Born on 2 August 1905 in Munich, where he would spend most of his life, Karl Amadeus Hartmann was the fourth son of Friedrich Richard Hartmann (1866-1925) and his wife Gertrud, née Schwamm (1874-1935). Hartmann’s father was a painter, mostly of still life, flowers, and landscapes, and a schoolteacher; his mother, a lover of Wagner, Balzac, and Zola, enjoyed recounting and acting out scenes from the theater with great expressiveness. Karl Amadeus was raised with his three brothers – Adolf (1900-1971), Fritz (1902-1974), and Richard (1903-1969). In 1915 he discovered Der Freischütz, which, along with Schubert and Richard Strauss, set him on the path to becoming a musician. In 1919, he enrolled in the Pasing Teacher Training College, graduating in 1922. After working as an office clerk, he enrolled in the Munich Academy of Music in 1924, where he studied trombone (which he abandoned playing in 1932), piano, and, from 1925 to 1929, composition. There, Hartmann studied with the conservative Joseph Haas, although his own political sympathies were anarchist and socialist (his brother Richard was a member of the Communist Party and had to flee Germany for Switzerland after he was caught distributing anti-Nazi tracts in 1933).

Hartmann’s first compositions, suites for piano or violon and two sonatas for violin, were written in 1927 and influenced by jazz. Some of them premiered in a series of concerts produced by a group of progressive artists called Die Juryfreien that he founded in 1928. The Wax Figurine Cabinet (Wachsfigurenkabinett), which Hartmann composed in 1929-1930, at the request of Erich Bormann, his librettist, and Max See, who had created a studio for young composers at the Bavarian Opera, was one of a suite of five short operas, each of them some ten to twenty minutes long, and would include works by Günter Bialas, Hans Werner Henze, Wilfried Hiller. The complete cycle premiered only in 1988, in Munich, during its Biennale, thanks to Henze, who had been close to Hartmann. In addition to a score for Macbeth (1940) written during this period, Hartmann wrote two other stage pieces that bear mentioning here: a mimed symphony based on Antigone in 1940 and an opera, Ondine, based on the work by Jean Giraudoux, in 1955.

In 1931, during the third Week of New Music festival in Munich, Hartmann met conductor Hermann Scherchen, a figure of musical and moral authority who would help Hartmann to define his art and contributed to the creation of Concerto pour trompette et orchestre à vent (1932), which premiered in Strasbourg in 1933 after the two had worked on it together, conducted by Ernst Klug. Dated “Dachau 1933-1934” and dedicated to “my friends who must have died in the hundreds and who sleep eternally today,” the symphonic poem Miserae (1933-1934), premiered in Prague at the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1935. At Darmstadt, in 1947, he premiered his symphonic overture “China Struggles” (China kämpft, 1942) which, along with Symphonische Hymnen (1941-1943) and his Symphonic Suite “Vita Nova“ (1943), constitute the Sinfoniae dramaticae.

Before that, during the Die Juryfreien concert series, between 1931 and 1933, Hartmann premiered his Dance Suite (Tanzsuite) for wind quintet, his Musique burlesque (Burleske Musik), for wind instruments, percussion, and piano, his Sonatine for piano, his Toccata variata for wind instruments, piano, and percussion, his Little Concert (Kleines Konzert) for string quartet and percussion, and his Sonata n° 1 for piano. He also composed a Profane Messe (1929) and a Cantata (1933) for six-part male choir, with texts by Johannes R. Becher and Karl Marx.

From 1933 to 1945, Hartmann refused to allow his music to be performed in Nazi Germany, maintaining a kind of individual resistance through “inner exile.” He continued to compose through this period, however. A concert production of his opera Simplicius Simplicissimus (1934-1936), based on a text by Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen, premiered in Munich only in 1948, conducted by Hans Rosbaud for Radio Bavaria. It had originally been scheduled for a premiere with Radio Brussels in May 1940, a project that was abandoned when the Nazis invaded Belgium. The opera was finally premiered in Cologne in 1949, directed by Erich Bormann; a revised version premiered at the Mannheim National Theater in 1957. Hartmann’s Concerto funebre for violin and string orchestra (1939) premiered in Saint-Gallen in 1940 with a revised version premiering in Braunschweig in 1959. He also wrote orchestral works during this time, returning to them in revised form in his first symphonies: Fragment symphonique, Cantata, and Cantata “Lamento” (1936-1937), for alto and orchestra, based on texts by Walt Whitman, form a first phase of Symphony n°1; Symphony “L’Œuvre” and Esquisses symphoniques (1937-1938), based on Zola’s novel, became Symphony n°6; Sinfonia tragica (1940-1943) was partially reprised in Symphonie n° 3, similar to “Lamentation” (Klagegesang, 1944-1945), a symphony dedicated to the Communist chemist Robert Havemann, who was poisoned by the Nazis; Symphony for string orchestra and soprano (1938) laid the foundations for Symphonie n° 4… None of the six symphonies Hartmann composed after the Second World War contain entirely original material.

