Günther Weißenborn

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Günther Weißenborn (born June 2, 1911 in Coburg ; † February 25, 2001 in Detmold ) was a German pianist , accompanist and conductor .

Life

Günther Weißenborn studied organ , piano , conducting, school music and German at the Berlin University of Music . One of his teachers was Paul Hindemith . He then went to the Halle Opera House as Kapellmeister, to which he belonged until 1942. Then he was first conductor at the Deutsches Theater in Lille in occupied France until 1944 . There he was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1943 for failing to report a matter of high treason and state treason , and in 1944 he was released without notice as a conductor. After the end of the war in 1945, his other professional positions were in Hanover and the Hamburg State Opera under the direction of Günther Rennert .

In the summer of 1950 Weissenborn took over as successor to the famous conductor Fritz Lehmann as musical director of the orchestra at the Göttingen City Theater, as a newly created Deutsches Theater under Heinz Hilpert presented itself primarily in the fields of drama and ballet. After only one season, the theater had to part with the music division for financial reasons - and thus also with its orchestra. Thanks to the efforts of Günther Weißenborn, however, it was possible to reorganize this orchestra as the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra and thus save it from being dissolved. Weißenborn and this orchestra worked together until 1957, again from 1960, albeit only sporadically, when Weißenborn took over the artistic direction of the Göttingen Handel Festival and shaped the music for 20 years until 1980.

Günther Weißenborn was an excellent pianist and early on acquired a reputation as an internationally sought-after song accompanist. Shortly after the war, from 1946, he was the piano partner of many well-known singers of his time, such as Erika Köth , Anneliese Rothenberger , Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau , Walther Ludwig and Hermann Prey . Weissenborn made music with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with whom he was friendly, for more than 30 years - in Europe, the USA and Japan.

The extremely successful collaboration with singers and chamber music ensembles led to a call to the Hochschule für Musik Detmold in 1960 to take over a professorship and to lead a master class for chamber music and lied accompaniment, which he supervised until 1976.

Weißenborn spent the last years of his life in Detmold. His first marriage was to the singer Irmgard Barth, the marriage was divorced after the war, his second marriage to Elske Weißenborn, née Grytzka, from this marriage the children Barbara (born 1948) and Günther Wilhelm (born 1951) emerged. After Elske Weißenborn's death, Günther Weißenborn married the pianist Misao Kawasaki in 1995 .

Honors

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, p. 9.358.
personal data
SURNAME Weißenborn, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pianist, song accompanist and conductor
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Coburg
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 2001
Place of death Detmold