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In June 2025, Philippe Manoury's 'Thinkspiel' Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, based on Karl Kraus' monumental drama The Last Days of Mankind, premiered at the Cologne Opera under the direction of Peter Rundel and received enthusiastic reviews.
Before the premiere of the first part of his large spacial orchestra triptych, Philippe Manoury talked about his musical career, his first contact with electronic music and his handling of the large orchestral apparatus.
Part science documentary, part true crime story: Philippe Manoury about his reconstruction of Boulez' Livre pour quatuor.
Philippe Manoury, Oracle for Violin and Orchestra
Philippe Manoury, composition
Isabelle Faust, violin
SWR Symphonieorchester
François-Xavier Roth, conductor
“... music that never bores, that always has new ideas, that constantly sets new accents in its colourfulness and diversity, that knows drastic outbursts yet often tells so much in the smallest, highly concentrated musical snapshots with just a few notes.” Der Opernfreund, June 2025
Philippe Manoury is regarded as one of the most important French composers, in addition to being a researcher and forerunner in the field of live electronics. Despite in-depth training as a pianist and composer–he was instructed by Max Deutsch (a student of Schoenberg's) and Michel Philippot, among others–he considers himself to be self-taught. “The composition must be born from an inner longing, and requires no preconditions.” Accordingly, he began his first compositional experiments on his own in parallel to his first lessons in music, and, at the age of 19, his works were already being performed at major festivals for new music. His breakthrough culminated with the premiere of his piano piece Cryptophonos in 1974, interpreted by Claude Helffer.
Following two years of teaching at Brazilian universities, his compositional interest in mathematical models brought Philippe Manoury to the Paris Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). He worked there from 1981 together with the mathematician Miller Puckette on a programming language for interactive live electronics (very well-known today under the name MAX-MSP). Between 1987 and 1991, he composed Sonus ex machina, a cycle focusing on the real-time interaction between acoustic instruments and computer-generated sounds–a topic that continues to influence his artistic work and theoretical texts.
Alongside pieces for large orchestras such as Sound and Fury, the violin concerto Synapse (2009), and Echo-Daimónon for piano, electronics, and orchestra (2012), recent years have also seen the premieres of Philippe Manoury’s string quartets (Stringendo and Tensio, both 2010; Melencolia, 2013; Fragmenti, 2016) and instrumental works with electronics (Partita I for viola, 2007; Partita II for violin, 2012; Le temps, mode d’emploi for two pianos, 2014). The moment of interaction characterises his approach–not only in smaller works or compositions featuring electronics, but also with large orchestras: he turns them into a sound laboratory where new interactive possibilities are tested, expanding music theatre as a form.
This increasingly includes the spatial arrangement of musicians in the concert hall, for example in his work In situ, awarded the Orchestral Prize in Donaueschingen in 2013. Inspired by François-Xavier Roth, who conducted the premiere, Philippe Manoury extended the composition into the Köln Trilogie, a large-scale spatial triptych for the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne. After Ring (2016) and a repeat performance of In situ (2017), the trilogy was completed with Lab.Oratorium for two singers, two actors, vocal ensemble, choir, orchestra, and electronics, staged by Nicolas Stemann and premiered in May 2019. The work folds texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Hannah Arendt, and Georg Trakl into current events and was performed to wide acclaim in Cologne as well as at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and Philharmonie de Paris. The composer had already worked with director Nicolas Stemann on the music theatre work Kein Licht (No Light), based on the text of the same name by Elfriede Jelinek, which was shown in Strasbourg, Paris, Zagreb and Luxembourg after its premiere at the Ruhrtriennale 2017 and most recently at the Holland Festival in 2022. The world premiere of the Kein Licht Suite, written for the Lucilin Ensemble and mezzo-soprano Christina Daletska, followed in 2021 at the Philharmonie Luxembourg. The concerto for piano and ensemble Mouvements was premiered in the same year by Ancuza Aprodu and the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain under Bruno Mantovani at the Messiaen Festival. In addition, Daniel Barenboim premiered Das wohlpräparierte Klavier, a large-scale work for piano and electronics, at the season opening of the Boulez Saal in Berlin.
