Composer Barbara Heller celebrates her 86th birthday on November 6, 2022.
Barbara Heller’s language is music. She formulates everything in notes: thoughts, notes, letters, diaries. Born in Ludwigshafen am Rhein in 1936, the composer has spent her life trying to bring image and music together. In her parental home she was less interested in music than in the visual arts. Her father was a church art restorer and “Heller church painting” was well known in Ludwigshafen for generations. Barbara Heller studied music in Mannheim and Munich, and from 1958 to 1962 she taught piano at the Mannheim Music Academy.
In 2019 she received the Darmstadt Music Prize.
One focus of Barbara Heller’s work is piano music. She writes a large number of works for piano lessons, which, in addition to technical skills, also aim to convey general musical knowledge. The fun of playing comes first, in addition there is ample but unobtrusive opportunity for learning. Barbara Heller’s piano pieces should not only be interpreted simply. While “playing” the students also learn how to creatively deal with the music and to do experiments. Many pieces encourage you to change them according to your mood. Barbara Heller wants to encourage the students to discover their own musical world.
Barbara Heller’s music is characterized by great stylistic richness and an awareness of tradition as the basis for further development: serious and passionate, impulsive and playful, rigorously worked or with a great deal of freedom to improvise. Her works, which can be written in a traditional or graphic manner, are characterized by openness and a love of experimentation.
Barbara Heller lives and works alternately in Darmstadt, in the Odenwald and on the island of La Gomera. The sounds of nature and the environment are often inspiration for her compositions. Communication in music and music as a diary: Here Barbara Heller meets with “her sister in spirit” Fanny Hensel, by whom she edited and performed some of the piano works. Click here for your works.
