The ICMA – International Classical Music Awards – has named Austrian composer Christoph Ehrenfellner Composer of the Year 2025. Ursula Magnes, who represents Radio Klassik Stephansdom on the ICMA jury, asked the „rebel against intolerance” (according to the international jury) a few questions.

- hirdetés -

– What was your first composition?

– My Opus 1 was „Amores”, Ovid’s love poems for string quartet and voice. I sang the premiere myself in 2005, improvising spontaneously and painting my own sets. My mother sat at a light switch and we gave a fully staged performance. People loved it. A first attempt and an immediate kick into the world of creation!

– When you were 25, you immediately took up Ovid. Is there a humanist in you?

– Yes, there is a humanist in me, definitely. A real philanthropist and art lover! Latin was important in my private Catholic school and I was fascinated by it. The references to antiquity and the Renaissance are very, very fertile sources for me. Strangely enough, I believe I am living proof that the narratives of the 20th century, as far as the history of art and music is concerned, simply need to be questioned and reconsidered.

– Do I hear scepticism about a ‘new music police’?

– It started with my mother’s church choir in Hennndorf am Wallersee in Salzburg – at the age of five, at funerals and weddings. It continued with the Vienna Boys’ Choir, at the Vienna State Opera with Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in the greatest, most glorious times. As a mature musician, I eventually turned to the creative side, i.e. writing. This difference in my biography automatically predestined me to be a bridge-builder between the traditional world and the avant-garde. And now, of course, it’s strange to say something like that in 2025, when there’s been an avant-garde for more than 100 years that calls itself avant-garde. And you ask yourself, where did this separation happen? And there are also these wild rebels who have broken something, had to invent something new and so on. It’s not about ideology, it’s about efficiency. And I couldn’t get away from this point of ideological separation with tonality, to think and try again. I’m certainly not at the end. This is my journey. And this is also one of my really crystallised credos, where music is there to comfort, to uplift, to unite, to give joy and strength. I am absolutely convinced that music is essential for that.

– Of course, that sounds a bit like ‘healthy music’…

– I just think that we have moved on in the history of humanity and art. Most of us have a regular job, a regular income and health and pension insurance. I don’t think that this makes them happy, that all their problems are taken care of, that they don’t need consolation, joy or inspiration – on the contrary! In our saturated societies, it is all the more important to really fill the soul’s thirst with fresh water and you have to say, how does music work and what is water? I can define that relatively precisely and accurately. After 30 years on stage and with the whole history of music in my fingers and my voice, I know well enough what water is and what is dust.

– What makes your music so special? Can you put it into words?

– Years ago I said with a wink that I was a classicist in modern music – emphasis on ‘in’! You can feel where that comes from in every bar of my music – it wants that origin and loves tradition. There’s absolutely no reason to bash that tradition in any way, because for me tradition in itself is something incredibly positive. But in an environment where it’s always being sold as something new, something that’s been repeated for 100 years, someone like me is a rebel. It doesn’t help if I have a Ferrari like the Vienna Philharmonic in my orchestra garage and I say I think it’s great, we’re all going to drive backwards because we’ve driven forwards enough. That’s what I’ve experienced as a musician for 30 years, and I offer real alternatives to that.

– Do you see yourself in the same tradition as Alban Berg?

– Very much so. Now I see my fourth opera, Karl and Anna, op. 48, which premiered at the Mainfranken Theatre in Würzburg, as a kind of – well, I was simply inspired by Wozzeck, not that I copied anything from it, but I have this way of actually working and thinking serially, that is with rows, but with a freedom and sensuality of sound that is absolutely geared to efficiency, to having a musical-theatrical effect. I use everything that has proved useful in the culture of domestic opera – Wagner’s leitmotiv technique, serialism, Alban Berg’s free poetry. I build on it and make my own, so why shouldn’t I use it to give my audience a deep pleasure.

– So you’ve never composed for a drawer?

– Never. Every piece has a commission. My first one was commissioned by me. But that was the only one. All the others are commissions.

