Luna Alcalayaus modern

Luna Alcalay (* 21 October 1928 in Zagreb; † 9 October 2012 in Vienna) was a Croatian-Austrian composer and pianist.

Life

Luna Alcalay came from a middle-class background as the daughter of an old Austrian Jewish textile merchant and received piano lessons from Svetislav Stančič in a private setting at an early age. Since her youth she was artistically active as a pianist, composer, author and painter. In 1947, she began studying at the Music Academy in Zagreb, but the family emigrated to Israel the very next year. In Tel Aviv she was taught by Leo Kestenberg.

In 1951, Luna Alcalay came to Vienna to study composition technique with Alfred Uhl and piano with Bruno Seidlhofer at the Musikakademie, now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Alfred Uhl introduced her to the music of Luigi Nono, which made a lasting impression on her and influenced her. Inspired by this, she took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses to get to know the music of Nono and other avant-garde composers. Here she was particularly impressed by Bruno Maderna as a teacher. Maderna conducted the world premiere of Alcaly’s choral work Una Strofa di Dante in Vienna in 1968.

From 1959, Alcaly taught with the Vienna Boys’ Choir. In 1963 she was appointed professor of piano for composers at what is now the University of Music.

Luna Alcalay’s music was initially influenced by the serial compositional style of René Leibowitz, but she gradually moved away from its strict application and in the 1970s, with pieces such as “New point of view”, arrived at a technique in which aleatoric passages also play a role and instruments are used in a way that deviates from tradition.

Especially in her work of the 1970s and 1980s, text plays an important role for Alcalay. She composed operas, choral, ensemble and solo pieces. There are also works in which male and female voices are accompanied by instruments while the text is spoken. With compositions such as “homo sapiens”, there are also examples of radiophony. She set various poets to music, including Else Lasker-Schüler.

She dedicated an opera to Jan Palach, who burned himself to death in Prague in 1969 in protest against the suppression of the Prague Spring and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Luna Alcalay considered her most important work to be the internationally acclaimed 1984 composition “Ich bin in Sehnsucht eingehüllt” (I am wrapped in longing), in which she scenically reflects on poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger. This Jewish poet died in a forced labour camp in the Ukraine in 1942.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_Alcalay