“Encountering Weill’s music, which I had never heard before because it was not allowed to be played in the Third Reich, was absolutely shocking for me because it opened up a tonal but completely new sonic world,” he said in a 2018 interview for his former’s annual publication secondary school.
At the age of 10, he also began composing short pieces for piano. Soon after, he accompanied his mother’s singing students at live shows.
In 1955, after graduating from highschool, he began working at the newly established opera studio of the Städtische Oper Berlin, now Deutsche Oper, while also attending composition and piano classes at the city’s music conservatory. He also briefly studied musicology at the University of Vienna.
One of his professors at the Berlin Conservatory was the influential German composer Boris Blacher, who advised Mr. Reimann to avoid the avant-garde centers of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen – incubators of contemporary music with a popularity for being experimental but dogmatic – and as an alternative forge his own path. In doing so, he distinguished himself from his older peers, and throughout his long profession he remained radically individual, even solitary, as an artist who never belonged to any movement or school of music.
Beginning at the age of twenty, Mr. Reimann accompanied Fischer-Dieskau and the mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in recitals and wrote music for them. Throughout his profession, he was a sought-after and steadily recorded accompanist and supported young composers through the establishment of the Busoni Composition Prize in 1988 and the Aribert Reimann Foundation, founded in 2006.
In 1962, the annual Berliner Festwochen performing arts festival premiered his concert piece “Fünf Gedichte von Paul Celan,” or “Five Poems by Paul Celan,” with Mr. Fischer-Dieskau as soloist. Mr. Reimann met Mr. Celan, a Jewish-Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor, in Paris in 1957 and was one of the first to set music to his haunting German-language poems. Mr. Reimann returned to Celan’s poetry in 1971, a yr after the author’s suicide, in “Cyklus,” a group of six poems in a single part lasting about 20 minutes.
