Death of the composer Cristóbal Halffter
The Spanish composer Cristóbal Halffter, who also taught at the Bern Conservatory in the 1980s - his students included Christian Henking, Jean-Luc Darbellay and David Philipp Hefti - has died in Ponferrada at the age of 91.
Halffter was born in Madrid in 1930 and spent part of his childhood in Germany. From 1939 to 1951, he studied piano, music theory, harmony and composition in Madrid. In 1961, he became a teacher of composition and formal theory at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid. He was director of the institute from 1964 to 1966.
In 1970, he began teaching and conducting at the University of Navarra. In 1976 he was a lecturer at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, after having worked with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio on several occasions in the 1960s, and in 1979 he became director of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation's Studio for Electronic Music in Freiburg im Breisgau.
In 2009, he received the Spanish Fundacion-BBVA's "Frontiers of Knowledge" prize, endowed with 400,000 euros, in the contemporary music category. In 2014, he was awarded the Culture Prize of the City of Kiel.
