Georg Friedrich Haas was born in Graz on August 16, 1953. Between 1972 and 1979 he studied composition at the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz, with Ivan Eröd and Gösta Neuwirth, and later with Friedrich Cerha in Vienna. Haas taught composition at the Kunstuniversität Graz and the Musikakademie Basel, and in 2013 was appointed Professor of Music at New York’s Columbia University.

In 2007, he was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize, in 2013 he was appointed member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and was awarded the Salzburg Music Prize in the same year. In 2017, Italian journal Classic Voice named him the most important living composer. In the 2023/24 season he was the ‘Capell-Compositeur’ of the Sächsischen Staatskapelle Dresden, for which he wrote the orchestral work I don’t know how to cry, which premiered in 2024 under the direction of Susanna Mälkki.

His involvement in music theatre, which includes 10 stage works, also plays a major role in Haas’ oeuvre: His opera Sycorax premiered at Bühnen Bern, with his wife – actor and activist Mollena Williams-Hass – taking on the title role. In 2024 followed the world premiere of his newest opera Liebesgesang at the Bühnen Bern, under the direction of Tobias Kratzer.

Haas’ work 11.000 Saiten, commissioned by the Busoni-Mahler Foundation and supported by Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, premiered in 2023 with great success. The work, in which 50 microtonally tuned pianos are arranged in a circle around the audience, as well as a chamber orchestra, opens up an innovative sound spectrum. It saw its world premiere in Bolzano, an Austrian premiere at wien modern, the Holland Festival and the Prague Spring Festival, among others, and will be performed at the Düsseldorf Festival, the Herrenhausen Art Festival and in New York.

11,000 Saiten is exemplary of Georg Friedrich Haas’ compositional work, which is always concerned with the harmonic possibilities of the sound space in microtonal and overtone ranges, and in creating new, ‘unheard’ sonic experiences. A Schubert and Mozart apologist, Haas feels on one hand rooted in the European tradition, and on the other is strongly influenced by the aesthetic freedom of American composers like Charles Ives, Harry Partch, John Cage, and James Tenny. He also repeatedly refers to the sonic mysticism of composers Giacinto Scelsi and Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

His extensive output, with a great many works for large orchestra, works for chamber orchestra, instrumental concertos, 10 operas, 10 string quartets, diverse chamber music, vocal works, and so on continuously spread worldwide, and not only in special events for new music. His compositions also reach a traditionally trained audience. Haas has dedicated his work to the utopian vision of creating a new music that is both expressive and accessible – not despite its newness, but because of it.

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