PETER SCHUBACK was born in Täby on March 31, 1947. He was educated as a cellist at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and complemented his studies under Mainardi and Palm, and with Tortellier in Paris, where he also worked after completing his education. In 1972, he visited Brazil for the first time, and he has often returned and worked there for long periods. In Sweden, he was a founding member of the ensemble Harpans Kraft (“The Power of the Harp”) in 1971. From 1973-1975, he taught both cello and composition at the Malmö Academy of Music. Since 1975, he has been active as a freelance artist, performing a great number of concerts, mostly as a solo cellist. These concerts have mostly taken place outside of Sweden and consisted of works written directly for him, as well as more traditional pieces such as the solo suites of Bach, which he always uses as a starting point in his musical work.

Schuback the composer has mostly been educated through his work with other composers. Among the circa 140 works currently on his list of opuses, about ten are for cello. The other works, mostly chamber music, have been written for different settings such as solo works, string quartets, mixed ensembles, and even some so-called open scores. One can also find orchestral music, tape music, and a chamber opera, Ku, with a text by Hans Abrahamsson, among his works. In 1972-73 he composed his first cello concerto, and in 1978 came the second. In Memorias di una fantasma (which does not attempt to express anything other than nothing) was created as a complement to the third cello concerto, Canto di spettro, which was premiered in Montreal in 1984.

Among the works Schuback himself deems best are Windows 1900, for chamber ensemble (1995), which is part of a triptych also including his solo sonata for cello and the saxophone quartet Correntes (1998); Tramontata e la luna (1991), to texts by Sappho and commissioned by the Goethe Institute; Entre Goethe e Webern (1999), commissioned by the state of France; Orpheus (1987) and Canti di Euridici (1987-91), both commissioned by the Swedish Radio; and the guitar triptych Serenata, La Notte, Ora del lupo (2000), and Zehn Studien (1992). In his later work, such as Aporias (2000), he searches for ways to “destructuralize” the structure of the music. It is a way of dealing with the impossible and an attempt at creating a tonal language free from both boredom and grimaces.
Stig Jacobsson (rev 2000), Engl. translation: George Kentros