Leopold Sprowacker

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Portrait photo from a report by Wiener Bilder , November 18, 1903
Sprowacker / Sprowaker / Sprowaka family burial site. Leopold Sprowacker is buried here

Leopold Sprowacker (born May 31, 1853 in Wiener Neustadt , † March 30, 1936 in Vienna ), occasionally Sprowaker , was an Austrian pianist, conductor , composer and lyricist.

life and work

Sprowacker first attended the upper secondary school in Wiener Neustadt and then studied from 1870 to 1872 at the Conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna (today's University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna ) horn , harmony , piano accompaniment and choir singing . Drafted for military service, he came to the Hoch- und Deutschmeister regiment and there to military music. On leave after compulsory service, he went to Budapest as a pianist in 1875 . For the occupation campaign in Bosnia in 1878 he had to join the military again. Apparently he continued to work as a musician and conductor afterwards; His first compositions, marches and polkas , which were printed in Budapest, date from 1879 and 1885 .

According to a report in Wiener Bilder , he is said to have started his own business in 1891 . He founded his own ensemble and played with it in Venice in Vienna , in Danzer's Orpheum and other establishments, at least until 1914. Sprowacker was not only known as a conductor, but also as a piano player.

Sprowacker has been living in Vienna since 1892. He also performed in Marienbad and Graz and went on tour with his orchestra to Germany (Breslau, Düsseldorf), Russia, Finland and Sweden, England and Switzerland. In 1903 he was honored for his 25th anniversary as a musician in Vienna. In press reports at the time he received titles such as “excellent conductor” and “the best-known conductor and composer in Vienna”, and the number of his printed compositions, some of which had “resounding success”, had already “exceeded the second hundred”. These included humorous scenes, for example for Josef Modl and Josef Steidler , Viennese songs , including texts by Carl Lorens , Adolf Bergmann or Eduard Merkt , marches (especially “Jux-Marsche”) and dances and sentimental songs. In some cases he also wrote the texts or translated them from a foreign language source, for example a cakewalk , an import that was extremely popular at the time, as can be seen from the numerous titles in Hofmeister's monthly reports that contain the word " Neger " . At Sprowacker, the piece was then called: "The funny niggers" (Original: "Coon Town Chimes"). Many of his compositions are likely to have been written directly for his engagements, such as a Gondolieri March and Mein Liebchen lives on the green beach of the proud Adriatic for his program in Venice in Vienna . As the biggest success that can tearjerker "Verlor'nes luck" apply. Sprowacker also tried, among other things, the setting of a text by Heinrich Heine .

In 1906 he founded a short-lived "musical fiction magazine": Viennese folk music , which also contained his own and other original compositions in a "musical supplement". There are 14 numbers in the Austrian National Library , the journal does not seem to have gotten past the first year.

Sprowacker is buried in Vienna's southwest cemetery. The grave is located there in group 6, row 4 and bears the number 14. Karoline Sprowacker, Katharina Sprowaka and Hermine Sprowaker are also buried in the same grave.

His son Karl (born February 24, 1907 in Vienna, † August 16, 1986 there) also became a musician, conductor and composer. He put the "c" in the family name and called himself Sprowaker from then on.

The lost happiness

Sprowacker's successful piece "Verlor'nes Glück" (1896), published by Adolf Robitschek , referred to in the first prints as "Romanian Song" with text and music by Sprowacker and listed as his Opus 101, was only an arrangement. The template was the romance Tu ne m'aimais pas by Charles Malo (music) and Léon Laroche (text) from 1875, which was then also shown in later prints. Sprowacker not only translated Laroche's text into German, but also built, although by and large adhered to the original, “smoother melody curves”, using “copious use of clichéd romantic substrates”, as Fritz Hennenberg judges, which led to the fact that the "strong sentimentality ... still thickened" in the original.

The success can not only be recognized in the large number of arrangements for literally all conceivable occupations, which can be proven in Hofmeister's monthly reports up to 1902. The song was translated into English, Czech and Polish and recorded on record, printed on postcards and sold as a perforated board for music boxes . The later printed sheet music was given a colored title illustration by Paul Scheurich , which shows the separated lovers: he, his head resting on his hand, in front of their photo on the secretary, she on the bank of the stream, which is lined with gloomy polluted willows . A number of memories of the song are documented ( Hans Reimann , Carl Zuckmayer , Ernst Busch ); it is said to have been a well-known “maid song ”.

Karl Valentin parodied it at least twice. The best known is the parody in the sequence of scenes Theater in der Vorstadt , also known under the title Tingeltangel , which Valentin had in the program since around 1915 and which was filmed in 1934 under the title "So ein Theater!" There a singer is announced who will perform Lost Happiness . Valentin asks first: “What has lost?” And recommends to the answer “Your luck has lost”: “Let it be advertised.” Then he accompanies the singer “completely wrong” on the violin. An upholsterer arrives to repair the stage curtain , but singing and playing the violin go on and on, with Valentin following the upholsterer every step of the way, even up the ladder. Finally, he gets into the singer's hair with his violin bow, tears off her wig and steps on the prompter's hand, who lets out a pathetic "Au - au - au". In a further scene, Valentin puts the melody of the aria Who dares us from the Gypsy Baron , which doesn't really fit together.

Bertolt Brecht probably knew the piece from his collaboration with Valentin. In any case, he was inspired by this to his memory of Marie A. , who was sung to the melody of "Lost Happiness" (first documented in a record by Kate Kühl , where the tune was identified as an "old melody", without a statement of the author) . However, Brecht shortened the melody by two lines of text and arranged it in collaboration with Franz Servatius Bruinier . It is clear that Brecht's arrangement, at least in one of its layers of meaning, works as a hit parody, something that Hans Reimann, for example, immediately noticed when he heard the piece for the first time.

