Iván Erőd

Iván Erőd's early music drew on Bartók, Kodály and Hungarian folk music; he later explored twelve-tone methods before returning to tonality. Born in Budapest in 1936, he studied piano with Pál Kadosa and composition with Ferenc Szabó at the Franz Liszt Academy, left Hungary in 1956 and continued in Vienna with Richard Hauser and Karl Schiske, attending the Darmstadt courses and working as a répétiteur at the Vienna State Opera. He taught in Graz from 1967 to 1989 before becoming a professor of harmony and counterpoint in Vienna in 1989. His students included Georg Friedrich Haas and Johannes Maria Staud. His works include Die Seidenraupen, the early String Trio, Op. 1, and Über der Asche zu singen. His musical language draws on Bartók, Hungarian folk idiom, classical traditions and jazz. He died in 2019. The Holocaust took his brother, his grandfather and his grandmother, at Buchenwald and at Auschwitz, and those childhood memories stayed with him. He took third prize at the Ferruccio Busoni Competition in 1962 and worked as a répétiteur at the Vienna State Opera. The Sofia Philharmonic dates that work to 1962–1968, while music austria lists 1962–1964 at the opera and 1962–1968 at the Wiener Festwochen. The Music Prize of the City of Vienna followed in 1986, the Béla Bartók–Ditta Pásztory Prize in 1993, the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria in 2001 and the Ferenc Erkel Prize in 2010. He placed craftsmanship and direct musical communication above the pursuit of an original language. At Darmstadt he worked with Eduard Steuermann and Luigi Nono. After the changes in Eastern Europe he was granted Hungarian citizenship again and taught at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. The Sofia Philharmonic gives 2004–2009, while music austria lists a guest professorship in 2004–2005. From 2009 he belonged to the Szechenyi Academy of Literature and Art. Three numbered symphonies, orchestral pieces, instrumental concertos, choral works and the opera Orpheus ex machina stand in his catalogue beside the chamber and vocal music, and he was a practised hand at musical parody.