Karl Amadeus Hartmann

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Karl Amadeus Hartmann (August 2, 1905 Munich – December 5, 1963 Munich) was a German composer. Some have lauded him as the greatest German symphonist of the 20th century.

Hartmann studied at the Munich Academy in the 1920s. He voluntarily withdrew completely from musical life in Germany during the Nazi era, while remaining in Germany, and refused to allow his works to be played there. An early work, Miserae (1933–1934, first performed in Prague, 1935) was condemned by the Nazi regime; but his work continued to be performed, and his fame grew, abroad. He began a nearly lifelong mentor-protegé relationship with Hermann Scherchen in the early 1930s, and during the war he became a pupil of Anton Webern.

After the war he finished a number of fine works, most notably eight symphonies. Perhaps the most well-known is his Symphony No. 1, titled "Attempt at a requiem" (Versuch eines Requiems). This work began in 1936 as a cantata for alto solo and orchestra, loosely based on a few select poems by Walt Whitman. It soon became known as "Our Life: Symphonic Fragment" (Unser Leben: Symphonisches Fragment) and was intended as a comment on the generally miserable conditions for artists and liberal minded individuals under the early Nazi regime. After the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II, the real victims of the regime had become clear, and the cantata's title was changed to "Symphonic Fragment: Attempt at a Requiem" to honor the millions killed in the Holocaust. Hartmann revised the work in 1954-1955 as his Symphony No. 1, and finally published it in 1956.

Hartmann's style is eclectic. In the earlier works, the influence of Mahler and Bruckner is evident, as well as the contrapuntal idiom of Max Reger. Later, he adopted some stylistic traits of the neoclassical composers such as Paul Hindemith, and middle-period Stravinsky. Although he studied with Webern, and understood Schoenberg, the influence of Berg is more pronounced in his work than either of the other two members of the Second Viennese School.

Hartmann became an important figure after World War II as organizer of the Musica Viva concert series in Munich, Germany. He established the series in order to reintroduce German society to the modern compositions that had been banned under National Socialist aesthetic policy.