Short biography of Michael Wiener
Michael Wiener, born in 1975 in Germany, combines his interest in contemporary music, especially composition, with his academic background in international law. From 2002 until 2006, he was a member of the composition class of Alexander Müllenbach at the Conservatory of Luxembourg, where he received a composition certificate “supérieur avec la qualification très bien”. He was also awarded prizes at the composition competitions “Carl von Ossietzky” in Oldenburg and “Engelbert Humperdinck” in Siegburg, Germany. His choir piece “Maior autem ex his est caritas” has been chosen as a winner in the composition contest for the Fourth Festival of Universal Sacred Music in April 2010 in New York City. He was also awarded a price in the international composition competition “Artistes en herbe” 2010 Luxembourg. In addition, he completed his doctoral thesis in 2006 with “summa cum laude” at the law faculty of the University of Trier, focusing on international human rights law and freedom of religion or belief in particular. He passed the German bar exam in 2003 and also holds a Master of Laws degree (LL.M. in Computer and Communications Law) from the University of London in the United Kingdom. From 1995 to 2000 he studied law at the University of Trier in Germany and at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He has published a book as well as several articles on international human rights law and national constitutional laws. In his 2001 LL.M. thesis, he analyzed legal notions and copyright issues in the works of Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) who composed marvelous pieces also during captivity in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezín. The links between art and law are alluded to in Ullmann’s personal diary in which he wrote that “art is nature according to mental laws; nature is mind according to natural laws”. Ullmann’s last piano sonata, which was completed in Terezín just two months before his death in Auschwitz, is full of musical quotations both from his own works and from pieces of other composers. Thus the music score of his last piano sonata may be examined as a kind of legal text by transferring legal methodology to musical analysis. It is argued that Ullmann tried to encode extra-musical contents as an appeal for moral resistance against the Nazis in particular and against totalitarianism in general.