Berger, Roman

Berger, Roman, Slovak composer and writer on music; b. Cieszyn, Poland, Aug. 9, 1930. He was the son of an evangelical pastor. His youth was disrupted by the Nazi attack on Poland in 1939, and he later was sent to the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. Following his liberation at the end of World War II, he entered the State Higher School of Music in Katowice in 1945. In 1952 he and his family were forced to leave Poland, and they settled in Bratislava, where he studied piano (graduated, 1956) and composition (graduated, 1965) at the Academy of Music and Drama. He also worked at the Cons, there until 1966. In 1967–68 he was secretary of the composers’ section of the Union of Slovak Composers. From 1969 to 1971 he worked in the dept. of theory at the Academy of Music and Drama, but then was expelled from the Union of Slovak Composers and was left unemployed. In 1980 he was able to find employment in the Art History Inst. of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. However, his theoretical writings led him to be classified as a dissident and subjected to harassment by the Communist authorities. With the collapse of the Communist regime in the wake of the “Velvet Revolution” in 1989, he served as a member of the advisory board of the Ministry of Culture until 1991, the year he left his position at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In 1967 he received the Ján Levoslav Bella Prize for composition, in 1967 the prize and in 1990 the diploma of the Czechoslovak Music Critics for composition, and in 1988 the Herder Prize of the Univ. of Vienna for his compositions and writings on theory. His works are formally well disciplined, melodically atonal, and harmonically complex.