Walter Deutsch

Austrian composer, hairdresser, musicologist, pianist and radio and TV presenter Walter Deutsch was born in Bozen (Bolzano, Italy) on 29 April 1923 and grew up in the South Tyrol. He began his career as a hairdresser, joined the army, was posted to North Africa, captured and became a prisoner of war in the USA. When he returned to Austria in 1946, he studied music teaching in Innsbruck, then, in Vienna, composition with Alfred Uhl, conducting with Hans Swarowsky and piano with Franz Eibner.

His first post-war job was as a ballet répétiteur at the Vienna Volksoper, where he began to study and analyse folk material and conduct field research, becoming a pioneer in modern folk music research.

His output as a composer included three operas, ballets, dances, marches, choir arrangements, cantatas, piano music, chamber music and some songs to poems and other texts by Emil Breisach,

Deutsch was also a popular radio and TV presenter for ORF.

Walter Deutsch died in Vienna on 13 January 2025, aged a-hundred-and-one.

 

A selection of articles about Walter Deutsch

Classical music news - January 2025 Obituaries - Our summary of those the classical music world has lost this month