Arthur Chitz

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Arthur Oskar Chitz (born September 5, 1882 in Prague , † 1944 in the Riga ghetto ) was a musicologist, pianist and composer. He worked as a répétiteur at the Dresden Opera and was musical director of the Dresdner Schauspielhaus .

Life

Arthur Chitz was born into a German-speaking Jewish factory owner family from Prague. Before he was ten years old, he became an orphan. He attended a Catholic monastery school with a focus on music, where he received additional lessons. He was a student of composition with Vítězslav Novák and František Špilka. He also took piano and violin lessons.

He studied natural sciences, philosophy and music history at the German University in Prague , later in Vienna and Dresden. In 1905 he received his doctorate at Prague University with "The Court Music Band of Emperor Rudolf II."

Under Leo Blech he worked as an aspirant and violinist in the Prague State Theater and was a speaker for the Prague German newspaper “Bohemia”. In 1906, Chitz married Gertrud Helene Stern, the daughter of the newspaper's editor-in-chief, for whom he worked as a speaker.

In 1908 he moved to Dresden and in 1911 earned the degree of chemical engineer at the Technical University. In 1912 and 1915 he published musicological studies as magazine articles. The subject of his published research work was Beethoven's compositions for mandolin. In 1914/15 he got a position as a lecturer for theory and music history at Ernst von Schuch's music school . From 1915 to 1918 he worked as a répétiteur at the Dresdner Schauspielhaus and. From October 1918 he was employed as musical director of the Dresden theater. In 1920 he became music director of the Schauspielhaus and in 1931/32 a member of the artistic advisory board.

Chitz composed songs, string quartets and stage music for Dresden premieres and new productions, e.g. B. on plays by Shakespeare , Schiller , Hauptmann and also Erich Ponto : Arthur Chitz's fairy tale Sleeping Beauty was premiered on December 18, 1923 . Together with Erich Ponto he created the fairy tale game Trilltrall and his brothers . He taught at the orchestra school of the Saxon State Orchestra and was also in demand as a pianist and harpsichordist.

Because of his Jewish origins, his musical activity ended in 1933 when the National Socialists forced him to leave his position and on January 1, 1934, he was forced to retire. In 1938 and 1939, respectively, Chitz was able to send his two children abroad and thus save them. After the pogrom night in 1938, Chitz was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp from November 10 to December 17, 1938. Eva Doering-Ponto remembered an encounter in the Residenz department store after he returned to Dresden:

“I can remember a very sad and terrible encounter: We knew that Chitz had come to a warehouse soon after 1933 - and one day I was with my mother in the Reka department store and suddenly he was standing next to us, all shaven! He somehow meant that we didn't need to recognize him - it was a terrible situation. "

- Eva Doering-Ponto

He himself stayed in Dresden with his wife, but was excluded from both public and baptized Catholic as well as Jewish musical life. In 1940 he was expelled from his apartment and had to move into a so-called “old people's house” at Lothringer Weg 2 in Dresden-Blasewitz. Arthur Chitz 'and his wife were picked up on the night of January 20-21, 1942 and deported to the Jewish ghetto in Riga. Here, or very likely in the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp , he died in 1944 under unexplained circumstances, the date and cause of death are unknown.

Memorial sites

Memorial stone for Arthur Chitz in Dresden
  • At the Neustädter Güterbahnhof in Dresden, a plaque commemorates the “evacuation order” of January 15, 1942 and the fate of the Jews deported from here. On the night of January 20-21, 1942, 240 Dresden Jews were brought from here to Skirotava near Riga and from there to the Riga ghetto . Arthur Chitz and his wife Gertrud were among the deportees.
  • In front of the former house at Helmholtzstrasse 3B in Dresden, where Chitz lived for 24 years, a stumbling block now reminds of the musicologist.
  • The grave of his son Hermann Ernst Sheets, a scientist, is located in Mystic , Connecticut, USA. In 2007 a granite bench with the inscription In Memory of Arthur and Gertrud Chitz was placed on the grave site .
  • On November 30, 2017, his works were performed again in public for the first time in the Dresden Semperoper .

See also

literature

  • Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 1: A-I. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 199.
  • Kerstin Hagemeyer: Jewish life in Dresden. Exhibition on the occasion of the consecration of the new Dresden synagogue on November 9, 2001 , Saxon State Library - Dresden State and University Library, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-910005-27-6
  • Agata Schindler: Ostracized musicians in Dresden: Arthur Chitz and others. A contribution to the research project "File number undesirable". In: Dresden and advanced music in the 20th century. Part II: 1933-1966 , ed. by Matthias Herrmann and Hanns-Werner Heister, Laaber 2002, pp. 259-274 ( Musik in Dresden 5), ISBN 3-89007-510-X
  • Franz Stieger: Opera Lexicon . Schneider, Tutzing 1977, ISBN 3-7952-0203-5 (Part 2, Composers, Volume 1, A – F).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kerstin Hagemeyer: Jewish life in Dresden. Exhibition on the occasion of the consecration of the new Dresden synagogue on November 9, 2001 , pp. 198–205
  2. ↑ a b c d e Agata Schindler: The Dresden Playhouse - From the fate of the music director Arthur Chitz. In: Führerschule, Thingplatz, Judenhaus. Topographies of Nazi rule in Saxony , Saxon State Center for Civic Education, Dresden, 2014, p. 178 ff.
  3. ↑ a b Arthur Chitz . In: Hannes Heer, Jürgen Kesting, Peter Schmidt (eds.): Silent voices - The expulsion of the “Jews” and “politically intolerable” from the Dresden theaters 1933–1945. Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86331-032-5 , p. 133.
  4. ↑ As if it hadn't existed at all , Dresden's Jewish Artists on juden-in-mittelachsen.de, accessed on April 19, 2017
  5. ↑ Memorial plaque at Neustadt train station on neustadt-ticker.de , accessed on May 2, 2018.
  6. ↑ Karin Vogelsberg: The dashing Lola and the emperor of Atlantis. In: Jüdische Allgemeine, December 7, 2017, online , accessed May 24, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Chitz, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chitz, Arthur Oskar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Musicologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 5, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH 1944
Place of death Riga