HANS GEFORS’ development from young seeker to established discoverer in the realm of music has entailed a number of metamorphoses and unexpected turns in his compositorial career. As a young composer, he attempted to find answers in the work of other composers and in several other disciplines – a still healthy theoretical curiosity led him to Per Nörgård’s eternal series and modern astrology, as well as quantum physics and philosophy. A great inspiration, which eventually became the most important complement to his musical thinking, has been literature and poetry. This, coupled with his interest in melodic thought and dramaturgy, led him to the realm of opera at a time when Swedish musical drama led a dwindling existence and the classical operatic form was an aberration. In his own fashion, Gefors challenged the dominant trend of the time as he began to research exactly what it was that caused a text and a piece of music to become good opera. His determined work with this form has to date resulted in four full-length operas and several smaller music dramatic works, song cycles, and works for choir. His first full-length opera was Christina, which was commissioned and premiered by the Royal Opera in 1986. The libretto was by Lars Forssell. After this came a commission for the May Festival in Wiesbaden in 1992 – Der Park, to a text by Botho Strauss. Clara, to a text by Jean-Claude Carrière, was written for the 100th anniversary of the Opéra-Comique in Salle Favart, and was premiered in connection with this anniversary at the storied theatre in Paris in 1998. Hans Gefors’ increasingly sophisticated understanding of the dramatic elements of texts set to music has also colored the instrumental music he has written in between his large operatic works. The common denominator in this development has been a downscaling of the theoretical work and the construction of mathematical models that do not contribute directly to the quality of the music. Instead, he has concentrated on an intuitively understandable and exactly formulated expression alongside a thoroughly worked musical form. In all he writes, man and the human voice are the measuring sticks – these never-ending sources and mirrors of all our sensory development.

Hans Gefors was born in 1952 in Stockholm, has lived in Helsingborg and Copenhagen, and now resides in Lund. From 1972 to 1977, he studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, where he also received his diploma. Aside from his work as a composer, Hans Gefors has been active as a music journalist and as editor of the Dansk Musiktidsskrift (Danish Music Journal). In 1988, he was named professor of composition at the Malmö Academy of Music, a position he held until 2001. He holds a number of directorships, and is a member of the jury for the Polar Music Prize. Hans Gefors has received among other awards the Litteris et Artibus in 2000, and the Christ Johnson Music Prize, the major Prize for the song cycle Njutningen (”The Enjoyment”) in 2003 and the minor Prize in 1994 for the orchestral work Twine.