Heinz-Klaus Metzger was a German music critic and theorist.

Metzger studied piano under Carl Seemann in Freiburg

Freiburg

Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In the extreme south-west of the country, it straddles the Dreisam river, at the foot of the Schlossberg. Historically, the city has acted as the hub of the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain...

 and composition under Max Deutsch

Max Deutsch

Max Deutsch was an Austrian-French musical composer, conductor, and teacher.He was a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and founded the theater Der Jüdische Spiegel in Paris. Here, many works of composers like Schoenberg, Anton Webern, or Alban Berg were debuted in France...

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Later, attending a summer course for new music in Darmstadt

Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...

, he met Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....

, Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....

, Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

 and Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century.- Early years :Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter...

. Here he found his role as a notable theoretician and proponent of Serialism

Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

 in musical theory. He participated as a distinguished contributor to a series of important texts called Die Reihe. Metzger was among the first critics to promote Stockhausen's music, but was soon a substantial critic of Stockhausen's compositional development.

In the 1960s, Metzger was one of the first Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an commentators on John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, and spokesman of the movement called compositional Anarchy, which resulted in the so called Kölner Manifest of 1960, and serving as a copy editor of the magazine Collage in Palermo

Palermo

Palermo is a city in Southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...

. From 1965 until 1969 he worked as a music critic for the Zürcher Weltwoche (Zürich world weekly). In 1969, he founded, together with his partner, composer and conductor Rainer Riehn

Rainer Riehn

Rainer Riehn is a German music composer and conductor and co-editor of music theory magazines.Riehn studied music theory in Mainz, Zürich, and Berlin and composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig in Utrecht....

, the 'Ensemble Musica Negativa', where they embraced the performance of radical new music. In 1987, Metzger and Riehn became the chief dramatic advisors of the Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

 opera under Gary Bertini

Gary Bertini

Gary Bertini was an Israeli conductor.-Biography:Gary Bertini was born Shloyme Golergant in Bricheva, Bessarabia, then in Romania, now in Donduşeni District, Moldova. His father, K. A. Bertini , was a poet and translator of the Russian and Yiddish Gary Bertini (Hebrew: גארי ברתיני) (born 1 May...

. During their tenure, the Frankfurt Opera commissioned and premiered John Cage's Europeras 1 & 2.

From 1977 to 2002 Metzger and Riehn founded, edited, researched, and provided texts criticism for the musicology series "Musik-Konzepte" (The concepts of music), Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

 text+kritik-edition; for this they received the Deutscher Kritikerpreis (German critics prize) in 1983. Also, they edited the two first volumes of the Kompositionen von Adorno (Compositions of Adorno). Metzger has received honorary doctorates from the Berlin University of the Arts

Berlin University of the Arts

The Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK is a public art school in Berlin, Germany, one of the four universities in the city...

 and from the University of Palermo

University of Palermo

The University of Palermo is a university located in Palermo, Italy, and founded in 1806. It is organized in 12 Faculties.-History:The University of Palermo was officially founded in 1806, although its earliest roots date back to 1498 when medicine and law were taught there...

.

Works

• Musik wozu. Literatur zu Noten, with Rainer Riehn, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1980