German Music Authors Award (Deutscher Musikautorenpreis)
(Source: GEMA) The expert jury was unanimous: this year's award in the Lifetime Achievement category goes to the composer Hans Werner Henze. The decision was announced by Dr Harald Heker, Chairman of the GEMA Executive Board, at the annual press conference in Munich on 24 March 2011. The Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced exclusively and as the only honour before the award ceremony.
The award for Hans Werner Henze will be one of the highlights of the 2011 German Music Authors' Prize ceremony on 14 April in Berlin. With the Lifetime Achievement Award, the jury is honouring Henze's special oeuvre: the composer wrote more than 40 works for music theatre, solo concertos, symphonies, oratorios, song cycles and chamber music. Some of his works were also the result of his close friendship with the writer Ingeborg Bachmann. He is one of the most frequently performed and most renowned composers of our time, both nationally and internationally. The jury of the German Music Authors' Prize stated: ’Hans Werner Henze is a musical personality who has had an impact beyond German and European borders and has had a very strong effect. A role model for generations after him. He has composed music for all genres, had students who have become very well known - he stamps it all with his incomparable quality and identity.’
Hans Werner Henze (born on 1 July 1926 in Gütersloh) studied at the Church Music Institute in Heidelberg and studied this musical form and serialism at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, among others. In 1953, he emigrated to Italy, where he still lives today - the reason for his emigration was what he saw as a lack of reappraisal of the Third Reich and the prevailing dogmatism in New Music in his home country of Germany. In the 1960s, he taught a masterclass in composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and from 1980 to 1991 he was a professor at the Cologne State Academy of Music. Teaching assignments and stays as ‘Composer in Residence’ also took him to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the USA and Cuba. On his initiative, the ‘Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte’ was founded in Montepulciano in 1976 and the Munich Biennale (International Festival for New Music Theatre) in 1988. In recent decades, Hans Werner Henze has been honoured with numerous national and international awards for his work, including honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music London (1975), the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1990), the Praemium Imperiale of the Japanese Emperor (2000) and the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany with Star (2008). As part of the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010, Henze was honoured with a tribute (‘Henze Project’), which included the premiere of his most recent composition, the opera ‘Gisela oder: Die merk- und denkwürdigen Wege des Glücks’. Hans Werner Henze follows composer Peter Thomas (2009) and lyricist Michael Kunze (2010) as the winner in the Lifetime Achievement category of the German Music Authors' Award.
The German Music Authors' Prize was initiated by GEMA and is part of the collecting society's cultural mandate. The prize, which has been awarded annually since 2009, honours composers and lyricists for the outstanding quality of their works.
