Christfried Schmidt

Biography

Christfried Schmidt (German pronunciation: [ˈkʁɪstfʁiːt ˈʃmɪt]; 26 November 1932 – 29 April 2025) was a German composer who worked as a church musician and piano teacher. In composition, he felt mostly self-taught. Some of his works for large choirs and orchestras were not performed during the period of East Germany, but were premiered decades after he wrote them, such as his 1975 St Mark Passion in Berlin in 2019 and his 1968 Second Symphony in memory of Martin Luther King in Dresden in 2021.

Life and career

Schmidt was born in Markersdorf in Upper Lusatia on 26 November 1932, the son of a miller. He attended the grammar school In Görlitz and received piano and organ lessons from Humperdinck's pupil Emil Kühnel. From 1951 to 1954, he studied church music at the Kirchenmusikschule Görlitz (B exam) and from 1955 to 1959 at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig (A exam), organ with Werner Buschnakowski and composition with Johannes Weyrauch. In Leipzig, he familiarised himself with contemporary music with Hermann Heyer. He discovered compositions by 20th-century composers of the Second Viennese School on radio, music that was rarely performed in East Germany, being regarded as not suitable to socialist realism.
From 1960 to 1962, Schmidt was a church musician in Forst. From 1963 to 1964, he worked as kapellmeister at the theatre of Quedlinburg. From 1965 to 1980, he was a freelance piano teacher and choir director in Quedlinburg. He began to focus on composition which was mostly self-taught, teaching on three days per week and composing the rest of the time. In Warsaw, he met the Japanese musicologist Ichirō Tamura, who enabled him to perform his works in Japan, including the first premiere of one of his pieces in 1970.

From 1980 until his death, Schmidt lived as a freelance composer in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Lacking commissions or a publisher, he composed major works for choir and orchestra. He was inspired by Bach, Anton Bruckner and Max Reger, and Alban Berg in the 20th century whose expressiveness based on formal construction was a model for his works. He preferred early works by Schoenberg to later more formal compositions, and felt close to the music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. He travelled to the Warsaw Autumn festival several times where he was impressed by the free aleatoric music of Witold Lutosławski. Schmidt composed Lieder setting texts by Friedrich Hölderlin and Heiner Müller, and a cycle of orchestral works inspired by graphic art of Edvard Munch. Schmidt's artistic breakthrough came with the premiere of his Oboe Concerto performed by Burkhard Glaetzner at the DDR-Musiktage 1984. He remained an outsider in East Germany where his major works were not performed. He was a member of the Akademie der Künste der DDR from 1990 to 1991.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, performances of Schmidt's compositions for large choirs and orchestra remained rare. He was a member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste from 1998; the institution holds his archive. His new orchestral work Memento was premiered in 2002 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus by the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fabio Luisi. The work is memorial of the composer's mother. In 2009 his Munch-Musik was played, and a reviewer from Die Zeit described its "unheard colours, magical and sometimes intoxicating, a music about love". In 2019, the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin conducted by Kai-Uwe Jirka premiered his St Mark Passion from 1974 after 45 years. The highly expressive, headstrong work combines aleatoric compositional procedures with a polyphonic way of thinking in the wake of Bach and the Viennese School. It ends with a Kyrie described as humble. Schmidt's Second Symphony "In memoriam Martin Luther King" was produced for radio on 3 October 2021 by Deutschlandfunk, live from the Kulturpalast in Dresden with the Dresden Philharmonic conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer. His Horn Concerto, which includes an episode in memory of Nelson Mandela, and his opera have remained unperformed.

Personal life and death

Schmidt lived in Berlin from 1980, first in a basement apartment that he shared with a colleague. He was married; his wife also worked as an artist, and the couple had a daughter. They moved within Prenzlau.
Schmidt died in Berlin on 29 April 2025, at the age of 92.

Awards and memberships

Schmidt's awards included:

1971: Composition prize in Nürnberg
1973: Composition prize in Stettin
1976: Composition prize in Trieste
1976: Composition prize in Nürnberg for Psalm 21
1978: Composition prize in Boswil
1987: Kunstpreis der DDR
1990: Member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin (until 1991)
1991: Johann-Wenzel-Stamitz-Preis of Künstlergilde Esslingen
1991: Composition prize of Mannheim
1998: Member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste
1999: Berliner Kunstpreis