Walter Steffens (composer)

In addition to literature, the visual arts also provide Steffens with important sources of inspiration. The book Vom Klang der Bilder, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart from 6 July to 22 September 1985, has an appendix with a list of paintings set to music by Steffens and other composers. Steffens’ orchestral work Guernica, after the painting by Picasso, is a timeless indictment of the terrors of war and violence, expressed in music. The initial silence at the beginning of the work gradually takes on elements of sound, swelling towards a sonorous crescendo, an ominous audio-pictorial intimation of the approaching fighter-bombers, before the viola intones its elegiac theme. Because of its graphic qualities, the score pages of Guernica were included in the 1986 exhibition Linien, Briefe, Notationen (Lines, Letters, Notations) at the Städtischen Galerie Lüdenscheid. The pictures of Ju 52 bombers incorporated into the score, together with the inclusion of background sounds of "extreme brutality," transpose traumatic experiences into visual impressions. In the afterword to the score Steffens writes,

Eli, Op. 7, after the mystery play by Nelly Sachs, which premiered under the direction of Wilhelm Schüchter in 1967, was commissioned by the City of Dortmund on the occasion of the opening of its new opera house. Under Milk Wood, Op. 14 (Unter dem Milchwald, 1972), based on the "play for voices" by Dylan Thomas, premiered at the Hamburg State Opera in 1973 and staged again by Staatstheater Kassel in 1977 on the occasion of the opening of the documenta 7. His other operas include Der Philosoph, Op. 57 (The Philosopher, Landestheater Detmold 1990), Die Judenbuche, Op. 65 (The Jew's Beech, Opernhaus Dortmund 1992), based on a novel by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and Two Cells in Sevilla, Op. 106 on a libretto by his son Marec Béla Steffens (Greenbriar Consortium Houston and Round Top Theatre Forum 2016, on CD: Navona Records 2018).

When the family was re-united again and the family's piano, which had been stored safely in the Sauerland during the war, was returned to their home, the young boy was allowed to accompany his father while singing. Walter was given his first music lessons by a woman from the neighborhood. He received his basic musical education from the music director Max Spindler in Dortmund, and this was supplemented by conducting lessons with Rolf Agop, at the Dortmund Conservatory. In Hamburg he studied composition under Ernst-Gernot Klussmann and the Busoni-pupil Philipp Jarnach as well as music theory under Wilhelm Maler. "I was only able to convince my father about my plans for a musical career after I had finished my school leaving examinations in Münster and passed the entrance examinations for the Hamburg University of Music in 1959", Steffens recalls. He began his teaching career in 1962 at the Hamburg Conservatory.

Walter Steffens (born 31 October 1934) is a German composer. He is noted for the diversity of his creative works, but has specialised in opera, such as Eli, as well as music inspired by paintings.