H. E. Erwin Walther

H. E. Erwin Walther was born in 1920 in Amberg in the Upper Palatinate. His father, Ernst Walther (a student of Joseph Rheinberger, excellent pianist, a decade-long church organist and longtime choir director), taught his son from his early youth to the piano, harmonica, music history and composition. Erwin played piano with four, violin with eight, viola with thirteen and Waldhorn with sixteen years. After the Abitur, he was admitted to the State Conservatory in Würzburg with his own violinsonate in the master class of Prof. Zilcher. At the same time, he studied musicology at Oskar Kaul, counterpoint with Hans Schindler and in the Nebenfach Viola with Karl Bender, and as a guest speaker, philosophy, German studies and medicine. After the examination (1941) Walther was conscripted. As early as 1943, after a serious injury, he was released and sent to Bayreuth for the student's guidance by way of a compulsory service obligation for wounded academics. In addition to his studies and beginnings as a composer, Erwin Walther worked as a practicing musician. Already during his studies, he belonged as a violinist, a. The Hemlock Quartet and the Sturm Quartet in Nuremberg. The press called him a "pianist of rank" in 1949. As such, he taught studiocrites in the years 1949 to 1951, in which he used the art of (almost forgotten) improvisation. For the studios founded by Gerd Winkler in Amberg in 1950, he wrote stage music for numerous performances (among others works by Sartre, Cocteau, Brecht, etc.) as a "house composer". He was a co-founder of the Amberger Jazzclub, and since 1960 he had received numerous assignments for television films and radio productions. The stylistic and generic variety of his extensive work makes him a difficult artist. Freedom and independence determined his life as well as his work. With the literature, he has devoted himself to his life composition. H. E. Erwin Walther died in 1995 in Amberg.