In 2022, Philippe Manoury celebrated his 70th birthday, which was honoured with numerous concerts. Among the many events, the Paris Percussion Group performed Silex for twelve percussionists. Two premieres were on the programme of a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris with the Ensemble intercontemporain under François-Xavier Roth: in addition to the ensemble concerto Grammaires du sonore, together with Christina Daletska Vier Lieder (aus Kein Licht) as well as Fragments pour un portrait were performed. The 2023/24 season was marked by the completion of the orchestral triptych, whose opening work Anticipations had been premiered in autumn 2022 with the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música under Baldur Brönnimann. The Austrian premiere of the work, which was co-commissioned by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, followed with the Tonkünstler Orchestra under Brad Lubman at the Grafenegg Festival, where Philippe Manoury was composer-in-residence. A second, shorter part of the triptych entitled Rémanences-Palimpseste was heard in December 2023 with the SWR Symphony Orchestra under Teodor Currentzis in Stuttgart and at the Philharmonie Berlin. The final work, Présences, was performed in August 2024 by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra under Brad Lubman at the Suntory Hall Summer Festival, where Philippe Manoury was artist-in-residence; the work was co-commissioned by the Orchestre National de France. His ‘Thinkspiel’ Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), premiered at the Cologne Opera in 2025, received rave reviews. Patrick Hahn, Philippe Manoury and Nicolas Stemann wrote the libretto based on Karl Kraus' monumental World War tragedy. Previously, the Orchestre National de France premiered Philippe Manoury's homage Maelström, composed on the occasion of Pierre Boulez's 100th birthday and inspired by his Notation VIII for piano.
During the 2026/27 season, Philippe Manoury will be featured in a series of concerts as Composer-in-Residence at Radio France. Amongst other works, three French premieres will be presented, including Tell me all. Tell me now for soprano and live electronics, which received its world premiere in July 2026 at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. In November 2026, the violin concerto Oracle, composed for Isabelle Faust, will receive its world premiere with the SWR Symphony Orchestra conducted by François-Xavier Roth; the Dutch premiere will follow in January 2027 with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. For the concert marking the 50th anniversary of the Ensemble intercontemporain, Philippe Manoury, as musical curator of the programme, will contribute intermezzi to form a unique collective work based on newly composed miniatures by 50 composers.
Philippe Manoury has held various teaching and artistic positions, including at Ensemble intercontemporain (1983-1987), Conservatoire de Lyon (1987-1997), Orchestre de Paris (1995-2001), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (1998-2000), and the Scène nationale d’Orléans (2001-2003). He is professor emeritus of the University of California San Diego where he taught composition from 2004 to 2012. In 2013, he returned to his native France where he was named Professor of Composition at the Académie Supérieure de la Haute École des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. His own academy for young composers took place from 2015 to 2018 as part of the Musica Festival in Strasbourg. Following an invitation from the Collège de France, in 2017 he was also a given the “Chaire Annuelle de Création Artistique.” In the 2022/23 season he was a jury member of the Luciano Berio International Composition at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.
Philippe Manoury has received numerous awards for his work. In 2014, he was named Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Philippe Manoury is a member of the honorary committee of the French-German Fund for Contemporary Music/Impuls Neue Musik. In summer 2015, he was elected as a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste.
Philippe Manoury’s works are published by Universal/Editions Durand. A collection of texts by and about the composer can be found on his blog at www.philippemanoury.org
2026/2027 season
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.
A catalogue of Philippe Manoury’s works can be found at www.philippemanoury.org or on the website of publisher Durand-Salabert-Eschig.
“For more than half a century, Philippe Manoury has been creating works in which a spirit of exploration is combined with remarkable expressiveness. What's more, research enhances expression. True to Stravinsky's dictum – ‘We have a duty to music, namely to invent it’ – Philippe Manoury has tirelessly questioned form, harmony, disharmony, music informatics, spatiality, the arrangement of the orchestra, perception and its neural pathways… This is particularly profound theoretical research, but in the works it inspires, it never forgets to ‘speak’ to the listener.”
concert classic – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Manoury’s orchestration and timbre are admirable; the orchestra reacts quickly and colourfully, intervening in the vocal part as well as in the spoken dialogues, bringing out the suggestive timbres of the percussion in particular. The references to the great symphonic composers of our heritage (Berg, Mahler, Wagner…) are clearly recognisable.”
Res Musica, Michèle Tosi, 3/7/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Manoury offers a work that is as total as it is masterful. Drama mingles with music, song with language, the present with the past. (…) The composition impresses with its complexity and convinces with its sophistication, its interwoven colours and textures, in which every note and every articulation is important. The electronics reveal the same mastery, especially when they colour the spoken voice for a moment or subtly replace the instruments.”
Diapason, Anne Ibos-Augé, 1/7/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“The music fully justifies the scale of these resources: modern, emotive and immersive. There is little overt dissonance, the impact coming more from the percussion and the defamiliarizing effect of the live electronics (…) The electronic dimension is similarly immersive, mixing digital sound sources with electronically modified sounds of the live instruments. The orchestral writing itself seems conceived in electronic terms: complex sound masses that develop and grow.”
