Manfred Trojahn

Manfred Trojahn was born in Cremlingen (near Brunswick) in 1949. He studied orchestra music in Brunswick and went on to study composition with Diether de la Motte in Hamburg. His works have received a great number of distinctions, including the Stuttgart Advancement Prize (1972), First Prize in the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris (1978), the Sprengel Music Prize (1980) and the German Music Author Prize (2009). Until 2017 he held a professorship for composition at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf: Trojahn is a member of the Academies of the Arts in Munich, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Berlin. Manfred Trojahn’s oeuvre comprises practically every music genre. His works have been performed by outstanding soloists, orchestras and conductors in Germany and abroad. Ever since the première of Enrico in 1991, music theatre has occupied a preponderant place in his output. Trojahn’s operas Was ihr wollt (Munich, 1998), La Grande Magia (Dresden, 2008) and Orest (Amsterdam, 2011) have been taken up and staged by a number of international opera houses. Trojahn has recently been composing more and more for instrumental ensemble: thus, since 2012, he has been writing the Quitter cycle based on texts by René Char for Ensemble Modern; in 2013 wrote Le Ceneri di Gramsci (on a text by Pasolini) for MusikFabrik NRW, and in 2015 /16 the first portion of Nocturne – Minotauromachie for Ensemble Intercontemporain.