Matthias Pintscher
Carnegie Hall Commissions
Matthias Pintscher began his career
playing violin and conducting the
local youth orchestra in his hometown
in western Germany, and he
eventually began to write music as
well. In his late teens, he spent a
year in London, studying music and
learning the business firsthand,
working at the BBC and at Boosey
& Hawkes, the publishing house.
An invitation from Hans Werner
Henze to attend his summer
music school in Montepulciano,
Italy, in 1991 was decisive in
forming his composer’s voice, as
were subsequent encounters
with the Hungarian composer
and conductor Peter Eötvös, the
German avant-garde leader
Helmut Lachenmann, and Pierre
Boulez. By the time Pintscher
was 22, he had written three big
symphonies as well as concertos
and works of chamber music.
Throughout his young career, the
balance between conducting and
composing has continued to shift,
and Pintscher admits that his
thinking as a conductor has been
informed by the music he writes
and vice versa. He has conducted
many prominent orchestras,
including the Cleveland Orchestra
and the Staatskapelle Berlin.
Pintscher first achieved international
attention as a composer
with Thomas Chatterton, an opera
about an 18th-century English poet
who committed suicide at the age
of 17, which premiered in Dresden
in 1998. A second opera, L’espace
dernier, based on the life and work
of poet Arthur Rimbaud, was first
staged at the Opéra Bastille in
Paris in 2004. Other major works
include Five Orchestral Pieces,
premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1997 under Kent
Nagano; Hérodiade-Fragmente,
first performed by the Berliner
Philharmoniker under Claudio
Abbado; a violin concerto, en
sourdine, written for Frank Peter
Zimmermann, who gave the first
performance in Berlin in 2003; and
Towards Osiris, one of the four
“asteroid pieces” commissioned
by the Berliner Philharmoniker to
be performed as postscripts to
Holst’s The Planets.
From 2000 to 2002, Pintscher was
composer-in-residence of the
Cleveland Orchestra, which gave
the premiere of his with lilies white
under Christoph von Dohnányi,
and he has held similar residencies
elsewhere, including at the Lucerne
Festival in 2005 and the Cologne
Philharmonie this season.
Many of Pintscher’s works are
evocations of other artworks,
including the poetry of Mallarmé
and sculpture by Giacometti.
Below, he describes how his new
piece, Osiris, was inspired by a
work by Joseph Beuys (1921–1986),
the influential German artist.