Peter Schat, Acting and Blundering in Freedom
Peter Schat, who died of prostate cancer in Amsterdam on 3 February 2003, was still active enough just before his death to be able to prepare a lecture about the disturbed relationship between composer and publisher, which was a painful issue throughout his entire career. Schat was argumentative and extremely independent, and as a result he often clashed with his former teacher Kees van Baren, his fellow students and even with his fellow ‘partners-in-crime’, the notorious ‘Nutcrackers’, who protested against the artistic policy of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
In the ‘Year of Music’ 1985 all Van Baren's pupils got together (besides Schat, there were Van Vlijmen, Ketting, Mengelberg and Van den Booren; only Andriessen was missing). In a debate, Schat referred as a turning point to the work involved in the collective opera Reconstruction (Reconstructie) in 1969, a morality tale based on the writings of Hugo Claus and Harry Mulisch. The American President Nixon avoided visiting The Hague when on a visit to Europe because of the imminent launch of this homage to Che Guevara. The opera had an unusual form: through its subject matter it followed the letters of the alphabet, and for the ‘z’ Schat chose ‘zingen’, meaning ‘singing’ in the Dutch language, whereas his colleagues would have preferred ‘zwijgen’, meaning ‘silence’ in Dutch. In fact, it ironically turned into ‘zeuren’ (‘nagging’)!
Schat was at home in the theatre, and no other Dutch composer has written so many successful operas. It seemed a natural progression that he should have founded STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music). This studio gave birth to the Amsterdams Electrisch Circus, which played in parks and other public places. It was with good reason that fragments of the opera Labyrint received awards in 1963 and 1964 and that his 1980 opera Monkey Subdues the White-Bone Demon (Aap verslaat de knekelgeest) won the Fontein-Tuinhout prize and the Carl Maria von Weber Prize in Dresden. In 1990 the Joost van den Vondel Prize of the Westfälische Wilhelmsuniversität was added to the list of honours.
At about the same time the subsidies for his work were cut off. The reason was that after
Serenade in 1984 he began to compose increasingly in the romantic style, and so - based also on his music for
The Tone Clock (De Toonklok) - it was decided that he
Peter Schat (1935-2003).
was no longer capable of the high quality of his earlier, more radical compositions.
However, this turning point in his oeuvre had actually occurred much earlier, in 1969, the year of Reconstruction, and particularly in the provo-piece entitled