Mark Andre

Mark Andre, who is composer-in-residence at  Lucerne Festival Summer 2026, was born in Paris in 1964. He studied composition at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Paris, working with Claude Ballif and Gérard Grisey, and also pursued musicology at the École normale supérieure and the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours. He completed his doctorate in 1993 with a dissertation titled “Le compossible musical de l’Ars subtilior.” He also studied with Helmut Lachenmann in Stuttgart and at SWR Experimentalstudio, where he was mentored by André Richard. This was followed by a series of fellowships, including at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and Frankfurt Opera, as well as such awards as the Kranichstein Music Prize (1996), First Prize at the International Stuttgart Composition Competition (1997), the Frankfurt Opera Composition Prize (2001), and the Support Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2002). He was a participant in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2005 and has resided in Berlin since then; from 2008 to 2010, he was a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome. The world premiere of his three-part music theater work …22,13… at the Munich Biennale in 2004 brought widespread attention. In 2014, Sylvain Cambreling premiered Andre’s opera wunderzaichen at the Stuttgart Staatsoper. Major works of the past decade include the clarinet concerto über, written for Jörg Widmann and awarded the Orchestra Prize at the Donaueschingen Musiktage; the trilogy riss, composed for Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and Ensemble intercontemporain; the 40-minute solo double bass work iv 18 “Sie fürchteten sich nämlich”; and the cycles rwh 1–4 and Vier Echographien. He has been featured as composer-in-residence at the Salzburg Mozartwoche (2011) and at the Vienna Musikverein (2022-23). Mark Andre is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Saxon Academy of the Arts, and an honorary member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts; in 2012, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He was appointed Professor of Composition at the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music in Dresden in 2009 and has taught regularly at the Darmstadt Summer Courses since 1998. His works are published by Edition Peters.

Januar 2026