14 Facts About Hugo Distler

Hugo Distler studied there with Martienssen, Gunther Ramin and Grabner.

Hugo Distler became the organist at St Jacobi in Lubeck in 1931.

In October 1933 Hugo Distler was appointed head of the chamber music department at the Lubeck Conservatory, and at about the same time he began teaching at the Spandauer Kirchenmusikschule.

In 1937 Hugo Distler was appointed as a lecturer at the Wurttemberg Hochschule fur Musik in Stuttgart, where he directed its two choirs.

Hugo Distler became increasingly depressed owing to the deaths of friends, aerial attacks, restrictions placed upon his teaching, a sense of isolation, and the constant threat of conscription into the German Army, all of it culminating in his suicide in Berlin at the age of 34.

Hugo Distler enjoyed his first success in 1935 at the official Kassel Music Days.

Hugo Distler achieved his greatest public success in 1939 at the German Choral Music Festival in Graz, when the Stuttgart Hochschule choir gave the premiere of sections from the Morike-Chorliederbuch; the event was regarded as the climax of the festival, but the dissemination of the work took place only after the war.

Hugo Distler composed chamber pieces, works for solo piano and two concertos, but he is known mostly for his sacred choral music and as a champion of Neo-Baroque music.

Hugo Distler's works are a re-invention of old forms and genres, rich with word painting, based on the music of Heinrich Schutz and other early composers.

Hugo Distler's music is polyphonic and frequently melismatic, often based on the pentatonic scale.

Hugo Distler's works remain "tonally anchored", while at the same time they "reveal an innovative harmonic sense".

Hugo Distler is recognized as "one of the most significant German composers of his generation".

Hugo Distler is often associated with other German neo-Baroque choral composers, including Johann Nepomuk David, Ernst Pepping and Wolfgang Fortner.

Hugo Distler's style was spread by choirs in Germany and abroad during the years after World War II, stimulating and influencing other later composers.