Opera Now, Gavin Dixon, 30/6/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Manoury and his co-librettist and director Nicolas Stemann [have] succeeded in creating a theatrical equivalent of Kraus’ journalistic criticism using journalistic stylistic approaches.”
FAZ, Patrick Bahners, 30/6/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Philippe Manoury, a goldsmith of gradations and sound textures, plays with the levels of perception; his composition expands the musical fields and creates a sonic maelstrom whose expansion seems to be infinite.”
Classique News, Alexandre Pham, 29/6/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Manoury thus draws ever wider circles and creates a music that never bores, that always has new ideas, that always sets new accents in its colourfulness, its diversity, that knows drastic outbursts and very often tells so much in the smallest, highly dense musical moments with only a few notes.”
Der Opernfreund, Sebastian Jacobs, 28/6/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Manoury’s music now unfolds into a veritable spatial sound composition with numerous electronic modelling and sound expansions. At the same time, Manoury’s musical language, as in the first part, always remains comprehensible, even to the point of having quotation-like echoes.”
WDR3 Opernblog, 28/6/2025 – about Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Premiere at Oper Köln the 27/6/2025
“Philippe Manoury created glistening, dramatic, expressive, tender, brutal sound worlds, in which rumba rhythms and steel drums also appear organically. The recording of the world premiere production leaves a deep impression and has a lasting effect. A ripe achievement by all involved.”
Concerti, Eckhard Weber, 3/6/2021 on the CD Lab.Oratorium
“Philippe Manoury is an essential player in today’s music. Renewing the codes and languages of music is his motto. He sees his role as a composer as that of an experimenter in the manner of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schönberg. Manoury integrates the use of electronics into his musical composition. The piano was already in dialogue with a computer system in real time in Pluton and Le temps, mode d’emploi. (…) Das wohlpräparierte Klavier, whose title and form, with their mixture of fantasy and rigour, refer to Bach (and his ‘well-tempered keyboard’), is a fascinating piece. (…) One is seized by the tragic force of the proposal, surprised by tribal sounds, droplets, bells, claves, the cry of the wind, chords hammered in the distance, a music box in this hazy, fantastic and seductive in harmony.”
Toute la Culture, Nicolas Chaplain, 7/09/2021 on the world première of Das wohlpräparierte Klavier composed for Daniel Barenboim
“Time, A User’s Manual is an exhilarating study at once of the endless transformations of sonority and sound mass that technology allows and, more obscurely, of the ways in which any piece of music is time-bounded.”
Sunday Times, Paul Driver, 28/07/2019 on the CD Le temps, mode d’emploi
“[W]hat’s really impressive is how well the live electronics interact with pianists Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher. […] Entrancing sounds apart, it’s possible to enjoy the music as a demonstration of the pair’s technical skills: rich, deep chords ringing out to thrilling effect and the faster, percussive passages superbly co-ordinated.”
The Arts Desk, Graham Rickson, 14.09.2019 on the CD Le temps, mode d’emploi
“Politics, art and social reality, video, light, spoken word, singing and music are all connected in an often elaborately interwoven, current work that effectively visualizes the absurd associations of Jelenik’s text.”
Klassik.com, Ursula Decker-Bönniger, 28/08/2017 on Kein Licht
“In his score [Philippe Manoury] has found a fitting counterpart to Jelinek’s text, which consists of quotes mined from various sources.”
Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 28/08/2017 on Kein Licht
“The musicians refined some of these brief wisps of sound into moments of exceptional beauty, like the glassy chords in a spectralist cloud of the second movement (‘Calmo’) or the muted soft murmurs of the sixth (‘Passaggio’).”
Washington Classical Review, Charles T. Downey, 25/03/2017 on the Arditti Quartet’s US premiere performance of Fragmenti (String Quartet No. 4) at the Library of Congress
“Following the death of Pierre Boulez, Philippe Manoury is the figurehead of the French avant-garde. In his 2010 violin concerto 'Synapse', the pioneer of computer music simulated shimmering, condensing feedback loops between the orchestra and the solo part with instrumental subtlety: Hae-Sun Kang steadily intensified the sound with cool and clear elegance.”
Münchner Merkur, Anna Schürmer, 25/01/2016 on Synapse
“At times the layers of sound roared around, as if the listener were being trampled by the four riders of the apocalypse or in the midst of a hailstorm. At other moments, the electronics chimed, crackled, gurgled, snapped, whispered, dissolved and caressed. A feast for the experiential completist, or even for the merely naive and curious.”
