Aleksandar Perunović (1978, Montenegro) holds a BA and MA degree from the composition class of Žarko Mirković at the Academy of Music in Cetinje and a PhD degree from the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, supervised by Prof. Srđan Hofman. Perunović has attended a number of international composition courses led by mostly German composers (Kurt Schwertsik, Detlev Müller-Siemens, Reinhard Febel, etc.). He has authored around 50 compositions in the domains of solo, chamber, choral, and orchestral music, some of which include the use of electronics, multimedia, and the like. Works by Perunović have been performed in Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Ukraine, by several contemporary music ensembles (on_line vienna, Sonemus, Construction Site), Collegium Musicum women’s academic choir, the pianist Nicolas Horvath, etc. Apart from composing, Perunović is also active in the domain of music theory and analysis. He teaches musical forms at the Academy of Music in Cetinje and is a member of the Committee for Music at the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts.

The composition Mozart schtirbt (2015) “speaks” of the final hours of Mozart’s life. The title of the work refers to Goethe schtirbt, a cycle of four short stories by Thomas Bernhard. Given that Bernhard, probably in order to emphasise the sound sh in stirbt, made a deliberate spelling error (the correct spelling would be stirbt), an English translation of the work’s title could read Mozart dddies, mimicking the witty rendition of Bernhard’s title in its Serbian translation (Gete na sssamrti). The text spoken at the very beginning of the piece comes from a letter that Mozart wrote in September 1791, probably to his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Apart from a brief passage in a letter to Constanze written a few months earlier, this is the only place where Mozart expresses a deep concern about his own fate, the feeling that his “final hour is close” and an almost Beethovenian fatalism. The music referred to in this work comprises the opening bars of “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem – probably the last thing that Mozart wrote in his own hand.