Klaus Huber was a Swiss violinist, composer, conductor, and music teacher. He was born in Bern on November 30, 1924, and died in Perugia on October 2, 2017.
From 1947 to 1949, Huber studied violin at the Zurich Conservatory, where he continued with theory and composition until 1955, studying with Stefi Geyer and Willy Burkhard. In 1955–56 he studied with Boris Blacher in Berlin. He taught violin at the Zurich Conservatory from 1950 to 1960 and music history at the Lucerne Conservatory from 1960 to 1963.
Huber gained international recognition in 1959 when his chamber cantata An Angel’s Address to the Soul was performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Rome. He taught composition at the Basel Academy of Music from 1964 to 1973. He served on the jury of the Gaudeamus International Composers Competition in Bilthoven in 1966, 1968, and 1972, and founded an international composers’ seminar in Boswil in 1969.
From 1973 to 1990, Huber led the composition department at the Freiburg University of Music. From 1990, he continued teaching at various institutions as a visiting professor. His students included Brian Ferneyhough, Kaija Saariaho, Wolfgang Rihm, Michael Jarrell, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Toshio Hosokawa, and Dieter Mack.
Huber’s music was strongly influenced by Anton Webern and his approach to serialism; in the 1980s, he also drew on Arabic music. His works included the oratorio Soliloquia (1959–64), the orchestral work Tenebrae (1967), the opera In Paradise, or the Old Man of the Mountain (1973–75), and the opera Black Earth (2001), based on poems and prose by Osip Mandelstam. He also wrote the string trio The Poet’s Plow (1989), dedicated to Mandelstam.
Huber received the Basel Art Prize in 1978, the Reinhold Schneider Prize in 1984, the Villa Ichon Culture and Peace Prize in 2002, the European Church Music Prize in 2007, and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2009. He was made an honorary doctor of the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre and the University of Strasbourg, and was an honorary member of the International Society for Contemporary Music. For the last 30 years of his life, he lived mainly in Panicale, Italy, with periods in Bremen.