Peter Huebner - Germany's New Classical Composer

CAREER

As a composer, Peter Huebner, born 11.4.1940 in Erfurt, Thuringia, is an autodidact.
At some point during his youth a knowledge of reading and writing music came quite unexpectedly to him. Suddenly it was there — overnight he became a composer who sat at his desk where, with no instruments at all, he wrote operas, symphonies, concerts and light music.

World-famous composers such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann and music theorists such as Herbert Eimert (himself, amongst other things, the father of electronic music), music academies and music universities were completely bewildered by the phenomenon of a fully skilled creator of music who had undergone no formal training or course of study, and so, at the time of his matriculation at the University of Music in Cologne, he was granted a most exceptional exemption from all lessons.

“Of all dreadful things,
the most dreadful is music
when it is first learnt.”

Johann Friedrich Hebbel

“…without wanting to present myself at the very least as a master, I can assure you that I lived in a small insignificant place* and almost everything that, here* like there, I have become, I have only become through myself…”

Ludwig van Beethoven

*1 Bonn
*2 Wien

“Everything that can be taught, is not worth the effort learning.“

Lao Tse

“If there is someone here or there who has a little talent, he will surely learn nothing.
Neither Schumann nor Wagner, or I have learnt anything decent. Talent was decisive. Schumann went down one path, Wagner down the other, I went down the third. But none of us learnt anything useful. None of us went to a regular school.“

Johannes Brahms

“Kings and princes can indeed make professors and privy councillors, and they can award titles and ribbons, but they cannot make great human beings - spirits who stand out from the vermin of the world; they simply have to forget about that.“

Ludwig van Beethoven

“It annoys people,
that the truth is so simple.“

J. W. von Goethe