Born in 1928 in Brusque, a city in the southern Brazilian State of Santa Catarina, Edino Krieger absorbed diverse musical influences from an early age. His first teacher was his father – the violinist, composer and conductor Aldo Krieger. In 1943, Edino moved to Rio de Janeiro to study composition with Hans Joachim Koellreutter, the leader of a group of young avant-garde composers, among whose members were Claudio Santoro and César Guerra-Peixe. Krieger then went to the United States in 1948, where he studied violin with William Nowinsky and composition with Aaron Copland and Peter Mennin. He won the Composition Prize at the Warsaw Festival in 1955 and went to London to study with Lennox Berkeley.

Back in Brazil, in the years that followed he saw his work achieve recognition and win him several national composition prizes. At the same time as his classical output was gaining greater visibility, he took part in the national stage of his country’s International Popular Song Festival in 1967 and 1968, obtaining fourth place in both editions. Inspired by these festivals, which had a huge profile in Brazil, in 1969 he created the Guanabara Music Festival, dedicated to contemporary music. Then, in 1975, he established the Brazilian Contemporary Music Biennial, which he continued to run until 1997 and which is still a regular fixture in the musical life of Rio de Janeiro today.

For three decades, from the mid-1970s onwards, Krieger was director or president of several of the principal Brazilian arts organisations, including the Rio de Janeiro Theatres Foundation, the National Institute of Music, the Museum of Image and Sound and the Brazilian Academy of Music, as well as the Cecília Meireles Concert Hall and Funarte (the National Foundation for the Arts), within which he set up PRO-MEMUS – the ‘Brazilian Musical Memory Project’, with the aim of documenting and disseminating Brazil’s musical traditions. He was honoured with the Ministry of Culture’s National Music Award in 1994. Edino Krieger died on 6 December 2022 at the age of 94.