Alexander Maria Schnabel

Alexander Robert Maria Schnabel (born December 17, 1889 in Riga , † June 17, 1969 in Hamburg ) was a German-Baltic composer .

Life and work in Riga

Alexander Maria Schnabel made his first attempts at composition as a child and received piano lessons at the age of eleven . From 1907 to 1914 he studied at the Imperial Music School in Riga. Despite initial success through the performance of orchestral works such as the Faust Symphony , he also studied architecture from 1908 to 1910. During World War I he was drafted into the Russian Army . He then took composition lessons from Jāzeps Vītols . Until the resettlement in 1939 he worked in the Latvian capital as a concert pianist, music teacher, music writer and organizer of subscription concerts in the House of the Blackheads . Schnabel was the only Riga-based Baltic German composer whose work - the dance drama Der Aufruhr - was performed in the Latvian National Opera . Many performances (including world premieres ) of his works took place in Germany as well , but from 1933 onwards the connections there broke off. His compositions - in addition to orchestral works, especially songs, piano pieces and chamber music - are characterized by a wealth of impressionistic colors.

World War II and last years

The Second World War brought the destruction of a large part of Schnabel's life's work. In 1939, like many other Baltic Germans, he was relocated to Posen as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . In 1943, numerous manuscripts and published works were lost in a bomb attack when the archive of the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Härtel was destroyed . When Schnabel had to flee west from the advancing Red Army in 1945 , he had to leave the score of a symphony he had been working on for five years in Poznan. During the escape, the piano reduction was also lost. Under the impression of this loss, he gave up composing, from then on played no role in musical life and eke out his life with a stamp trade . Today he and his work are largely forgotten.

literature

• Helmut Scheunchen: Alexander Maria Schnabel. Life and Work , 1989
• Ders .: Lexicon of German Baltic Music , Wedemark-Elze 2002, pp. 228–231
• Carola L. Gottzmann , Petra Hörner: Lexicon of the German-language literature of the Baltic States and St. Petersburg . De Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-019338-1 , p. 1157-1158 .

Web links

• Alexander Maria Schnabel in the Bavarian Musicians' Lexicon Online (BMLO)
• Schnabel, Alexander Maria in the East German biography (Kulturportal West-Ost)
• Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry to Schnabel, Alexander Maria. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital