Frederic Cohen

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Memorial plaque for Friedrich Cohen in Bayreuth

Frederic Cohen , also: Friedrich A. Cohen , Fritz A. Cohen (born June 23, 1904 in Bonn , † March 9, 1967 in New York City ) was a German-American composer. His best-known work is the music for the ballet The Green Table .

Life

Friedrich Cohen was the son of the Bonn bookseller Friedrich Cohen and his wife Hedwig Bouvier. Cohen studied composition at the universities in Bonn, Leipzig , Cologne and Berlin . In 1924 he was the piano accompanist of the dancer Yvonne Georgi and was engaged as a director at the theater of the city of Münster under the general music director Rudolf Schulz-Dornburg . There he met the dancer and Rudolf Laban student Kurt Jooss , for whom he composed the ballet Tragedy in 1926 as the first of eleven Jooss ballets. In 1927 he and the Jooss dancer Elsa Kahl (1901–1992) married in Münster. Schulz-Dornburg, Hein Heckroth and Joos founded the Folkwang School in Essen in 1927 and Cohen received a lectureship there in 1928. Schulz-Dornburg brought him, who had meanwhile worked as a director in Würzburg , to the Essen theater in 1930 . From 1927 Jooss and Cohen had their great success with the pantomime ballet "The Green Table" , which was awarded in Paris in 1932. At the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 Laban, Jooss and Cohen choreographed the Bacchanal in Tannhäuser . Cohen was the musical director of the Jooss Ballet between 1932 and 1942.

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, Jooss was forced to dismiss the Jewish members of his ballet company for racist reasons.Instead, he emigrated with the ballet troupe to London and presented his choreographies with them on worldwide tours until 1942. Cohen and his wife moved in 1941 to the USA, and he was there at various colleges, including the Black Mountain College , as a music teacher worked. At Tanglewood of the Berkshire Music Center he was an opera director for a while, where on February 26, 1944 he played the piano accompaniment for the English-language premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Fear and Misery of the Third Reich , translated by Eric Bentley . From 1946 to 1963 he was a teacher at the Juilliard School . In 1952, Le jeu de Robin et Marion by Adam de la Halle in the musical establishment of Darius Milhaud at the "Juilliard Opera Theater", which he founded in 1951, was part of the series of world premieres or US premieres that he organized or conducted . Works by Benjamin Britten , Zoltán Kodály , Luigi Dallapiccola , Vittorio Giannini and Richard Strauss also premiered there under his direction .

In 1951, Cohen became president of the US section of the International Society for New Music .

Fonts

  • A manifesto for opera in the United States. In: Juilliard review, v. 4, no.3 1957.

literature

  • Anna Markard , Hermann Markard: Jooss: for the exhibition "Kurt Jooss - Life and Work" in the Museum Folkwang Essen on the occasion of the festival "Folkwang '85"; Documentation , Cologne: Ballett-Bühnen-Verl., 1985 ISBN 3-922224-06-7 .
  • Gisela Möllenhoff; Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer: Jewish families in Münster 1918 to 1945. Biographical Lexicon , Münster: Westfäl. Steam boat, 1995 ISBN 3-929586-48-7 .
  • Werner Roeder, Institute for Contemporary History Munich [ed.]: International biographical dictionary of Central European émigrés 1933 - 1945 , Munich: Saur, 1983, p. 190 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 .
  • Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 .
  • Kurt Jooss; Frederic A Cohen; Anna Markard; Gretchen Schumacher; Ann Hutchinson Guest: The green table: a dance of death in eight scenes , New York: Routledge, 2003. ISBN 9780415942553 .
  • Suzanne K. Walther: The Dance of Death: Kurt Jooss and the Weimar Years , Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994 ISBN 9783718657025 .
  • Hannes Heer ; Jürgen Kesting ; Peter Schmidt: Silent voices: the Bayreuth Festival and the "Jews" from 1876 to 1945; an exhibition . Bayreuth Festival Park and New Town Hall Exhibition Hall Bayreuth, July 22nd to October 14th, 2012. Berlin: Metropol, 2012 ISBN 978-3-86331-087-5 , p. 367.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Schmidt: German booksellers. German book printer . Volume 1. Berlin / Eberswalde 1902, pp. 143–144, at zeno
  2. ^ List of works by Jooss at Markard: on the exhibition Jooss , pp. 76–77
  3. ↑ Notes on the vita in Leanore Friedland Ickstadt's memories of the dancer: Dancing, out of Germany - A bicultural reflection , Bloomington: UniversInc., 2011 ISBN 9781462001439
  4. ↑ Pictures of the dancer Elsa Kahl in choreographies by Jooss at Markard: for the exhibition Jooss , u. a. P. 128; There also on various photos Friedrich Cohen
  5. ^ Andi Schoon: The order of sounds: the interplay of the arts from the Bauhaus to the Black Mountain College , Bielefeld: transcript 2006, p. 116f ISBN 978-3-89942-450-8 Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 2006
personal data
SURNAME Cohen, Frederic
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cohen, Friedrich A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American composer
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH March 9, 1967
Place of death New York City