No composer in the Netherlands was as influential as Louis Andriessen (1939-2021)
by Frits van der Waa, first published in deVolkskrant
Louis Andriessen, Holland’s most famous composer, has died. Friends and colleagues have confirmed this to de Volkskrant. He suffered from Alzheimer's disease and passed away Thursday night in a nursing home in Weesp. He was 82 years old.
In Louis Andriessen the Netherlands had, for the first time since Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), a composer who not only counted internationally, but who also had something to say. The number of foreign music students who came to the Netherlands especially to study with him must add up to a hundred, and Andriessen also gave many a course abroad. He owed this world fame first and foremost to his own pioneering style, which was embodied in large-scale compositions such as De Staat, De Tijd and De Materie and operas such as Writing to Vermeer and La Commedia.
In his own country, he was also known as a composer of smaller-scale work and music for theatre, ballet and film. He was the central figure, if not the founder, of what since the 1980s has been called the Hague School.
Andriessen was born on 6 June 1939 in Utrecht, as the youngest son of the renowned composer Hendrik Andriessen. ‘I still have the feeling that my father is looking over my shoulder when I compose,’ he said in 1992, when he was already over fifty.
In his first published composition, a flute sonata in French neo-classical style, composed at the age of 18, his father’s influence still prevailed, but within a year, with Séries for two pianos, young Louis showed that he wanted to go his own way. That road led to the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where he studied with Kees van Baaren, and then to Italy, where he took lessons with Luciano Berio.
In the sixties, Andriessen revealed himself more and more as a politically engaged composer. This made him a guiding force in the development of the later Dutch ensemble culture. In 1969, he was one of the five composers responsible for the anti-capitalist, collectively composed opera Reconstruction (the others were Misha Mengelberg, Peter Schat, Reinbert de Leeuw and Jan van Vlijmen). He was also a member of the Notenkrakers, the action group at the time that opposed what they saw as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s too conservative programme policy.
Andriessen came to the conclusion that you could only change the music system by also changing the music and the way it was performed. From his close cooperation with musicians emerged the now defunct but equally illustrious and noisy ensembles De Volharding and Hoketus, both named after the works Andriessen wrote for them.
Andriessen’s music from that period was a response to American minimal music, in which he first of all rejected the sweet-voiced surface of that style. The repetitive, yet angular and dissonant sounds of his work were soon regarded as essential characteristics of the Hague School, the group of composers at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague to which, besides Andriessen, Cornelis de Bondt, Diderik Wagenaar and Gilius van Bergeijk also belonged.
Andriessen made his international breakthrough with the large-scale piece De Staat in 1976. This was followed by a series of monumental and gradually less minimalist compositions that also attracted attention. At the same time Andriessen composed various smaller works, including several music theatre pieces in collaboration with the theatre group Baal. In this music, like his great example Stravinsky, he could indulge in musical mimicry and all kinds of stylistic pastiches, to which he nevertheless always gave his own twist.
A textbook example is the contrary Mattheus Passie from 1976, in which he creates a fusion between Bach, Weill and tearjerkers, but not without adding his own fingerprints. These two lines came together in the 1989 music theatre work De Materie (Matter), a four-part work in which almost all the main characters originate from Dutch history, such as Hadewych and Piet Mondriaan.
From the 1990s onwards, Andriessen’s fame rose rapidly, to which his collaboration with theatre and film makers such as Bob Wilson, Peter Greenaway and Hal Hartley certainly contributed. Although his pupils came from far and wide, his work mainly found resonance in Anglo-Saxon countries.
One of his last major works was the opera Theatre of the World, which was premiered in 2016 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Reinbert de Leeuw. Andriessen combined stylistic exuberance with a preference for weightless sounds and ethereal beauty, which became increasingly prominent in his later work.
His very last piece was May, a requiem for his bosom friend, the recorder player and conductor Frans Brüggen (1934-2014), based on the poem Mei (May) by Herman Gorter. When the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and chamber choir Cappella Amsterdam premiered it on 5 December 2020, the composer was already living in a care facility. Andriessen suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. His student Martijn Padding had helped him complete the instrumentation.
Andriessen lived in Amsterdam for almost his entire adult life and shared it for almost fifty years with his great love Jeanette Yanikian, who died in 2008. In 2012, he remarried the violinist Monica Germino. He usually spent his mornings composing. In the afternoon, he would teach, and then between 5 and 6 he would take a health nap. The next morning, he would first of all scrutinise the previous day’s production, because as he said: ‘Good notes need a night’s sleep’.
This self-criticism has led to a multiform, but high-quality oeuvre that testifies to a never-ending belief in music’s expressive powers, whether it be a complete opera or a few minutes’ piano piece written as a birthday present.
