Life of the composer Blaž Arnič is a unique story in the Slovenian Music. He was born at an isolate farm about 900 m high, under the mountain Raduha, and as nineteen-year-old-boy - a self-taught accordion player without the knowledge of musical notes - left for Ljubljana where he finished the school for organists in extremely tight financial conditions, and later, after a short period of service as the organist at the provincial parish, the study of composition and organ at the Ljubljana Conservatorium. When he also graduated under the tutelage of Professor Rudolf Nilius at the Vienna New Conservatorium, he was 31. Followed the restless years of irregular jobs, hard work and first composer's successes witch finally brought him a nomination for professor at the High Music school in Ljubljana. During the Second World war he was deported to Dachau as a collaborator of Resistance, where he almost miraculously survived the horrors of the nacist camp, and became a regular professor of the composition at the Academy of Music after his return home. Although blind on one eye, he worked incessantly. He died one day after his 69th birthday in a car crash.
His composer's opus is big: 9 symphonies, almost a dozen symphonic poems, 7 concerts for various instruments, a cantata, chamber and soloist musical pieces, music for choirs and films.
Primarily, he was a symphonic composer with a broad sweep of a born epic composer and a marked sense of majestic gradation and plasticity of tonal images. A romantic realist, convinced that a personal expression could be created only in touch with one's home land, he was not interested in modern orientations of his time. With his concept of music he filled a gap in the development of the Slovenian music which in Romanticism had no symphonic composer with a similar programme.
