Franz Josef Breuer

Franz Josef Breuer, 1983

Franz Josef Breuer (born January 30, 1914 in Elberfeld ; † March 7, 1996 in Hamburg ) was a German composer and music producer of entertainment and military music and a member of the supervisory board of the Society for Musical Performance and Mechanical Reproduction Rights (GEMA for short) ( 1953-1965).

childhood and education

Franz Josef Breuer was the second of four children of the wicker furniture manufacturer Franz Maria Leonhard Breuer (1880–1959) and his wife Helene nee. Lencke (1879-1970).

Growing up in Elberfeld, the family moved to Coburg in northern Bavaria in 1923 , where the father had set up a second larger wicker furniture business.

Franz Josef Breuer attended elementary school and also received violin and piano lessons. A short time at the Casimirianum grammar school in Coburg was followed by a seven-year training period in the Ettal monastic boarding school in Upper Bavaria when he entered the school in 1928 .

In the monastery Breuer perfected his violin and piano playing and also learned a total of fourteen instruments. This laid the basis for his later work as an arranger and arranger for orchestras of various line-ups.

With a school orchestra he founded, he organized regular performances in the nearby monastery hotel "Ludwig der Bayer". He also founded a choir and organized concert and theater evenings. During this time he created his first play with music - "The Song of the Mountains". A tragicomic story of a secretary who gets into mountain difficulties and is rescued by a dairy farmer.

When composing musical interludes, Breuer demonstrated a talent for written expression, so that the boarding school management gave him and a classmate the responsibility for the student chronicle "Ettaler Mandl" for several years.

After the end of his boarding school, he began studying at the Munich University of Music , directed by Richard Trunk , with the aim of becoming a theater conductor and composer in the field of popular music . Joseph Haas taught him how to compose, Franz Knappe how to conduct and Franz Dorfmüller how to play the piano. However, the call for general conscription with the 61st Infantry Regiment in the Deroy barracks in Munich prevented a proper conclusion.

After six months of basic training, Breuer was accepted into the regiment's music corps, for which he wrote scores as an arranger, to which music publishers increasingly became aware, so that the Mainz music publisher Schott signed him first . This was followed by a full-length broadcast on Radio Munich, in which only compositions and arrangements by Breuer were broadcast. The piece "Rosemarie", which Breuer wrote together with Franz Großesmann for Regiment 61, was particularly popular.

After completing his military service in 1936, he worked as a lecturer and volunteer at the Leipzig music publisher Ehler & Erdmann, with whom Breuer had already worked before his discharge. His training as a publisher eventually led to a position as publishing director. As the editor for all types of publication, he was also the publisher's composer.

A total of around 300 printed works are available from the Leipzig period. These include piano arrangements, accordion editions, folk music ensembles, choral scores, salon orchestral editions, wind orchestra arrangements, arrangements for large orchestra and well-known concert pieces by Tchaikovsky , Verdi or Johann Strauss .

The general mobilization in 1939 finally ended his work for the Leipziger Verlag. In the war year 1941 he married Rosemarie Breuer nee. Junghans (1920–2011) - daughter of a Leipzig district court director - with whom he had two children.

Post-war period and artistic career in Hamburg

Missions on both the western and eastern fronts, including nine weeks in Stalingrad, from which he was one of the last to be flown out due to an illness, finally ended with the capture by the English in the Bay of Lübeck.

At the end of August 1945, a delegation from Hamburger Rundfunk selected a total of 32 prisoners from the Putlos camp near Oldenburg in Holstein after an audition to set up the future Northwest German Radio (NWDR). Among them was Breuer, who was initially hired as the editor for the new Mario Traversa entertainment orchestra , only to take over the position of composer for the newly founded children's radio just weeks later.

In the following two decades he worked with the Great Radio Orchestra, the NWDR Dance Orchestra and the Harbor Concert Orchestra. Breuer eventually became the station's in-house composer and wrote the music for around four hundred children's radio programs, radio plays from William Shakespeare to Max Frisch, as well as funk features, film music and for choir and harbor concerts.

In 1949, Breuer, who had meanwhile switched from radio employee to freelance work at the NWDR, also began working as a record producer. There was cooperation with record companies such as Polydor, Telefunken / Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, Elite Spezial or Austrophon. Breuer acted in personal union as composer, arranger and production manager.

For the Polydor , which Breuer offered a contract as an editor and unit manager in 1951, he produced approx. 2100 titles over 15 years. If you add in the titles that were created in the course of his involvement with Telefunken / Decca between 1968 and 1985, a total of over 6000 record titles come together. About 1500 of these are own compositions and arrangements.

Over the years Breuer has worked with a variety of artists. These include the interpreters Lale Andersen , Maria Hellwig , Paul Hörbiger , Udo Jürgens , Heidi Kabel , Hildegard Knef , Chantal Mathieu , Anna Moffo , Freddy Quinn , Hermann Prey , Willy Schneider , Anneliese Rothenberger , Felicia Weathers, Günter Wewel and Fritz Wunderlich as well Choirs such as the Cologne Male Choir, the Munich Chamber Choir, the Vienna Boys' Choir or the Regensburger Domspatzen .

In 1960 his composition Bonne nuit, ma chérie , interpreted by Wyn Hoop and conducted by himself, won fourth place for Germany at the Eurovision Song Contest in London.

Breuer continued to perform successfully as a musical composer. In total he composed about 100 productions with up to 80 individual performances. The musical "Mister Poppcorn or the Journey to Rothenburg", "The Pirate's Piece" or the children's musicals based on fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm: "Seven in one go" (based on the "Brave Little Tailor"), "Tischlein, deck dich", " Otto Panino and his band "(after the" Bremer Stadtmusikanten ")," Reinicke Fuchs "or the circus piece" Olalahoo ". Many of the musicals were created in collaboration with the playwright Heinz Wunderlich .

But there is also serious music in his work. A total of 25 larger orchestral compositions, including “Rhapsody of a Night” for piano and orchestra, the “Ukrainian Overture” and “Between Ebb and Flow” (subtitle: “North Sea Sketch”).

Numerous gold records recognized his work. On his 80th birthday, Joachim Dorfmüller published a 28-page commemorative publication (including 8 sheet music sample pages) with a complete catalog raisonné.

Web links

Bonne nuit, ma chérie on youtube, accessed January 12, 2013

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wuppertal composers I. On the life and work of Jan Albert van Eyken, Heinrich Friedrich Wink, Wilhelm Fehres, Kurt Lissmann , Gunild Keetman, Fritz Christian Gerhard, Franz Josef Breuer, George Dreyfus, Konrad Hupfer, Ludwig Werner Weiand , Bernd Köppen and Thomas Honickel. (Wuppertal Biographies, 15th episode. Contributions to the history and local history of the Wuppertal, Volume 33.) 137 S. Wuppertal (Born) 1986