Surname

The musician appears in many catalogs as Leopold Sprowaker . This may be due to the decision of his son to use this changed surname. In Sprowacker's own publications and in contemporary texts, the name is always spelled with "ck". On his tombstone is the Sprowaka family , apparently various other family members had the same name.

Works (selection)

  • From the Hinterbrühl . March polka. Budapest: Rózsavölgyi. 1879
  • My love lives on the green beach of the proud Adriatic . Waltz rondo. Text: Eduard Merkt. 1890. Digitized at the Austrian National Library
  • Hello Schurl! Joke march. Text: Eduard Merkt. 1890
  • Poste restante . Polka française. Text: Carl Lorens. 1890
  • That won't bring you roses. Text: Hanns Binder. 1892. Digitized at the Austrian National Library
  • Today go ma nimma ham. Joke march. Text: Carl Lorens. 1893
  • Juchhe, we haun a hole in the world. March couplet. 1894
  • With a balloon. Marching song. Text: Adolf Bergmann. 1894. Digitized at the Austrian National Library
  • Gondoliers march. Using the original songs recorded with great applause in Venice in Vienna . 1895
  • Lost luck . Romanian song. 1896. Digitized at the Austrian National Library
  • Unfaithful. 1898
  • O Leopoldin, where have you gone? Singing polka. Sung by Josef Modl with Ronacher . 1899
  • Madame I love you! Wienerlied. Text: Heinrich Heine. 1903
  • There has to be a little catching up to do. Sung by Josef Steidler in Danzer's Orpheum
  • The merry negroes. Original Cakewalk. English Original: Harry S. Webster. German text: Leopold Sprowacker

literature

  • Christian Fastl: Sprowaker (own Sprowacker), family . In: Austrian Music Lexicon online, entry .
  • Fritz Hennenberg: “On that day in the blue moon September…” A Brecht poem and its source. In: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , Vol. 149, Issue 7/8, July / August 1988, pp. 24–29.

Web links

Wikisource: Full text of "Lost Happiness"  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the annual report of the kaiserl. royal Upper secondary school in Wiener-Neustadt at the end of the school year 1868 , Vienna 1868, p. 38. Online .
  2. ↑ Christian Fasti: Sprowaker .
  3. ↑ Anonymous: Leopold Sprowacker . In: Wiener Bilder , November 18, 1903, p. 10. Online .
  4. ↑ Listed in Hofmeister's musical-literary monthly reports .
  5. ↑ Anonymous: Leopold Sprowacker . In: Wiener Bilder , November 18, 1903, p. 10 online ; Anonymous: anniversary of a musician. In: Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt , November 13, 1903, p. 7, online . An appearance in Café Adlon is documented for 1914. There “the Sprowacker music band brought the latest operettas and waltzes to the audience” ( Neues Wiener Journal , January 24, 1914, p. 8, online ).
  6. ^ Josef Koller: The Viennese folk singing in old and new times. Retold and self-experienced , Gerlach & Wiedling, Vienna 1931, gives on p. 188ff. a list of the well-known pianists at performances by Viennese folk singers and mentions Sprowacker among others.
  7. ↑ Christian Fasti: Sprowaker .
  8. ↑ Anonymous: Leopold Sprowacker . In: Wiener Bilder , November 18, 1903, p. 10, online ; Anonymous: anniversary of a musician. In: Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt , November 13, 1903, p. 7, online .
  9. ^ Josef Koller : The Viennese folk singing in old and new times. Retold and self-experience , Gerlach & Wiedling, Vienna 1931, p. 119.
  10. ↑ Susan Ingram, Markus Leitner travel, Cornelia Szabó-Knotik: Reverberations: Representations of Modernity, Tradition and Cultural Value In-Between Central Europe and North America . Lang, 2002, p. 23f.
  11. ↑ It is Sprowacker's only title with Rudolf Sieczyński : Wienerlied, Wiener Wein, Wiener Sprache . Wiener Verlag, 1947, p. 144 indicated.
  12. ↑ See Günter Metzner: Heine in der Musik. Bibliography of the Heine settings . Volume 7: Composers - S, H. Schneider, Tutzing 1991, p. 405.
  13. ↑ See for example the advertisement in: Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters , 1906, p. 106; also in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts ( online ).
  14. ^ Alfred Schillinger: Remembrance days for personalities from Vienna and Lower Austria in 1966 . In: Our home. Monthly journal of the Association for Regional Studies of Lower Austria and Vienna , vol. 37 (1966), issue 1/3, pp. 36–72, here: p. 64.
  15. ↑ See the search for the deceased at https://www.friedhoefewien.at/grabsuche_de .
  16. ↑ Christian Fasti: Sprowaker .
  17. ^ Fritz Hennenberg: On that day in the blue moon September ... , p. 26.
  18. ↑ Hans Reimann: Love and marriage on records. In: Der Cross Section, Volume 13 (1933), Issue 3 (March), pp. 218–219, here: p. 219.
  19. ↑ Based on a presentation by Brecht on Berlin radio in 1950, here quoted from Fritz Hennenberg: On that day in the blue moon September ... , p. 24.
  20. ↑ See the entry in the Internet Movie Database .
  21. ↑ See Karl Valentin: Theater in der Vorstadt . In: ders .: All works in nine volumes. Volume 5: The Confirmation. Pieces , Piper, Munich 2007, pp. 11–37, here: pp. 15f.
  22. ^ Fritz Hennenberg: On that day in the blue moon September ... , p. 26.
  23. ↑ Fritz Hennenberg: On that day in the blue moon September… .
personal data
SURNAME Sprowacker, Leopold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sprowaker, Leopold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Kapellmeister and composer
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1853
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiener Neustadt , Austria
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1936
Place of death Vienna , Austria