Elfriede Jelinekaus modern

Elfriede Jelinek (* 20 October 1946 in Mürzzuschlag) is an Austrian writer and composer.

Life

Elfriede Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in Mürzzuschlag, Styria. Her mother Olga, née Buchner, came from the Viennese upper middle class and supported the family for a long time by working as an accountant. Her father Friedrich Jelinek was a chemist, a graduate of the Vienna University of Technology and of Jewish-Czech descent.

Jelinek’s mother took care of her upbringing. Jelinek went to a Catholic kindergarten and then to a convent school, which she found extremely restrictive (essay “Going to school is like going to death”). Her conspicuous urge to move brought her, on the advice of the nuns, to the child psychiatry department, to the curative education department of the children’s clinic at Vienna University, which was run by Hans Asperger, although her behaviour remained within the range of the norm from a medical point of view. Apart from that, her mother planned her daughter’s career as a musical prodigy, and Jelinek received piano, guitar, flute, violin and viola lessons already in primary school. At the age of 13 she was admitted to the Vienna Conservatory, where she studied organ, piano, recorder and later composition. At the same time she completed her secondary education at the Wirtschaftskundliches Realgymnasium Wien-Feldgasse.

In 1971 she passed the organ examination at the conservatory with Leopold Marksteiner.

In 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “the musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and dramas that reveal with unique linguistic passion the absurdity and compelling power of social clichés”.

In 2021, the first comprehensive conference on Elfriede Jelinek was held in the US to mark the author’s 75th birthday. The third day of the programme, streamed online from New York, dealt with “Elfriede Jelinek – A Composer”. In addition to the author’s preoccupation with Franz Schubert, the focus was on vocal pieces that Jelinek had written for voice and piano in her early years. These songs were also performed at the event.

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