Happy Birthday, Aribert Reimann! - Deutsche Oper Berlin
4 March
Happy Birthday, Aribert Reimann!
In retrospect, Aribert Reimann’s choice of career was nothing short of portentous. On 15th February 1955, a week after receiving his Abitur results, the 18-year-old school leaver took up his first position as répétiteur for the newly founded opera studio of the Städtische Oper in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The move was a defining event in Reimann’s life not simply because he has remained closely linked to the venue – which was soon to become the Deutsche Oper Berlin – right up to the present day and in a variety of artistic capacities, but also, and above all, because his choice of job revealed his interest in a field of music that has remained at the core of his work as composer, piano accompaniment being the tireless labour of perfecting and expanding the ability of the human voice to invest the spoken word with musical expressivity.
His list of instrumental compositions notwithstanding, Aribert Reimann’s career over six decades has largely revolved around two poles: musical theatre and lieder. On the one hand the art song: Reimann enlarges its expressive compass in a way that can give acoustic articulation to the language of a Paul Celan (“Eingedunkelt”, 1992) while preserving links to the Romantic tradition. Anyone listening to a Reimann lied with an open and receptive ear will witness lyrics, no matter how old, coming alive with striking intensity.
This power to conjure up vivid images in the mind’s eye is also discernible in Reimann’s other area of musical creativity. Despite the distanced and more panoramic focus required of a director of musical theatre, Reimann still ensures that audiences experience the full intensity of the actor, theatrical in the best sense of the word, and in scenes with multiple characters on stage, as in TROADES and THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA, still manages to avoid the impression of an amorphous group.
Aribert Reimann is an acutely literary composer – not unlike his great paragon Robert Schumann – and is himself a role model for many younger composers. Few lists of poems and novels set to music by a single composer can compare to his: they range from Euripides and Shakespeare to Shelley and Eichendorff and on to Joyce, Plath and Celan - a diversity of material that, far from causing him to indulge in artificial adornments, has nourished a process of continual stylistic evolution, with Reimann never losing his creative essence and therefore always able to reinvent himself, like all the great composers.
This process has resulted in a body of work that includes a raft of operas that are now part of the canon: first and foremost LEAR but also MEDEA and his latest work for the stage, L’INVISIBLE, commissioned for the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Today Aribert Reimann celebrates his 85th birthday. The Deutsche Oper Berlin warmly congratulates him on the occasion. May his creative energy inspire him and charm us for many years to come.
On the occasion of his birthday, we asked Aribert Reimann 12 questions. Read here about composing in times of Corona, his opera L'INVISIBLE and his greatest birthday wish.
Aribert Reimann's works at the Deutsche Oper Berlin
