Heinrich Sutermeister

Heinrich Sutermeister (b Feuerthalen, nr Schaffhausen, 12 Aug 1910; d Morges, 16 March 1995). Swiss composer.

After preliminary studies in the humanities in Basle and Paris, he attended classes in musicology at Basle University in 1931. From 1932 to 1934 he was a pupil of Courvoisier, Röhr, Geierhaas, Pfitzner and Orff at the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst. He returned to Switzerland in 1934 and spent a year working as an opera coach at the Berne municipal theatre. Subsequently, he devoted himself to composition, settling at Vaux-sur-Morges on Lake Geneva in 1943. In 1958 he was made president of the Mechanlizenz, the Swiss association for mechanical copyright, and from 1963 to 1975 directed a composition class at the Hanover Hochschule für Musik. In 1977 he was elected a member of the Bavarian Academy of Arts.

Sutermeister first attracted attention during the 1930s with a series of works including the Divertimento for strings and the radio opera Die schwarze Spinne which, with their dynamic rhythms and primeval melodic and harmonic simplicity, clearly reflect the influence of his teacher Orff. Equally decisive for his development, however, was an early encounter with Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and a passionate enthusiasm for Verdi’s late operas. These relatively traditional models caused him to reject modernism, and opt for a more spontaneous and diatonic mode of expression that would remain comprehensible to a wide audience.

Such ideals found particular favour in Nazi Germany where Sutermeister received a prestigious commission from the Dresden Staatsoper for his opera Romeo und Julia. First performed in 1940 under Karl Böhm, it secured an extremely favourable critical response and was staged in more than 20 different German theatres during the next few years. With its fresh melodic invention, highly skilled manipulation of theatrical effects and its unbridled romanticism, Romeo und Julia perfectly fulfilled Goebbels’s demand that new operas of the period should divert the public from the harsh realities of war. But Sutermeister’s attempt to capitalize on this success with a further Shakespearean opera Die Zauberinsel (based on The Tempest) misfired, and the work quickly dropped out of the repertory.

After the war Sutermeister continued to focus his attention on operatic composition, though with mixed results. Drawing his inspiration from a wide variety of literary models (Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Nestroy, Wilde and Ionesco), he demonstrated an impressive versatility of approach, and always took care not to resort simply to well-tried formulae. Nonetheless, his somewhat anachronistic musical language seemed at odds with the work of most of his contemporaries. While some operas such as Raskolnikoff (1948) and Titus Feuerfuchs (1958) attained some popularity, much of his output was quickly forgotten, and he rarely recaptured the potent melodic spontaneity of Romeo und Julia.

Outside the opera house, Sutermeister achieved considerable popularity in Switzerland with his choral works, many of which were designed to be performed by amateur groups. Of particular note are the powerful and dramatic Missa da requiem (1957), dedicated to the memory of the conductor Issay Dobrowen, and the Te Deum 1975 (1974) which presents a rather different and more unsettling interpretation of the religious text than the familiar 19th-century examples of Bruckner and Verdi.