Friedrich Welter

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Friedrich Wilhelm Welter (born May 2, 1900 in Eydtkuhnen near Königsberg , † 1984) was a German composer, music teacher and music critic.

Life

Welter was a son of the businessman Friedrich Wilhelm Welter from his marriage to Bertha Welter geb. Hirth. He attended the grammar schools in Insterburg and Königsberg and passed his matriculation examination there in June 1918. He then completed his military service until the end of 1918. From Easter 1919 he studied art history and philosophy at the University of Königsberg and at the same time attended the Königsberg Conservatory . Easter 1921 he became a master student of Georg Schumann at the Berlin Academy of the Arts and studied musicology at the Berlin University , especially with Johannes Wolf . In 1923, he was with a thesis on organ music to Dr. phil. obtained his doctorate and then worked as a music critic for various daily newspapers, including the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger .

From 1928 to 1932 Welter cataloged the archive of the Berlin Singakademie , which is one of the most important sheet music collections of the 18th and 19th centuries. During these years he was friends with the composer Justus Hermann Wetzel , to whom he dedicated a monograph in 1931.

With the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933, Welter positioned against the supposedly " degenerate art " by composers such as Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith , he fought in publishing, and making himself the mouthpiece of the Nazi regime . This applies in particular to the outline of his music history, published in 1939 , in which he vilified Jewish composers and spoke out on the subject of “music and race”.

Around 1939 he was briefly the composition teacher of Gottfried von Eine , who was impressed by an a-cappella piece by Welter that he had heard in a choir concert. The lessons ended after a few weeks, however, as Welter was drafted as an officer in the armed forces.

After the Second World War , Welter worked as a librarian in Lüneburg .

Compositions (selection)

As a composer, he has mainly performed with piano and vocal music, including:

  • Op. 1 - Eight little piano pieces , Berlin-Lichterfelde: Vieweg 1926
  • Op. 3 - Four songs for four-part male choir , Berlin-Lichterfelde: Welter 1929
  • Op. 4 - Three songs based on poems by Paul Würzburger , Berlin: Ries & Erler 1929
  • Op. 6 - Little Sonata for Piano , Stettin: Möricke 1937
  • Op. 10 - Suite in the form of variations in 3 movements , Berlin-Lichterfelde: Welter o. J.
  • Op. 15 - Three elegies for soprano and piano , Berlin: Stahl 1935
  • Op. 19 - To Ostland. Five folk songs for male choir , Berlin: Stahl 1935
  • Those wandering to the truth , cantata based on texts by Christian Morgenstern

Fonts

  • Play and compositions for several organs from 16. – 19. Century, primarily in Northern Italy , Berlin 1923 (dissertation) - Excerpt: Yearbook of dissertations of the Philosophical Faculty of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin , 1923, pp. 327–329
  • Justus Hermann Wetzel . The artist and his work , Berlin: Stahl 1931
  • About German Music - A Confession , in: Die Musik , vol. 25, issue 10 (July 1933), pp. 727–730 ( digitized version )
  • Hindemith  - A cultural and political consideration (an epilogue to the 1st German Composers' Day) , in: Die Musik , vol. 26, issue 6 (March 1934), pp. 417-422 ( digitized version)
  • Guide to the operas. The standard works and new releases of the German opera repertoire based on modern guidelines with descriptions of their creators' lives, with an opera story and 2 directories , Leipzig: Hachmeister & Thal 1937
  • Music history in outline. From the beginning to the present. With special consideration of German music since 1900 , Leipzig: Hachmeister & Thal 1939
  • Catalog of the music from the Lüneburg Council Library , Lippstadt: Kistner & Sigel 1950
  • The music library of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin . Attempt to prove their earlier holdings in: Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Festschrift for the 175th anniversary , ed. by Werner Bollert, Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag 1966, pp. 33-49

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Axel Fischer and Matthias Kornemann, The Archive of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Catalog , Berlin 2010, p. 27 ( digitized version )
  2. ^ Stephan Mösch, The used text. Studies on the libretti Boris Blachers , Stuttgart 2002, p. 73 ( digitized version )
personal data
SURNAME Welter, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Welter, Friedrich Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer, music teacher and music critic
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Eydtkuhnen near Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH 1984