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Klaus Doldinger, 1936-2025
Composer Klaus Doldinger died on October 16, 2025, at his home in Germany after a short illness. He was 89.
Klaus Erich Dieter Doldinger was born in May 1936, in Berlin, Germany. He studied piano and clarinet at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf before turning to the tenor saxophone, which quickly became his primary instrument. By the late 1950s he had established himself as a leading figure in West Germany’s post-war jazz scene, performing with ensembles such as the Feetwarmers and the Klaus Doldinger Quartet.
In 1971, he founded the fusion group Passport, a pioneering ensemble that combined elements of jazz, rock, and electronic music. The group’s long-running success earned Doldinger recognition as one of Europe’s foremost jazz innovators, and he was often referred to as “Germany’s jazz ambassador.”
Doldinger began writing music for film and television projects as early as 1968, but first came to international prominence with his score for Wolfgang Petersen’s claustrophobic submarine thriller Das Boot in 1981, which received worldwide acclaim for its tense, atmospheric writing. His sweeping and adventurous music for the 1984 children’s fantasy The NeverEnding Story, based on the classic novel by Michael Ende, raised his profile further in Europe, and it remains probably his most beloved work in film, although the North American release of the film saw his bold orchestral score mostly replaced with an electronic one by Italian disco composer Giorgio Moroder. Read more…
THE NEVERENDING STORY [DIE UNENDLICHE GESCHICHTE] – Klaus Doldinger and Giorgio Moroder
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Neverending Story is one of my most cherished childhood fantasy films, a love letter to books and the power of imagination, dressed up as a fantasy adventure set in a far-off world. Based on the novel Die Unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende, it marked German director Wolfgang Petersen’s first English-language film after the international success of Das Boot in 1980, and starred Barret Oliver as Bastian, a young boy in suburban America who regularly suffers at the hands of school bullies. After being chased one day into a used book store owned by a grumpy bookseller, Bastian ‘borrows’ a book – The Neverending Story of the title – and begins reading it in his school’s attic. Bastian becomes quickly immersed in a story set in a world called Fantasia, which is being threatened by a force called “The Nothing”, a void of darkness that consumes everything. Fantasia’s child-like Empress (Tami Stronach) entreats Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), a young warrior, to find out how to stop The Nothing. In response, The Nothing summons Gmork, a highly intelligent werewolf, to find and kill Atreyu. The film has a rich and vivid cast of fantasy characters, most notably the luck dragon Falkor, and was a popular success when it was first released in the summer of 1984. Read more…
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