(Peter) Alexander Goehr - Early works, Later works

Composer, born in Berlin, Germany. Brought to England in 1933, he studied at the Royal Manchester College (1952–5) and in Paris. He was professor of music at Leeds University (1971–6), then at Cambridge, where he is a fellow of Trinity Hall. His compositions include the operas Arden Must Die (1967), Behold the Sun (1985), and Arianna (1995), as well as concertos, cantatas, and chamber music.

He was born in Berlin, the son of Walter Goehr. Whilst resident in Paris in 1956-7, Goehr also had private consultations with Pierre Boulez.

From 1976 to 99 he was Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.

Early works

Goehr's earliest published work is the Piano Sonata from 1953, a fluent and idiomatic work which bridges the gap between Prokofiev and serialism (Prokofiev had died in March of that year, and the sonata commemorates this fact with a brief quote from his Seventh Piano Sonata). Goehr's works from the middle fifties tend to be more austere and closely adhere to traditional Schoenbergian 12-tone technique. Goehr's first international success was with his Eisenstein cantata The Deluge (1958), which created a considerable stir at its first performance, conducted by his father. Its impact upon Goehr's colleagues from Manchester seems also to have been considerable: echoes of it, both in terms of vocal writing and instrumental writing, may be discerned in Maxwell Davies's Leopardi Fragments (1961) and Birtwistle's Monody for Corpus Christi (1960).

As a result of the success of The Deluge, Goehr was commissioned to compose an orchestral piece for the BBC Promenade Concerts (Hecuba's Lament) and a larger Eisenstein cantata Sutter's Gold (1961) for chorus, baritone and large orchestra.

Despite this, Goehr continued to compose choral works. Encouraged by his friendship with the choral conductor John Alldis, who was strongly committed to new music, Goehr composed his Two Choruses in 1962, which used for the first time the characteristic modally inflected harmonic serialism which was to remain his main technical resource for the next 14 years.

Both as a technical procedure and in its harmonic results, Goehr's rotation technique has much in common with Boulez's idea of the 'bloc sonore' derived from segmenting rows into smaller units which are multiplied with each other. But, unlike Boulez, Goehr retains a strong and lasting link with the precepts of Schoenberg as expressed in the latter's writings (as found in the anthology 'Style and Idea', for instance). Like Schoenberg, Goehr is committed to the revivification of traditional Western forms such as sonata, symphony and fugue. This has led to views like that of composer and critic Bayan Northcott, who has termed Goehr a "radical conservative".

The first large scale application of Goehr's new modal serialism came in his Little Symphony of 1962. It is a memorial to Goehr's conductor/composer father, who had unexpectedly died, and in consequence it is based upon a chord-sequence subtly modelled upon (but not quoting) the Catacombs movement from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (Goehr senior had made a close harmonic analysis of this unusual movement; Alexander Goehr's own choral sequence is richer than Mussorgsky's original, with strongly predominant thirds and sixths, and prominent false relations between adjacent chords. The finale alternates two contrasted types of music, both based upon the chorale - a slow lament, and much faster music featuring dotted-rhythm cadences which have remained a typical feature of Goehr's mature style.

Later works

Goehr's subsequent output from the sixties included one further symphony (in 1969) which fuses sonata, fantasia and variation principles in a half-hour discourse. The harmony is some of Goehr's most lush and articulate, with richly detailed orchestration to match. During this period, Goehr also composed the Romanza for cello and orchestra, premiered by Jacqueline du Pré, under the direction of her husband Daniel Barenboim at the 1968 Brighton Festival with the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Though highly melodic, the work also has its darker, more ominous overtones, and it proved further the expressive viability and flexibility of Goehr's modal serialism.

Goehr's first opera, Arden Must Die, was also composed during this period and proved to be a powerful setting of a Jacobean morality play which had uncomfortably contemporary political and social resonances.

Goehr's chamber music output has included a Piano Trio commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin.

The third quartet (1976) was the last Goehr composed using his personal form of serialism.

He delivered the Reith Lectures in 1987 entitled The Survival of the Symphony.