Sergio Ortega

Sergio Ortega
(b Antofagasta, 2 Feb 1938). Chilean composer. At the age of 20 he abandoned architecture training for a career in music, studying composition with G.B.

Schmidt and Roberto Falabella at the University of Chile. In 1969 he became a professor of composition there, taking over the artistic direction of the university television station the following year. Forced by political events to flee Chile in 1973, he settled in Paris, where he became director of the Ecole Nationale de Musique at Pantin.

Ortega's operas, songs, chamber music and film scores have been heard throughout Europe as well as in Chile. But he has reached his widest audience with his two political anthems Venceremos (‘We Shall Triumph’), composed in 1970 as the hymn for Salvador Allende's government, and El pueblo unido jamás será vencido (‘The People United will Never be Defeated’), written in May 1973 in protest against the growing right-wing movement in Chile. Political protest is also central to many of his operatic and vocal works; the writing of Pablo Neruda has proved a particular inspiration in this respect. His music incorporates atonal and other modernist techniques alongside a memorable lyricism, and draws on Chilean musical traditions, though rarely through the use of actual quotation and never merely for the sake of local colour.