Friedrich Cerha

Composer and educator Friedrich Cerha was one of the most widely honored musical figures in Austria in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He was closely identified with the perpetuation of the legacy of the Second Viennese School, but his activities extended into many other areas. Cerha was born in Vienna on February 17, 1926. He took up the violin at age seven, tried his hand at composition two years later, and quickly progressed, taking counterpoint and harmony classes at Vienna's Realgymnasium in his early teens. At 17, Cerha was drafted into a German Luftwaffe unit. He was able to study at the University of Vienna for one semester but was sent to an officer training program in Denmark. While there, he stole a stack of blank military order documents and deserted, successfully making his way across Germany until he was impressed into a German brigade as Russia neared the German border. He deserted again, walked into Austria, and hid out in the mountains until it was safe to return to Vienna. After completing his education in violin, composition, and general studies at the University of Vienna, in 1958, Cerha co-founded Die Reihe, an ensemble that often performed works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (its name means "the row"), and in general, he had a strong reputation as an interpreter of their works on the violin. In 1959, Cerha began teaching at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna; he became a full professor in 1976 and taught there until 1988; his distinguished students included Karlheinz Essl. Cerha may be best known for his 1979 completion of Alban Berg's opera Lulu, principally involving his orchestration of the unfinished third act. He was often involved with entirely different kinds of music, however; in 1960, he founded the Camerata Frescobaldiana. His own works include the opera Der Reise vom Steinfeld, commissioned by the Wiener Staatsoper, Impulse for large orchestra, performed at the 150th anniversary celebration of the Vienna Philharmonic in 2006, and concertos for violin and soprano saxophone. Along with his wife Gertraud, Cerha was a co-founder of a society honoring tonal composer Joseph Marx. Cerha received the Great Austrian State Prize in 1986, as well as many other Austrian regional and national awards, including the Salzburg Music Prize in 2011 and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2012. He continued composing into the 2010s decade; among his later works was 2012's Tagebuch for orchestra. Cerha died in Vienna on February 14, 2023, just three days before his 97th birthday.
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