– Did you study classical composition?

– I went to Prof. Christian Minkowitsch’s class at the Vienna Conservatory when I had already written my first opera. He threw up his hands and said: „For God’s sake, it’s all in three-four time.
You can’t be serious,” and I said, „I’m quite serious. And you’ll see – my Opus 7, the chamber opera Mae Mona, was my first great operatic success. Four different newspapers called it a sensation, and so it went on. My second was also a great operatic success, as was my third and my fourth. So what can I say, I am on the right track. The response shows that.

Right and wrong music…

That is something very difficult for art. After my experiences as a singer, violinist and conductor, I had to find my way. And perhaps it was fortunate for me that this path led to composition. In terms of my music, when you decide on a theme, it has consequences. Some themes are suitable for this, others for something else. If you go down a fateful path with a theme, you may need it or have the energy to hit the wall.
Other things you leave in a rose garden for yourself.

– Where do you see your catalogue at the moment?

– I’m currently working on my Opus 63 for the ICMA Gala in Düsseldorf. I have written 62 works, some of them very large, four operas, three symphonies, a ballet, three string quartets, chamber music, theatre music, all kinds of things. And I have always had a very classical approach. One word has become the quintessence for me: Efficiency. So as long as we’re sitting in a classical concert hall and we have a classical ensemble to serve, it’s all about classical storytelling, because there’s an audience sitting there, they’ve paid an entrance fee and they’ve got an hour and a half to listen to something.
They’re paying for it, so if I don’t say anything in that hour and a half, or I say something they don’t understand or can’t understand, what do they get out of it?

So in the course of my life as a musician, I’ve become very strict about saying, look, this is the framework.When I’m making sound combinations, I don’t need to have Vienna Philharmonic musicians sitting there who have worked all their lives to get a beautiful sound out of a violin, because I can explain to somebody in 20 minutes how to get something like that out of a violin. It’s not just about what has traditionally crystallised as good and beautiful and true.

– Where can I place you artistically?

I don’t know, there are hardly any words to describe it. The music-loving Prince Paul Esterházy had Joseph Haydn play for him every evening. He couldn’t suddenly scrape something together and say, „Now that’s art.
It had to sound good.I don’t want to single out Paul Esterházy as the authority on all art, but that’s how the game has worked for centuries. It wasn’t superfluous for us to have symphony orchestras, it wasn’t superfluous for us to have opera houses. It was not superfluous for us to play Beethoven – I would say for very good reasons.

– The ICMA jury has chosen you as „Composer of the Year”. You will conduct your new piece at the gala on 19 March at the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf. What can we expect?

I called it Wiener Blut 200. It’s an embrace of Johann Strauss and his 200th birthday, which we will celebrate in 2025. What I really like to do is to bring roses from Vienna when I go somewhere else. Because I see that nobody else does it. One of my key works is Ravel’s La Valse – the apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, so to speak, and at the same time its downfall and swan song. This will be a bouquet of roses from Vienna, a bravura piece inspired by Ravel’s La Valse. The Düsseldorfer Symphoniker will be able to display their full range of colours.

– How full is your order book?

– I’m not fully booked until 2030, but what’s very interesting is that in almost 20 years of travelling the world as a composer, I’ve never had a week where I didn’t have a commission or a work. A year later, it’s almost as if I don’t know what to do first. And that’s both a good feeling and an invitation to continue on this path.

– From composer to violinist Ehrenfellner: With which musicians from the past would you like to play in a string quartet?

– I would give so much to have played with David Oistrakh. His sound on the violin is one of the most beautiful and greatest things for me. I would have loved to play with Jacques Thibaud. I think he would have been a musician with whom I could have shared a lot. I would have loved to sit on the podium with Sándor Végh, whose grandson I am through my violin teacher Gerhard Schulz. With the viola it’s more difficult. Probably with Paul Hindemith. That would have been incredibly attractive to me. We would have made a wild team.

(Via ICMA)