Matthias Pintscher

Matthias Pintscher was born in Marl on 29 January 1971 and is one of the figures in contemporary German music who has combined composition with conducting. His training began at school, where he gained experience as an instrumentalist and as an occasional conductor of the youth orchestra of his native town. His first works, written in his adolescence, grew out of his fascination with the symphony orchestra.

In 1989 he began composition studies with Klebe and later continued them with Trojahn in Düsseldorf, between 1992 and 1993. Hans Werner Henze also supported and encouraged him in his early years. He soon received numerous honours, including composition prizes, scholarships and commissions from opera houses, orchestras, conductors and prestigious soloists. His reputation as a conductor was established in 1994, when the Staatsoper Berlin premiered his ballet Gesprungene Glocken.

His music pays close attention to sonic colour and responds to compositional impulses with poetic force. Ideas drawn from the visual arts and literature serve him in constructing associative structures, which he translates into atmospheric densities of sound. Several of his works inspired by poems, such as the series Monumento, based on Rimbaud, he describes as 'speech music', an attempt to reach the core of the poetic scene, although he concedes that this ideal can never be fully attained. In that dramatic spirit he composed his first opera, Thomas Chatterton (1994–1997).

Pintscher is today a composer with a broad and widely performed catalogue, including works for stage, orchestra, voice and chamber music. His importance lies in combining orchestral tradition with poetic exploration of timbre, qualities that place him among the most acclaimed German composers of his generation.