Reinhard Febel

Reinhard Febel (born 3 July 1952) is a German composer, notable for his operas. He is also a music theorist and a university professor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover and the Mozarteum.

Career Febel was born in Metzingen, Baden-Württemberg, and first studied music and piano with Jürgen Uhde at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart. On a recommendation from Helmut Lachenmann he studied composition from 1979, with Klaus Huber at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and at the IRCAM in Paris where he attended courses in electronic music in 1982. On a commission of the Bayerische Staatsoper he composed the chamber opera Euridice, premiered in 1983. He described his work "The musical world of Euridice is a hybrid of instrumentation, pastiche, collage, composition, sound-noise, and song-language-speech particles." He worked from 1983 to 1988 as a freelance composer in London, in 1984 in Rome on a scholarship of the Villa Massimo. In 1985 his Symphony, composed for the Youth Orchestra of the European Community, was premiered at the Donaueschinger Musiktage. In 1996 WERGO recorded his Variations for Orchestra, Das Unendliche (The Infinite) for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra, and his first string quartet, played by the Arditti Quartet. Joseph Stevenson described Variations for Orchestra as "a highly individual, strikingly mysterious one-movement orchestral piece in a post-modern style that mixes tonality and atonality in a freely chromatic technique." Das Unendliche on a poem by Giacomo Leopardi begins with an instrumental reference to the opera Euridice. In 2003 Wolkenstein, Lieder und Chöre nach Texten und Melodien des Oswald von Wolkenstein (Wolkenstein, songs and choruses after texts and tunes of Oswald von Wolkenstein) was first performed at the Berliner Philharmonie.

Febel's works have been published by Ricordi.

Awards 1980 Beethoven Prize of Bonn 1984 Villa Massimo 1988

Publications Reinhard Febel: Musik für zwei Klaviere seit 1950 als Spiegel der Kompositionstechnik. Pfau Verlag, Saarbrücken 1998. Rainer Nonnemann (ed.) and Reinhard Febel: Alles ständig in Bewegung: Texte zur Musik 1976–2003. Pfau Verlag, Saarbrücken 2004.

Literature Günter Katzenberger (editor): Reinhard Febel. Beiträge zu seinem musikalischen Schaffen. Hannoversche Gesellschaft für Neue Musik. Ricordi, Feldkirchen 1994.