A film by Reiner E. Moritz

“Hans Zender belongs to the last of that generation of composers who drove the establishment of a new music after WWII. Modernity and tradition were the two strands of his artistic career, music, making, composition and reflexion on music were the leading subjects of his untiring mental activity.”

(Max Nyffeler, music critic)

In 2018, the author Max Nyffeler and the filmmaker Reiner E. Moritz managed to convince Hans Zender, who was already suffering from health problems at the time, to look back at his long and successful career. For several days, Hans Zender remembered the highlights of his career, interpreting a very special painting from his valuable collection of Japanese calligraphy and complaining that “our school education, based exclusively on scientific positivism and economic usefulness, is proving to be incapable of taking on a task which in the older generations still fulfilled the bourgeois family: to respectfully cultivate great music as a central phenomenon of the creative human spirit”. Looking back on an extraordinary career as composer, conductor and essayist Hans Zender talks about his life at the spectacular “Glaserhäusle” overlooking Lake Constance. Including performances of Scelsi, Lachenmann, Messiaen, Zimmermann and many more. An impressive documentary about the musician Hans Zender.

Featuring Hans Zender, Gertrud Zender, Helmut Lachenmann und Frank Gerhardt