Thomas de Hartmann

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thomas Alexandrovich de Hartmann (1885 - 28 March 1956) was a Russian composer and prominent student and collaborator of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Thomas de Hartmann was born in Koruzhevka, east of Kiev, Ukraine in 1885. At the age of eighteen he received his diploma from the Conservatory at St Petersburg. He studied conducting in Munich with Felix Mottl before World War I.

[edit] Association with Gurdjieff

Thomas de Hartmann was already an acclaimed composer in Russia when he first met Gurdjieff in 1916 in St. Petersburg. From 1917 to 1929 he was a pupil and confidant of Gurdjieff. During that time, at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris, de Hartmann transcribed and co-wrote much of the music that Gurdjieff collected and used for his movements exercises. De Hartmann wrote Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff together with his wife Olga de Hartmann who was Gurdjieff's personal secretary for many years.

He died on 28 March 1956, New York City, New York, USA. After her husband's death, Olga collected many of Gurdjieff's early talks in the book Views from the Real World (1973). Olga died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1979.

[edit] Music

De Hartmann’s four-act ballet La Fleurette Rouge was performed in 1906. Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, and Michel Fokine were principal roles in performances at the Imperial opera houses of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

He composed the music for Wassily Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound.

The music he wrote with Gurdjieff was later adapted for the 1979 Peter Brook film Meetings with Remarkable Men by Laurence Rosenthal.

[edit] Recordings

  • The Music of Gurdjieff/de Hartmann, Three Disc Set, Triangle Records, TCD1001-1003, 1989

[edit] External links

 This article on a European composer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Languages