Manfred Trojahn
Manfred Trojahn numbers among the most important German composers of the present day and has been repeatedly honored for his works, including in 2009 with the GEMA German Music Authors Award. His operas have attained a firm place in the repertoire.
Manfred Trojahn continued his flute studies, begun in Brunswick, at the Hamburg College of Music and Theater under Karlheinz Zöller, In Hamburg, he additionally studied composition with Diether de la Motte and conducting with Albert Bittner. In 1979/80 he was a scholarship holder at the Villa Massimo in Rome.
His oeuvre encompasses music theatre, orchestral and choral works, solo concertos, as well as art songs and chamber music. His operas Enrico (Schwetzingen Festival 1991), What You Will (Bavarian State Opera Munich 1998), and Limes from Sicily (Opera Cologne 2003) have been produced at numerous theaters in Germany, Holland, and Austria. In 2002 Manfred Trojahn composed recitatives to Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito for National Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam. In 2008 La Grande Magia after Eduardo de Filippo was premiered at Dresden’s Semper Opera, in 2011 Orestes on his own libretto at the Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam. In 2020, Trojahn composed the ‘reflective scene’ Ein Brief (A Letter), based on the text of the same title by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which premiered at the Bonn Opera. In 2022, Eurydice – Die Liebenden, blind (Eurydice – The Lovers, Blind) was staged at the National Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam and was awarded an Oper!Award for best world premiere, followed in 2023 by the chamber opera Septembersonate (September Sonata) at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf.
He has been honored with numerous composer portraits, including at Düsseldorf’s Tonhalle, ORF Vienna, in the Brucknerhaus Linz, at the Hamburg State Opera and, most recently, at the Würzburg Mozart Festival 2025.
From 1991 to 2017 Manfred Trojahn was Professor of Composition at the Robert Schumann College of Music in Düsseldorf, and from 2004 to 2006 president of the German Composers Association. He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of the Arts, the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science and the Arts, and the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Moreover, he has conducted the Munich Philharmonic, the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg, and the MDR Symphony Orchestra. As an essayist, he has commented on numerous aesthetic and music-political issues.
He lives in Düsseldorf and Paris.
From 1972 to 1977 Trojahn’s works were published by Sikorski. He subsequently moved to Bärenreiter Verlag. Since 2019 Boosey & Hawkes has assumed responsibility for his new pieces.
September 2025
This biography can be reproduced free of charge in concert programmes with the following credit: Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
