Adolf Graf (church musician)

Adolf Graf (born July 14, 1899 in Annweiler am Trifels ; † November 4, 1978 there ) was a German church musician and first regional church music director of the Evangelical Church of the Palatinate (Protestant regional church) .

Live and act

During his activity as a primary school teacher , which he practiced until 1949, Adolf Graf also shaped the church music landscape in the Palatinate. From 1924 to 1930 he worked as an organist, first in Annweiler and then from 1930 to 1958 at the Speyer Memorial Church. Graf was a student of the Mannheim cantor Arno Landmann and was considered a supporter of the organ movement . From 1946 he was an official organ expert in the Palatinate. He was appointed regional music director in 1949. Associated with this was the full-time management of the newly established Office for Church Music in Speyer , after he had founded the church music seminars as training centers for musically gifted young people just one year after the end of the war. The Evangelical Youth Choir of the Palatinate was founded in September 1951 by Adolf Graf in the Landau seminary . From participants in the church music seminars, he put together a choir of around 30 singers, who were supposed to devote themselves above all to the cultivation of sophisticated literature, such as the great oratorios , motets from the Schütz era or the cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach . In 1955 Graf was appointed to the newly created office of regional church music director (LKMD) of the Palatinate regional church. He held this management position until he retired in 1968. His successor in office was Heinz Markus Göttsche. Overall, after the war in the Palatinate, Graf carried out sustainable church music development and youth work and created structures that outlived his term of office. The regional church music day, which still takes place every two years to this day, as well as the choir booklet Palatinate, which has been published annually by Strube Verlag since 1952 and which has been ecumenically published together with the diocese of Speyer since 2018, goes back to Adolf Graf . Furthermore, since 1938 Adolf Graf was the editor of prelude collections and chorale auditions, which were widely used far beyond the Palatinate.

Awards

• 1959: Peter Cornelius badge of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate
• 1964: Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class

criticism

As a representative of the organ movement and in his function as regional church music director and organ building expert for the Palatinate regional church, numerous new and reconstructed organs in the Palatinate were made on Graf's initiative. After the early baroque (north German) organ with its overtone-rich sound had become the ideal of organ movement in Germany since the 1930s, many romantic organs in the Palatinate also had to give way to new instruments with a steep, “neo-baroque” disposition in the 1950s and 1960s . The sloppy and superficial intonation , the use of untried materials and the sometimes poorly crafted implementation brought the instruments of that time a lot of criticism in retrospect.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Adolf Graf (ed.), Chorale preludes for worship use (Vol. I-III); That. (Ed.), Free Organ Pieces by Old Masters (Vol. I-II).
2. ↑ Evangelische Jugendkantorei der Pfalz »Choir history since 1951. Retrieved on June 21, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Development work in the Palatinate and international attention. In 1955 the regional music warden becomes the regional church music director - Adolf Graf and Heinz Markus Göttsche shape church music . In: Evangelischer Kirchenbote 2008 . Issue 8. Speyer, p. 12 .
4. ↑ Ev. Church music Palatinate. Retrieved June 21, 2018 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b} Bernhard H. Bonkhoff: Monument organs in the Palatinate . Evangelischer Presseverlag Pfalz, Speyer 1990, p. 25-38, 349 .
6. ↑ 60 years of the Evangelical Youth Choir of the Palatinate. 1951-2011 . Speyer: Verlagshaus Speyer, 2011