Unconventional biography
Corinne Holtz has chosen a dual perspective for the first, extremely detailed biography of Klaus Huber.
Writing a biography of Klaus Huber is not easy. The personality of the composer, who died in 2017, was just as, shall we say, problem-oriented as his work, which was riddled with productive contradictions and ruptures.
Corinne Holtz was the first to make the attempt and chose an unconventional form for her biography. Four of the eight chapters are written from the composer's first-person perspective, which places him in an almost intimate proximity to the reader. At first glance, this looks like literary fiction, but it is largely documented correctly with countless footnotes. The composite ego that emerges is a puzzle of written and oral statements by Huber, letters, diary entries and conversations with his descendants, much of it unpublished.
Corinne Holtz's meticulous research also brought many private details of Huber's life to light. His daughter Katharina Rikus willingly opened the family archives for this purpose. The part about his childhood and youth, which were dominated by a strict and by no means exemplary father, is revealing - a classic superego from which the late starter as a composer was never quite able to free himself.
Unfortunately, the works are somewhat neglected in the detailed biography. Only the opera Black earth whose production at the Theater Basel in 2001 the author accompanied as a journalist. In an entire chapter, apparently a by-catch of her research at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, she searches for traces of Sacher and the Nazis, which smells somewhat of the moral socialism so eagerly cultivated among the Swiss cultural left and seems like a foreign body here.
The extensive documentation with notes, sources and bibliography takes up over a hundred pages, a third of the book. A tremendous feat of diligence with a claim to completeness, but one that can probably never be fully realized in a case as complex as Huber's.
Corinne Holtz: World in the work. Klaus Huber (1924-2017), Biography, 309 p., Fr. 54.00, Schwabe, Basel 2024, ISBN 978-3-7965-5148-2
More detailed version of this review: beckmesser.info/klaus-huber-biographisch-seziert/
