartók influenced Baur's early works, and in the 1950s he became interested in Anton Webern's innovations. His music combined elements of twelve-tone technique and, less often, aleatory with references to earlier composers, from Heinrich Isaac to Robert Schumann. He wrote several works for recorder, contributing to renewed interest in the instrument; these include the 1975 concerto for recorder and chamber orchestra, In Search of Lost Time. His other notable works include the oboe concerto Concerto romano (1960), works for organ, and his only chamber opera, The Romance with the Double Bass (2005), based on the story by Anton Chekhov. Baur received the Rome Prize of the German Academy at Villa Massimo in 1960 and the Duisburg Music Prize in 1994. He died in Düsseldorf on January 31, 2010.