Anatol von Roessel

Anatol von Roessel (born November 4, 1877 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † October 30, 1967 in Ober-Hambach , today the city of Heppenheim (Bergstrasse) ) was a stateless pianist, music critic and piano teacher of Austrian-Russian origin.

Anatol von Roessel, around 1910

Life

The father was Austrian, the mother Russian, one of his grandmothers Alsatian. His father was also a concert pianist and from 1877 to 1878 a student of Franz Liszt , who was also Anatol von Roessel's godfather . Soon after the birth of Anatol, the family moved to Odessa , where the father had become the Imperial Russian Music Director . Roessel was raised Russian Orthodox . He grew up trilingual. In addition to Russian, German and Ukrainian, French was added to the high school, which he soon mastered perfectly. After graduating from high school in Odessa, he gave concerts in southern Russia in order to get the funds to study at the Leipzig Conservatory .

In Leipzig he studied with the famous pianist Alfred Reisenauer . He completed his studies at the end of 1904 and won the Mozart Prize there. Reisenauer appointed him as the only assistant to his master school, where he worked until Reisenauer's early death in 1907. Married by now, he now ran his father-in-law's business.

From 1910 to 1914 he was head of the training class at the Erfurt Conservatory, and he also went on concert tours through Germany, France, Sweden and Russia, where he achieved significant pianistic successes. Nothing is known about his life during the First World War ; it is possible that he was interned as a citizen of an enemy state . Roessel had been a Russian citizen and had become stateless after the revolution in Russia .

In 1905 he was invited several times to record a total of 25 pieces for the Welte-Mignon reproduction piano .

In 1926 he went to Paris, where he worked as a music critic. He wrote for the international music press, including for the magazine L 'art musical and was a correspondent for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , he was also vice-president of the Critique étrangère en France .

Meanwhile divorced, he returned to Germany in July 1939 to settle private affairs. It was here that he saw the outbreak of war in September 1939. In 1940 he briefly returned to Paris, but soon withdrew to the Bavarian countryside, deprived of his livelihood. As a stateless person, he had a difficult status in Nazi Germany. The internationally renowned musician and critic found refuge in the Landschulheim Neubeu near Rosenheim , where he worked as a piano teacher and concert master. In 1941 the National Socialists closed the boarding school as "politically unreliable". At the invitation of the Odenwald School , he was able to move to Ober-Hambach in the same year to also work as a piano teacher there. Roessel worked in the Odenwaldschule into old age, his existence was secured by the school community.

literature

• Anatol von Roessel: A virtuoso résumé . In: School magazine of the Odenwald School .
• Trude Emmerich: Commemorative speech on the death of Anatol von Roessel . In: Reports from the Odenwald School (=  13th year, issue 5 ). S. 352-355 .