The Guardian, Fiona Maddocks, 18/10/2015 on Le temps, mode d’emploi for two pianos and live electronics
“The writing is sometimes strikingly beautiful, especially in the moments of stasis that are coloured by the decaying electronic sonorities echoing around the hall.”
The Guardian, Andrew Clements, 13/10/2015 on Le temps, mode d’emploi for two pianos and live electronics
“The rhythms in Manoury’s Zones de turbulences for two pianos and orchestra bombard the audience with humorous provocation, virtuosic fodder for the brilliant soloists Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, but no less so for the intensely present Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the confident baton of Frank Ollu. The orchestra highlights the sound of the pianos with softly woven string layers, it can join itself beyond recognition to the pianos with plucks from the harp and light tinkling tones on the wood block. Just as it seamlessly placed the most exact, dazzling accents in the wind.”
Der Tagesspiegel, 23/01/2015
“Behind the sharp particle fire and the subtle electronic sound drizzle that surround his music, a system of underground tunnels reveals itself, overlapping neatly stratified layers of sound. One can recognise here a connoisseur of the methods used by the two Richards, Wagner and Strauss. There is nothing hazy or soft about this music that is permeated by a secret network of polyphonic mazes in which Philippe Manoury, like a jealous Minotaur, divests us of Ariadne’s thread.”
Télérama, Gilles Macassar, 24/09/2014, article on the occasion of the French premiere of In situ at Musica Strasbourg in September 2014
“[…] in 2012 Philippe Manoury wrote very finely chiselled music in his Melencolia (d’après Dürer). Structured by the sound of bells, new and interesting sounds are produced. Suspense is guaranteed – Philippe Manoury retains it, almost casually, over the course of 40 minutes.”
Schweizer Musikzeitung, Torsten Möller, June 2014 on Melencolia (d’après Dürer) (String Quartet No. 3)
“The French composer Philippe Manoury […] is after substantial musical gestures and direct expression. Although Manoury is fond of large romantic gestures, he went on to find his own singular voice in the realm of chamber music and live electronics. There is a lot going on in Le temps, mode d’emploi (2014) for two pianos and live electronics […]. Above all, the way the multiple live electronics interact with the two pianists is masterfully programmed; the polyphony of time that is produced is so invigorating that the time just flies by.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Alfred Zimmerlin, 14/05/2014
“Manoury, born in 1952, can be placed alongside the likes of Tristan Murail and Pascal Dusapin as one of the most influential French contemporary composers. Concealed behind his Zones de turbulences, which received its world premiere by the Musica Viva, is a concerto for two pianos after the classic model. […] His concerto for two pianos is an ingenious work, so full of secrets that one immediately wants to listen to it again. It references French models in its highly sensitive sound. But its sensuality comes above all from the fact that it is so carefully constructed.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Michael Stallknecht, 16/12/2013
"Réseaux" & "Dérèglements" (2022, Concours international de piano d'Orléans- Lorenzo Soulès)
Rendez vous chez Philippe Manoury
Fanfare (2020, Brass section Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, François-Xavier Roth)
B-Partita for violin, ensemble and electronic (Ashot Sarkissjan, Ensemble Remix, Peter Rundel, Worten Digitópia)
État d'alerte for two percussionists and orchestra (2015, KrausFrink, Deutsche Radiophilharmonie Saarbrücken, Peter Rundel)
Hommage à Richter I, 6 Bagatelles (Jean-François Heisser)
Les éléments qui forment la musique de nos jours - Philippe Manoury
L'invention de la musique - Philippe Manoury
Vorspiel Lab.Oratorium (Rinnat Moriah, Tora Augestad, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, François-Xavier Roth)
Melencolia, 3. Streichquartett (Arditti Quartet)
Philippe Manoury - Fragments pour un portrait
Philippe Manoury - Partita I
Philippe Manoury: Le temps, mode d'emploiGrau Schumacher PianoDuo; SWR Experimentalstudio; José Miguel Fernandez & Dominik Kleinknecht, KlangregisseurNEOS 11802, 2019
Philippe Manoury: Le Livre des Claviers, MétalThird Coast PercussionNew Focus Recordings, fcr187, 2017
Philippe Manoury: In Situ für Orchester und EnsembleEnsemble Modern; SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg; François-Xavier Roth, DirigentNEOS 11411-14, 2014
Philippe Manoury: Fragments d'Héraclite, Inharmonies, Slova, Trakl Gedichteaccentus; Laurence Equilbey, DirigentinNaive, V5217, 2011