Felix Werder

Felix Werder was born in Berlin in 1922, where his family was part of Arnold Schoenberg's musical circle. His family fled Germany in 1935 (his father was a cantor and liturgical composer at a leading Berlin synagogue).

Ending up in Australia five years later, he was interned for four years as a political prisoner from 1940. Many of his fellow internees were musicians, and he produced a large number of his early compositions for them to play - Werder wrote fragments of the scores of Handel and Mozart from memory, later progressing to his own imitations of seventeenth and eighteenth century music. The music of the synagogue was a major influence, manifesting itself in his use of the Hebraic modes (in early works), and in the melismatic treatment of speech rhythms.

Werder's early twelve-tone music gave way to a more improvisatory, collage-like style that often made virtuosic demands on its performers. From 1956, Werder was active as adult education class lecturer on music, and, from 1960 to 1977, as music critic for the Melbourne daily newspaper The Age, before moving to radio, where he developed a series on contemporary music for the ABC together with Keith Humble.

He wrote for a wide variety of musical media, including chamber music, orchestral and music theatre works, and received numerous commissions from organisations such as Deutsche Oper (1967), the ABC (1969), the Australian Opera (1969), the National Theatre (1975), the Victorian State Opera (1976), and the Berlin Festival (1987).

A significant figure in Australia's musical avant-garde, Werder went on composing into his old age. According to a composer colleague, Warren Burt, Werder had been refining his technique and 'getting closer to what one might term "pure music", a product of intense reflection and personal expression'.

A provocateur until the end of his life, Werder finished his own AMC biography by stating: '...a thing of beauty is a bore forever', and 'music is not as soporific for calming neurosis of a decadent bourgeois society'. Felix Werder died in Melbourne, at the age of 90, on 3 May 2012.

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