Felicitas Kukuck

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Middle: The German composer Paul Hindemith in 1937 with students. Right next to him Felicitas Kestner geb. Conheim, whose later work was strongly influenced by Hindemith. In 1939 she was called Kukuck after she married.

Felicitas Kukuck (born November 2, 1914 in Hamburg ; † June 4, 2001 there ), née Cohnheim (the family name was officially changed to Kestner in 1916), was a German composer .

Life

Felicitas Kukuck was born in Hamburg as the daughter of the doctor and physiologist Otto Cohnheim (1873–1953), who had the family name changed to Kestner in 1916. The parents encouraged their daughter's artistic development from childhood and made it possible for her to attend schools in which music was a high priority. Until 1933 she attended the Lichtwark School, which was oriented towards reform pedagogy . The National Socialist takeover of power marked a deep turning point in her life; only now did she find out about her Jewish ancestors. After the DC circuit of Lichtwark by the Nazis , she joined Martin Luserkes " school by the sea " in Juist , where they by Eduard Zuckmayer was promoted and by the strong musical orientation benefited the rural school hostel. She graduated from high school in 1935 at the Odenwald School . Her teachers included Zuckmayer (music), Edith Weiss-Mann (piano) and Robert Müller-Hartmann (harmony).

After graduating from high school, Felicitas Kukuck first studied piano and flute at the Berlin Conservatory . In 1937 she successfully passed the private music teacher examination. After because of their partly Jewish ancestry disbarment had received, she studied alongside Jens Rohwer composition with Paul Hindemith until it emigrated.

Thanks to her father's change of name, which also affected her, she became a member of the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK) and was thus able to complete her music studies in 1939 with the artistic matriculation examination for piano.

In the same year she married Dietrich Kukuck, who presented the registrar with a birth certificate for his partner in the name of Kestner.

Felicitas Kukuck spent the war time in Berlin , only then did she publish her works.

In 1945 Felicitas Kukuck moved to Hamburg with a refugee trail . In 1948 she finally moved with her family to Hamburg-Blankenese , where she lived and worked until her death in 2001. She had four children.

Felicitas Kukuck was buried in the Blankeneser cemetery in Quartier A1 (No. 917).

In 2016, a street in the Hamburg district of Altona-Nord was named after Felicitas Kukuck.

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Paul Hindemith had a lasting influence on Felicitas Kukuck. His commitment to the composer's ethical obligations set the trend for her. The overarching two-part voice and the harmonic gradient as well as secondary bridges determined their compositional process.

In six decades Felicitas Kukuck has created “more than 1000 works”, in addition to instrumental works, sacred and secular vocal music. She has developed her very own, unmistakable style. Of particular importance was the friendly collaboration with Gottfried Wolters , who headed the North German Singing Circle and was editor of the Möseler Verlag .

In 1953 her first oratorio "The Coming Reich. The Beatitudes" was premiered at the 5th German Evangelical Church Congress in Hamburg.

In 1959 her two-choir oratorio "Der Gottesknecht" was premiered in Berlin, and subsequently in the Hamburg main church St. Petri under the direction of Gottfried Wolters and Willi Träder.

Felicitas Kukuck founded the Blankenese Chamber Choir in 1969 , the core of which was initially her family and friends. Her choir has participated in many world premieres of her works, e. B. the church operas Der Mann Mose (1986) and Ecce Homo (1991), the cantatas De Profundis (1989), On glowing coals sung (1990), And it was: Hiroshima , Who was Nikolaus von Myra? and swords to plowshares (1995), the motets death fugue , psalm , O the weeping children's night and O the chimneys (1994), It is said to you, human being , The Beatitudes and Everything Has Its Time (1995) as well as the Ten Songs against the War (1996).

The cantata And there was: Hiroshima. A collage about the beginning and end of creation was premiered on August 11, 1995 as part of a World Peace Week in Hamburg. In this work, but also in other works that follow, the composer deals with existential questions of our time: with war and peace, with Auschwitz or with Chernobyl .