Hartmann married Elisabeth Reussmann in 1934. The following year the couple had a son, Richard. In 1936, Hartmann won the Gand chamber music prize (Ernest Ansermet, Henri Gagnebin, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Albert Roussel were members of the jury) for String Quartet n° 1 “Carillon” (1933), dedicated to Scherchen, which premiered that year in Gand in a performance by the Végh Quartet, and in London in 1938 during the ISCM Festival in a performance by the Kutcher Quartet – the words “German, independent” were printed beside Hartmann’s name in the program. His cantata Friede Anno 48 (1936), based on texts by Andreas Gryphius, in memoriam Alban Berg, received a composition prize in 1937 from the Emil Hertzka Foundation – Anton Webern was in the jury. Hartmann became his student in Maria Enzersdorf, near Vienna, in November 1942. Meanwhile, in 1939, Symphony “L’Œuvre” (1936-1938) premiered as part of a cycle of concerts for the Guillaume Lekeu Competition in Liege, in connection with the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Liège, with a conductor Hartmann deemed “impossible.” The piece was performed again in Brussels at the initiative of Paul Collaer, a loyal supporter of the composer, this time conducted by Franz André.

In 1943, as the war dragged on, Hartmann took the precautions of burying his scores in a metal box. When the Dachau concentration camp was liberated, he watched the freed inmates filing by “endless line - endless sadness - endless pain”, an experience upon which he based his Piano Sonata n° 2 “27 April 1945” (1945). Soon after, under the American occupation, the American authorities asked Hartmann to direct the Bavarian National Opera, a post he turned down, feeling that he lacked experience, but he wrote music for the institution. He also founded Musica Viva, remaining its director until his death. After the war he worked on a series of symphonies: the first, based on his Fragment symphonique from 1936, premiered in Frankfurt in 1948, under the same title, to which he had added the subtitle “Essay for a Requiem” (“Versuch eines Requiems”); it was subsequently revised and given the title Symphony n° 1 in 1950, then revised again in 1955 (it premiered in Vienna that same year). His fourth symphony (1948), based on Symphony for string orchestra and soprano voice, premiered in Munich in 1948 with the title Symphony for strings; ultimately, it bore the title Symphony n° 4. Symphony n° 3 (1948-1949), based on Sinfonia tragica and Symphony “Lamento” premiered in Munich in 1950. Symphony n° 2 (Adagio) (1946), based on the Symphonic Suite “Vita Nova“, premiered in Donaueschingen in 1950. Symphony n° 5 and Symphonie concertante (1950), based on his Concerto for trumpet and wind ensemble that itself had been revised as a Concerto for wind ensemble, double bass, and trumpets, premiered in Stuttgart in 1951. A commission from Radio Bavaria, his Symphony n° 6 (1951-1953), based on Symphonie “L’Œuvre”, premiered in Munich in 1953. After this, Hartmann composed two final symphonies, both with entirely original material: Symphony n° 7 (1958), a commission from the Koussevitzsky Foundation (Boston), premiered in Hamburg in 1959, and Symphony n° 8 (1960-1962) premiered in Cologne in 1963. They were performed again at the Venice Biennale, the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam, at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and during the Berliner Festwochen, led by prominent conducters including Rafael Kubelík, Eugen Jochum, and Hans Rosbaud.

Hartmann’s last notable pieces include String Quartet n° 2 (1945-1946), which premiered in a performance by the Végh Quartet in Milan in 1948 during a conference on twelve-tone technique, and two concertos, one for piano, wind instruments, and percussion (1953) and the other for alto with piano, accompanied by wind instruments and percussion (1954-1956), as well as an incomplete (Gesangsszene, (1962-1963) for baritone and orchestra, based on Jean Giraudoux’s Sodom and Gomorrah. The composer received many awards and honors (including the City of Munich Prize in 1949, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Prize in 1950, the ISCM Schoenberg Medal in 1954, the Grand Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1957, the City of Braunschweig Ludwig-Spohr Prize in 1959, the City of Berlin Prize in 1961, etc.). He was named a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1952), served as president of the German section of the ISCM (1953), was a member of the West Berlin Academy of Arts (1955), and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Spokane Conservatory in Washington State (USA). He declined positions as professor and director of the East Berlin Musikhoschule (1950), at the Cologne Musikhoschule (1957), and at the Berlin Conservatory (1961). He died of cancer in Munich on 5 December 1963.