Heinz-Klaus Metzger
Heinz-Klaus Metzger (Born
February 6 1932 in
Konstanz) is a
German music critic and theoretician.
Metzger studied piano under
Carl Seemann in
Freiburg and composition under
Max Deutsch in
Paris. Later, attending a summer course for new music in
Darmstadt, he met
Theodor W. Adorno,
Edgard Varèse,
Karlheinz Stockhausen and
Luigi Nono. Here he found his role as a notable theoretician and proponent of
Serialism in musical theory. He participated as a distinguished contributor to a series of important texts called
Die Reihe. Metzger was among the first critics to promote Stockhausen's music, but was soon a substantial critic of Stockhausen's compositional development.
In the
1960s, Metzger was one of the first
European commentators on
John Cage, and spokesman of the movement called
compositional Anarchy, which resulted in the so called
Kölner Manifest of
1960, and serving as a copy editor of the magazine
Collage in
Palermo. From
1965 until
1969 he worked as a music critic for the
Zürcher Weltwoche (Zurich world weekly). In
1969, he founded, together with his partner, composer and conductor
Rainer Riehn, the 'Ensemble Musica Negativa', where they embraced the performance of radical new music. In
1987, Metzger and Riehn became the chief dramatic advisors of the
Frankfurt opera under
Gary Bertini. During their tenure, the Frankfurt Opera commissioned and premiered John Cage's
Europeras 1 & 2.
From
1977 to
2002 Metzger and Riehn founded, edited, researched, and provided texts criticism for the musicology series "Musik-Konzepte" (The concepts of music),
Munich text+kritik-edition; for this they received the
Deutscher Kritikerpreis (German critics prize) in
1983. Also, they edited the two first volumes of the
Kompositionen von Adorno (Compositions of Adorno). Metzger has received honorary doctorates from the
Berlin University of the Arts and from the
University of Palermo.
Musik wozu. Literatur zu Noten, with Rainer Riehn, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1980
