Christoph Delz

3.1.1950 - 13.9.1993

Born in Basel, Christoph Delz received his teachers and piano diploma for concert before his undergraduate education at the Humanities College. Between 1974 and 1989 he lived in Cologne where he studied piano under Aloys Kontarsky, composition under Karlheinz Stockhausen, electronic composition under Hans Ulrich Humpert and conducting under Volker Wangenheim, he graduated in 1981. He studied composition further under Henri Pousseur in Lüttich. From 1989 until his death Delz lived as a freelance composer in Riehen, Basel. Besides his activities as a pianist performing his own works he also performed, often in world premiere performances, the music of numerous other contemporary composers, as well as being committed to the more standard repertoire of Schumann, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Debussy and Schoenberg. From his eighteen years of compositional output Delz left behind a relatively small oeuvre where works for choir and piano concertos take precedence. Having always been interested in heterogeneity and the inclusion of stylistic quotes and the more distressing fragments from daily life, Delz stressed these moments in his final work ‘Istanbul’ such that decay and decomposition become the guiding principle in the compositional process. His illness due to AIDS is not so much a subjective element in the work, but becomes objectivised in a more ancestral spirit, hailing perhaps from the world of Constantinople / Istanbul; a spirit that is present in all religions and throughout all epochs, at once destroying and renewing.

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