Toshiro Mayuzumi

Toshiro Mayuzumi (黛 敏郎 Mayuzumi Toshirō, born Yokohama, 20 February 1929 – died Kawasaki, 10 April 1997) was a Japanese composer.

Contents

Biography

Mayuzumi was a student of Tomojiro Ikenouchi at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music immediately following the Second World War, before going to Europe where he attended the Paris Conservatoire national supérieur de musique.

He was initially enthusiastic about avant-garde Western music, especially that of Varèse, but beginning in 1957 he turned to pan-Asianism for new sonorous material (Herd 1989, 133). Like the novelist Mishima Yukio, whose novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion he set as an opera (Kinkakuji, 1976), Mayuzumi opposed the westernization of Japan and tried to emphasize his native cultural identity in his work.

A prolific composer for the cinema, he composed more than a hundred film scores between Waga ya wa tanoshi (It's Great to Be Young) in 1951 and Jo no mai in 1984. The best-known film with a score by Mayuzumi is probably The Bible: In the Beginning (1966). He also wrote many pieces for wind band that have been recorded by the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra.

Mayuzumi was the recipient of a Suntory Music Award in 1996.

Works

Operas

Note about Kinkakuji

This is a German-language opera, Der Tempelbrand, to a libretto by Claus Henneberg. In three acts, and set in Japan in the 1940s, it dramatizes Yukio Mishima's 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Japanese: 金閣寺, Kinkakuji), recounting events in the life of an arsonist monk who in 1950 destroyed the 600-year-old gold-leafed wooden temple of that name in Kyoto. Scored for chorus and full orchestra, the opera has these principal roles: Hure (Whore), Mädchen (Girl) and Mutter (Mother), all sopranos; Kashiwagi, the monk's close friend, tenor; Mizoguchi, the protagonist, baritone; and Abt Dosen, bass. There are several supporting roles as well. The work was commissioned by and premiered at the Deutsche Oper, West Berlin, in 1976. Live recordings were made in Tokyo in 1991 (with Ohnuma/Kameda/Kurata/Katsube/Yamaguchi, conducted by Iwaki, issued on Fontec) and in New York in 1995 (with Yu/Ruggles/Sorensen/Perry-E/Corteggiano, conducted by Colaneri, not issued commercially).

Ballet

Orchestral works

Ensemble/Instrumental works

Electronic music

Film scores

Sources

External links