“I’ve now reached nine minutes fifty-seven seconds,” Johannes tells me on the telephone. He keeps me posted on the progress of whatever he is writing, true to what he told me some years ago about the way he keeps track: “Like a bookkeeper.”

What really impressed me about his music when I first heard it some time in 2000, was the sensitivity and musicality of it: the delicacy of the sounds he imagined for the few instruments accompanying the soprano, in his Vielleicht zunächst wirklich nur [To start with, perhaps really not more than] (1999), premiered in Vienna by the Ensemble Modern. The music touched a chord in me; I responded with my instincts.

The piece made me happy, for I felt that I was visiting a landscape I had never seen before and yet where I was at home. It was wonderfully reassuring to find a young man of such talent: creating new within the familiar. It was sheer pleasure to hear tiny details within the overall soundscape, so that you sat up and savored, say, the sound of a harp, like the glint of light on a painting—tiny but absolutely essential.

For Staud, the idea for a piece is more often than not suggested by extramusical impulses: the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander as well as Leonardo da Vinci inspired Apeiron (2004/5) for large orchestra (a commission of the Berlin Philharmonic), a work by the American artist Bruce Nauman (1941) produced Violent Incidents (2005/6) for saxophone solo, winds, and percussion, the incomparable atmosphere of the novels of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) captured the young composer’s imagination to create two large-scale orchestral pieces which attempt to conjure up Schulz’s world: On Comparative Meteorology (2008/9) for the Cleveland Orchestra and Über trügerische Stadtpläne und die Versuchungen der Winternächte [On Deceptive City Maps and the Temptations of Winter Nights] (2009) for string quartet and orchestra. The titles are taken from Schulz, a remarkable Polish-Jewish writer shot dead by the Gestapo in the middle of a street in Drohobycz, a small town in Galicia.

Literature, philosophy, the arts—Johannes Maria Staud is remarkably well-versed in all, but he is just as sensitive to natural beauty, coming as he does from the most mountainous region of Austria, Tyrol.