Gerd Kühr

Who is Gerd Kühr?

Gerd Kühr, also Gerd Kuhr, is an Austrian conductor, composer of classical music and academic teacher.

Kühr studied history, conducting and composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and took master classes in conducting with Gerhard Wimberger, Hans Swarowsky and Sergiu Celibidache. He continued his studies of composition with Josef Friedrich Doppelbauer and Hans Werner Henze. In 1983 he collaborated with Henze, David Graham and Marcel Wengler to compose the film music for Volker Schlöndorff's Eine Liebe von Swann after Marcel Proust.

His opera Stallerhof, to a libretto of Franz Xaver Kroetz based on his own play, was premiered at the first Munich Biennale in 1988, as a co-production with the Staatstheater Wiesbaden. Ulf Schirmer conducted the premiere at the Kongresssaal of Deutsches Museum. The play Stallerhof, a dialect play on a taboo subject matter, was premiered in 1972. A review of the opera in a production of the Theater Luzern remarks:

Kroetz's Stallerhof is a work about inability to communicate, which opens space for music. Gerd Kühr's music serves the function of expressing the feelings and situations in which people find themselves. With a fairly large chamber orchestra he provides a rich tapestry of colours and motives. There is expressionist music, which brings to mind. the inarticulacy and exploitation suffered by Wozzeck.