Gösta Neuwirth

Gösta Neuwirth was born in Vienna in 1937 and studied composition with Karl Schiske at the Vienna Conservatory of Music and music and theater studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 1968, he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Franz Schreker. He then worked at the Mendelssohn Archive of the Berlin State Library and at the research center of the Arnold Schoenberg Complete Edition. From 1973 to 1982, Neuwirth taught at the University of Music and Performing Arts and the University of Graz, and from 1983 to 2000 he was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. His students include Peter Ablinger, Orm Finnendahl, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Isabel Mundry, and Enno Poppe.
Neuwirth composed for all genres, but mainly for chamber music ensembles. His magnum opus, the 150-minute Proust cycle Gestern und morgen (Yesterday and Tomorrow), which took over four decades to complete, premiered in Berlin in 1992. Neuwirth is the author of extensive theoretical works on 15th-century music, two books on Franz Schreker, and essays on Debussy, Krenek, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Wagner, Webern, Zemlinsky, and the directors Akira Kurosawa and Yasujir? Ozu.
This volume brings together several works on Neuwirth's artistic and scholarly thinking and the connection between these two areas in his compositional oeuvre.
With a composition Hommage à Gösta Neuwirth by György Kurtág, contributions by Claus-Henning Bachmann, Christine Mast, Isabel Mundry, Gösta Neuwirth, Helmut Satzinger, Jürg Stenzl, and András Wilheim, a conversation between Werner Grünzweig and Mathis Huber with Neuwirth, and an inventory of the music in the Gösta Neuwirth Archive.

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