Manfred Gurlitt

Manfred Gurlitt (born in Berlin 6 September 1890 – died in Tokyo 29 April 1973) was a German opera composer and conductor. He studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, conducting with Karl Muck, and piano with Moritz Mayer-Mahr. He was the great-nephew of the composer Cornelius Gurlitt.

From 1908 to 1910, he was a coach at the Berlin Court Opera, and then acted as musical assistant to Karl Muck at Bayreuth. In 1911-12, he was second conductor in Essen, then in Augsburg for two years. in 1914 he was given the post of first conductor at the Bremen Stadttheater, a job he held until 1924 when he was made their general music director. In 1920 he founded a Society for New Music in Bremen to encourage avant-garde and rarely heard pre-classical works.

His opera Wozzeck (1926), after the play by Georg Büchner, appeared four months after the opera of the same title by Alban Berg and has remained in its shadow. Nevertheless its premiere in Bremen on 22 April 1926 attracted much attention at the time and marked the zenith of Gurlitt's career. Malicious gossip, claiming 'debauchery and loose living', caused him to move to Berlin in 1927 where he taught at the Charlottenburg Musikhochschule, and conducted for the Staatsoper, Krolloper, Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater and Berlin Radio.

Gurlitt's music was banned by the Nazis when they assumed power, but his presence in Berlin was tolerated as he undertook to bring his music in line with the aethetics of the Third Reich. Gurlitt was then a member of the Nazi party from May 1, 1933 until being ejected from the party by court order on May 3, 1937. The court declared (falsely as it turned out) that Gurlitt had Jewish ancestry. In order to avoid being arrested by the Gestapo, he emigrated to Japan in 1939 where he became active as an opera conductor with Fujiwara Yoshie's company, the Fujiwara Opera, and, in 1940, became Musical Director of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In these positions he presented the Japanese premieres of many works from the standard repertoire by Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss. Gurlitt's attitude to the Nazi regime remained equivocal, and he was a regular guest at the German Embassy in Tokyo. In 1953 he founded his own Gurlitt Opera Company in Tokyo, and in 1969 he became a professor at the Showa College of Music.

In 1955 he returned to Germany for a tour conducting his own works, but it was not a success - his idiom was judged passé. The following year he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross of the German Federal Republic's order of merit, but he ceased to compose and never returned to live in Germany, bitter at the neglect of his music in post-war Germany.

He also wrote Soldaten (1930) after the play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and Nana (1933) after the novel by Émile Zola. In the former he anticipated the operatic treatment of the same text by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, while in Nana he was taking on a subject similar to the exactly contemporary Lulu by Berg.

Works

Operas

• Die Heilige 'musical legend' in 3 parts after Carl Hauptmann

  27 January 1920, Bremen

• Wozzeck 'musical tragedy' in 18 scenes and one epilogue, op. 16 after Georg Büchner

  22 April 1926, Bremen

• Soldaten opera in 3 acts after Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

  9 November 1930, Düsseldorf

• Nana opera in 4 acts (1931/32) after Émile Zola/Max Brod

  16 April 1958, Dortmund

• Nächtlicher Spuk opera in 3 acts (1934-1936) after Paul Knudsen
• Warum? opera in a prologue, 4 acts, and sequel (1934-1936/1942-1945)
• Nordische Ballade opera in 4 acts (1934/44) after Selma Lagerlöf/Manfred Gurlitt
• Wir schreitten aus (1958)

Orchestral Works

• Violin Concerto (after 1933)
• Cello Concerto (after 1933)
• Goya Symphony (1938-39)
• Shakespeare Symphony (1952-54)

Vocal Works

• Four Dramatic Songs for soprano and orchestra (1946-52)

References

• Galliano, Luciana. "Manfred Gurlitt and the Japanese Operatic Scene, 1939-1972," Japan Review (2006) 18:215-248.