The scenic cantata Who was Nikolaus von Myra? How a bishop saved his city from a famine and saved it from war was also premiered in 1995, on December 3rd, on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the Hamburg main church St. Nikolai .

In 1996 seven songs for female voice and piano were written based on poems by a girl to her friend by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger , who died in a concentration camp at the age of 18 .

In 1989, Felicitas Kukuck was honored with the Biermann Ratjen Medal in Hamburg for her services to art and culture . In 1994 she was awarded the Johannes Brahms Medal for her services to Hamburg's musical life and as an award for outstanding achievements in the field of music .

Even in old age, Felicitas Kukuck composed almost every day and was therefore always on the lookout for good lyrics. Because it was, as she once said, “the words” that “ignite” them.

The two best-known pieces by Felicitas Kukuck are the melody for the hymn Sometimes we know God's will ( EG 626, GL 299) and the song It leads across the Main (the first seven verses are from the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus in Berlin in the 1930s handed down by her sister. Kukuck added the eighth and last stanza. She incorporated the original melody in the cantata “Die Brücke über der Main” and thus saved it from being forgotten).

She was a member of the artists' organization GEDOK , the ecumenical text authors and composers group of the Werkgemeinschaft Musik e. V. and the AG Music in the Ev. Youth e. V., today the lyricists and composers group TAKT

The singing group Felicitas Kukuck , founded in 2006 under the direction of Christoph Leis-Bendorff, is dedicated to the vocal works of Felicitas Kukuck and performs with them in northern Germany.

Other important works

  • Twelve piano variations on 'The Fish Live in Water' , 1937
  • Sonata for flute and piano , premiered in Berlin in 1941
  • Piano variations on 'It's a reaper is called death' , premiered in Berlin in 1942
  • Psalm 104 , German and English, 1947
  • Annunciation , Premiere 1951
  • Missa Sancti Gabrielis Archangeli , premiere 1968 in Hamburg
  • Where do you stay comfort , premiere 1974 in Hanover
  • The Conference of Animals , premiere 1982 in Hamburg
  • Lamentations of Jeremiah , premiered 1984 in Hamburg
  • The Game of Herodes , premiered in 1988 in Stockholm and Copenhagen
  • Von der Barmherzigkeit , premiered 1997 in Hamburg

See also

literature

  • Article Kukuck, Felicitas , in: Kürschner's German Musicians Calendar 1954. Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin 1954, Sp. 682–683.
  • Cordula Sprenger: Felicitas Kukuck as a composer of solo and choral songs , Tectum Verlag. Marburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8288-9756-4 .
  • Margret Johannsen: Lexicon entry Kukuck, Felicitas. In: Hamburg biography . Lexicon of persons. edited by Franklin Kopitzsch and Dirk Brietzke, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2008, pp. 203–205, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Article Kukuck, Felicitas , in: Kürschner's German Musicians Calendar 1954. Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin 1954, Col. 682.
  2. ^ Claudia Friedel: Women composing in the Third Reich. Attempt to reconstruct the reality of life and the prevailing image of women . LIT, Münster 1995. ISBN 3-8258-2376-8 , p. 382.
  3. ↑ Felicitas Kukuck: Autobiography in the form of a diary . P. 9 (PDF file; 446 kB). From: felicitaskukuck.de, accessed on July 15, 2017
  4. ↑ Portrait and image / location of the tombstone at garten-der-frauen.de
  5. ^ Statistics Office North: Street and area index of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
  6. ↑ Article by Verena Fischer-Zernin: The imagination is kindled by the words in NMZ ( Neue Musikzeitung , ConBrio Verlagsgesellschaft Regensburg) November 2014, p. 6.
personal data
SURNAME Kukuck, Felicitas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH June 4, 2001
Place of death Hamburg