André Hajdu

Hungarian by birth and Israeli by adoption, André Hajdu studied composition with Endre Szervánszky and Ferenc Szabó at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, piano with Ernő Szegedi and ethnomusicology with Zoltán Kodály, whose example sent him into the field to collect Roma music. He left for Paris in 1956, worked there with Darius Milhaud and sat in on Messiaen's classes, and settled in Jerusalem in 1966. Teaching at the Tel Aviv Academy and then at Bar-Ilan University, he built a composition programme that formed a generation of Israeli musicians. His output runs to chamber music, piano cycles, choral works, cantatas and oratorios on biblical, rabbinic and historical subjects — Dreams of Spain, Job and His Comforters and the Mishnayoth cycle among them. He received the Israel Prize in 1997 and died in 2016. He taught at the Tel Aviv academy from 1966 to 1991 and at Bar-Ilan from 1970, heading the music department there and founding its composition section; Gil Shohat and Yonatan Razel came out of his classes. His pedagogical volumes, among them The Milky Way, The Art of Piano Playing, The Book of Challenges and a concerto for ten young pianists, draw the player into the making of the piece, and his research took in klezmer and Hasidic music. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem made him an honorary doctor in 2005.