BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

 

Hendrik Hofmeyr, who has been described as South Africa's most performed composer of Classical music, was born in Cape Town on 20 November 1957.

 

His first major success as a composer came in 1988 with the performance at the State Theatre of 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' which won the South African Opera Competition and was also awarded the Nederburg Opera Prize. In the same year, Hofmeyr, who was furthering his studies in Italy during ten years of self-imposed exile as a conscientious objector, obtained first prize in an international competition in Trent with music for a short film by Wim Wenders.

 

In 1992 he accepted a post as lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch, and in 1997 won two further international competitions, the Queen Elisabeth Competition of Belgium (with 'Raptus' for violin and orchestra) and the Dimitri Mitropoulos Competition in Athens (with 'Byzantium' for high voice and orchestra).

 

Hofmeyr retired in 2022 as Professor and Head of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Cape Town, where he obtained his Doctorate in 1999. His 'Incantesimo' for flute was chosen to represent South Africa at the Congress of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Croatia in 2005, and in 2008 he was honoured with a Kanna Award by the Kleinkaroo National Arts Festival. He received the UCT Creative Arts Award for his Second Symphony – The Elements in 2018, and his opera 'Sara Baartman' was premiered in Cape Town in 2022. Hofmeyr’s oeuvre comprises operas, ballets, symphonies, concerti and numerous vocal and instrumental works, and includes some 140 commissioned works. More than 80 of his works have been issued on CD; in 2021, the CD 'Partita africana,' comprising six of his works, was chosen as Discovery of the Month by the French magazine Classica; in 2023, another CD featuring three of his works was selected as Contemporary CD of the Week on Radio France.

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E-MAIL ADDRESS: hendrik.hofmeyr@uct.ac.za

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ARTICLES: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hendrik_Hofmeyr">Hendrik Hofmeyr on ResearchGate</a>