Rudolf George Escher

Rudolf Escher (8 January 1912 in Amsterdam – 17 March 1980 in De Koog) was a Dutch composer and music theorist.

At the age of four, Escher moved with his family to Batavia, Dutch East Indies, where his father worked as a geologist for the Batavian Petroleum Company.

Escher went to the Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden and continued his piano lessons, now with Bé Hartz.

[1] When the Second World War expanded into the Netherlands, many of Escher's compositions from his study period were destroyed in the bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940.

[2] About the compositions from the war, he wrote: 'My work from this period has got a sort of gravity, a doggedness here and there, which makes it clearly to realize as grown amid disasters.

For me, personally, that is the ethical significance of it: they are constructions of the mind, in a time that 'mind' (if you can still call it that way) is used almost exclusively for destructive purposes.’[3] Soon after the war Escher was a contributor about visual arts and music for the weekly Groene Amsterdammer.

Socially he had little to complain about; he was offered several administrative functions, his compositions were successfully performed, and his publications were followed with interest.

He wrote a few critiques for the monthly communist periodical Politics and Culture, using the pseudonym A. Leuvens.

He gave a lecture "characteristic structure- and form criteria in the music of the twentieth century."

[5] In 1992 the Centrum Nederlandse Muziek published correspondence between Escher and the composer Peter Schat, 33 letters and postcards written between 13 May 1958 and 5 August 1961.

The letters give insight to Dutch history, aesthetics, and theory of the 20th-century music, from the inception to the reception of serialism.

[6] In the year of the publication of the correspondence Peter Schat published a letter to the dead Escher.

[7] In 1999 David Moore wrote that Escher is one of the most prominent Dutch composers of the previous generation.

[8] Leo Samama was also laudatory when we mentioned Escher's work: "Together with the 'Sinfonia per dieci strumenti' (1973/75), the 'Flute sonata' (1976/79) and the 'Trio for clarinet, viola and piano' (1978/79), the 'Wind Quintet' belongs to the works of a master – one of the few our country has known - of an artist that has developed such a personal language, a personal grammar, a personal sound, that every statement about French or German influences, about old or new music, about place and time are futile and meaningless.

In 1946 he got the Music prize of the city of Amsterdam for his orchestral work Musique pour l'esprit en deuil, yet before the first performance sounded.

He also received the Music price of the city of Amsterdam for Le vrai visage de la paix for choir a cappella.