Dafydd Llywelyn (composer)

Dafydd Llywelyn (10 January 1939, in South Wales – 25 March 2013, in Munich) was a Welsh composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Biography Llywelyn, born in South Wales, received his first piano lessons from his father and later from priests in a monastic boarding school in the Midlands. His other teachers include the British pianist Tom Bromley, Johann Trygvasson (father-in-law of Vladimir Ashkenazy) and Peter Feuchtwanger (nephew of the writer Lion Feuchtwanger). He received an important musical influence from the pianist and later close friend Shura Cherkassky, who showed him the tradition of the old masters’ polyphonic piano playing. He was later significantly inspired by Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and . In Birmingham and then London he studied music, medicine, criminology and theology, after which he moved to Cologne. He moved to Munich in 1971, and in 1984 until his death lived with his life-partner Hedy Schmitt in the Haidhausen district. When he was three years old, his mother died from leukemia. Later he began to translate and write his thoughts into music. The deep religiosity of his work, which he was already composing in a meditative state since his youth, w