The composer and pianist Aribert Reimann has died at the age of 88. Reimann’s output of over 70 works was dominated by operas and song cycles, and he will be best-remembered for his opera Lear, which has been performed in more than 30 productions since its premiere in 1978. Vocal music also dominated Reimann’s work as a pianist, and his catalogue of recordings includes lauded accounts of Romantic and Modern song cycles, accompanying singers including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Brigitte Fassbaender.

Reimann was born in Berlin into a musical family, his mother a singer, his father the leader of the Berlin Cathedral Choir. From 1955, he worked as a repetiteur at the Städtische Oper (now Deutsche Oper) Berlin, and also began studies in piano, counterpoint and composition at the Musikhochschule Berlin, where his teachers included Boris Blacher and Ernst Pepping.

His career as a composer for the stage began in 1959 with the ballet Stoffreste, to a libretto by Günter Grass. His first opera followed in 1965, Ein Traumspiel, based on a story by Strindberg. Lear, his fourth opera, was composed at the suggestion of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who created the title role. The opera, an adaption of the Shakespeare play, demonstrates the unique qualities of Reimann’s music: a bold and visceral orchestral score supporting powerfully expressive vocal writing, all within a distinctive Modernist soundworld. In a recent Gramophone feature on Shakespeare in music (8/23), Michelle Assay wrote, ‘Reimann’s … Lear grabs the listener by the throat and doesn’t let go … [It] comes closer than any other full-length opera to the devastating power of Shakespeare’s tragedy.’

A similar immediacy and emotive directness characterise Reimann’s recordings as accompanist. He would often encourage his singers into Modernist repertoire, recording songs by Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith and Eisler. But he was most in demand in the Lieder of Schubert and Schumann. His 1988 account of Schubert’s Winterreise with Brigitte Fassbaender was recently the subject of a Classics Reconsidered (3/24), in which Hugo Shirley commented, ‘His playing feels incredibly fresh and imaginative more than 30 years ­– and dozens of Winterreise recordings – later, and it really helps Fassbaender present the cycle as something closer to an expressionistic monodrama.’

Reimann taught throughout his career. From 1973 he was professor at the Hamburg Hochschule and from 1983 at the Musikhochschule Berlin. As well as orchestral works and song cycles, he continued to write operas throughout his later life, including Medea, which premiered at Vienna State Opera in 2010, and L'Invisible, his last, which was staged at Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2017. Among many other awards he received the German Order of Merit in 1985, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2010 and, earlier this year, the GEMA-Musikautor*innenpreis for Lifetime Achievement.

Born March 4, 1936; died March 13, 2024