Erik Then-Bergh

Erik Then-Bergh (born May 3, 1916 in Hanover , † April 19, 1982 in Baldham near Munich) was a German pianist and music teacher .

Live and act

Erik Then-Bergh received his first piano lessons at the age of five from his father and received further training from the Hanoverian piano teacher Clara Spitta (1885–1955). He made his first public appearance at the age of 13 in his hometown. He later studied piano in Frankfurt am Main in Alfred Hoehn's master class and then deepened his studies with Carl Adolf Martienssen in Berlin . At the age of 20 he won the Walter Bachmann Prize in Dresden . He made his debut at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1938 with piano concertos by Beethoven and Brahms . The high point of his career was during the Second World War , where he played under well-known conductors and in 1940 won the National Music Prize for the best young pianist.

After the war, he went on extensive concert tours throughout Europe, where he played under well-known conductors such as Herbert von Karajan and Joseph Keilberth . In 1954 he played four concerts in Hamburg and Berlin under the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler . Furtwängler was so impressed by him that he asked him to perform the revised version of his Symphonic Concerto in B minor on a major concert tour with the Berliner Philharmoniker . Both rehearsed and worked on the work together, but Furtwängler's death on Nov. 30, 1954 caused the tour to fail. Erik Then-Bergh played this concert almost 4 years later, on January 25, 1958, in the concert hall of the Hochschule für Musik Berlin with the Berlin Philharmonic in homage to Furtwängler. Artur Rother was the conductor .

Then-Bergh was not only a pianist but also a dedicated music teacher. From 1949 he taught at the Folkwang School of the city of Essen , from 1952 at the same time and later entirely at the Munich University of Music , where he taught until his death. His recordings focus mainly on the works of Beethoven , Mozart and Max Reger . In 1955, like his teacher Alfred Hoehn, he was on the jury of the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1932 and 1937 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Erik Then-Bergh in the catalog of the German National Library
• Erik Then-Berg in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)