Hendrik Hofmeyr

Hendrik Hofmeyr, who has been described as South Africa’s most performed composer of Classical music, was born in Cape Town in 1957. He achieved his first major success as a composer in 1988 with the performance at the State Theatre of The Fall of the House of Usher, which won the South African Opera Competition and the Nederburg Opera Prize. In the same year, Hofmeyr, who was furthering his studies in Italy during ten years of self-imposed political exile, obtained first prize in an international competition in Trent with music for a short film by Wim Wenders. In 1992 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch, and in 1997 won two further international competitions, the Queen Elisabeth Competition of Belgium (with Raptus for violin and orchestra) and the Dimitri Mitropoulos Competition in Athens (with Byzantium for high voice and orchestra). Until his retirement at the end of 2022, Hofmeyr was Professor and Head of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Cape Town, where he obtained his Doctorate in 1999. His Incantesimo was chosen to represent South Africa at the Congress of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Croatia in 2005, and in 2008 he was honored with a Kanna Award by the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival. He received the UCT Creative Arts Award for his Second Symphony – The Elements in 2018, and his opera Sara Baartman was premiered in Cape Town in 2022. Hofmeyr’s oeuvre comprises operas, ballets, symphonies, concerti and numerous vocal and instrumental works, and includes some 140 commissioned works. Many of his works have been published abroad, and more than 80 have been issued on CD; in 2021, the CD Partita africana, comprising six of his works, was chosen as Discovery of the Month by the French magazine Classica; in 2023, another CD featuring three of his works was selected as Contemporary CD of the Week on Radio France.