Yevgeny Ottowitsch favor

Yevgeny Gunst ( Russian Евгений Оттович Гунст ., Scientific transliteration Evgenij Ottovič favor ; born May 26 ^{. Jul} / 7. June  1877 ^greg. In Moscow , † the 30th January 1950 in Paris ) was a Russian composer , music writer and -pädagoge and Jurist. He was the brother of the actor Anatoly Ottowitsch favor .

Life

Gunst grew up as the son of the German-Russian State Councilor Otto Karl Gunst in Moscow and studied law at Moscow University and composition, theory and piano at the State Conservatory; he also received private lessons from Reinhold Glière and Alexander Goldenweiser . In 1909 he was involved in founding a Moscow Society for the Distribution of Chamber Music (with Rachmaninoff , Scriabin , Glasunow and Taneyev, among others ). After completing his law degree, Gunst worked as a lawyer and assistant to the investigating judge until 1910. As a result, he appeared in various musical fields until the outbreak of war: Gunst was employed as a translator and reviewer for various music and theater magazines , briefly conducted at the Moscow Chamber Theater and was also a teacher at the Gnessin Institute . During the First World War, Gunst temporarily returned to the legal profession and assisted the procurator of the war district court in Moscow. After the war, Gunst was appointed to the Nizhny Novgorod State Conservatory , where he first taught music history and was later appointed director of the conservatory.

In 1920 Gunst emigrated to France via Estonia, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1924 he co-founded the Conservatoire Russe in Paris (today “Conservatoire Rachmaninoff”) and worked there as a lecturer in music theory and composition. In 1931 he had to give up his work there due to political differences of opinion and founded his own conservatory, the "Conservatoire Normale Russe". With the ongoing global economic crisis , Gunst got into financial difficulties: he lost his private students and had to close his conservatory. From then on he kept himself afloat as a copyist and proofreader as well as an arranger and in the following years he increasingly turned to the composition of piano works, songs and school music. In 1949 he planned to emigrate to the United States , but Gunst died in Paris in 1950 at the age of 72.

Due to his different places of activity, Gunst's name can be found in different spellings. His German birth name was Eugen Gunst; in Russia it was known as Evgeni Gunst, in France then as Eugène Gunst. He published some works, especially those from popular music, under the pseudonym "Eugene Favor". His estate was rediscovered in Basel in 2009, where it was stored unnoticed in the basement of the musicological institute for several decades after the estate was handed over from Gunst's widow to the institute director at the time, Jacques Handschin .

literature

• Montagu-Nathan, Mont: Contemporary Russian Composers , London 1917.
• Article “Eugène Gunst”, in: Joubert, Joseph (ed.): Les maîtres contemporains de l'orgue . Pièces inédites pour l'orgue ou harmonium , vol. 5, Paris 1914.
• Article “Гунст Е. О. “, in: Keldyš, Jurij V. (ed.): Музыкальная Энциклопедия [Muzykal'naja Enciklopedija], Moscow 1973–1982.
• Article “Ewgenij Ottowitsch Gunst”, in: Fiseisky, Alexander (ed.): Orgelmusik in Russland, Vol. 1, Kassel 1997.

Publications after the rediscovery of the estate

• Musicological Institute of the University of Basel (ed.): Findings of a life. The composer Evgenij Gunst , Leipzig 2011.
• Rossel, David (ed.): Evgenij Ottovič favor. All choral works , music science. Institute of the University of Basel, 2011.

Discography

• Sonata No. 2 in C sharp minor, Op. 10, Romances sans paroles, Op. 2, Heidelberg Sketches, Op. 6, etc. , Susanne Lang, Oehms Calssics OC 899, harmonia mundi 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grated and forgotten between wars and systems in FAZ of 29 September 2014 Page 10