Gottfried Wolters

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Gottfried Wolters as a singing lesson leader

Gottfried Wolters (born April 8, 1910 in Emmerich ; † June 25, 1989 there ) was a German choir director and composer .

Life

He began studying music at the University of Cologne , but did not finish his dissertation on Johann Baptist Vanhal as a symphonist in 1933 . After the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists , he worked as a lecturer at PJ Tonger Verlag in Cologne and also as a freelance composer and choir director. On May 1, 1933 he became a member of the NSDAP and registered under the party number 2.227.516. However, it was deleted in 1934 because it had missed the monthly report. Since 1934 he has appeared as a composer of HJ anthems and songs. As a gau music consultant for the German Labor Front , he was already active as a singing conductor during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In the Second World War he was drafted into the Navy. His songbook, Uns die Sonne does not go down, published together with Hugo Wolfram Schmidt . A selection of the most sung songs of the youth (1935) was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the Soviet occupation zone .

In the post-war years he founded the Norddeutscher Singkreis, a mixed choir in Hamburg . With this he performed the Johannes Passion and the St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach , the Choral Passion and the Mörike Choral Song Book by Hugo Distler , Günter Bialas Im Anfang and many other serious modern and baroque works. His special love was the German and later the European folk song, which he sang together with his choir and the audience with his own instrumental movements at the monthly Open Singing Hours in Hamburg. Secular music from madrigals to vocal music by Paul Hindemith was another focus. With other European choir directors he founded the Europa Cantat movement in the early 1960s and had active connections with the French choral movement À Cœur Joie and the choir director César Geoffray .

He organized numerous courses and singing weekends and became head of the working group Music in Youth (AMJ). He was an editor for Möseler Verlag in Wolfenbüttel and published the song sheet series Das Singende Jahr . This was followed by the multi-volume work Ars Musica Volume I – V with many choral movements and unanimous folk songs as well as the choir book Romanticism .

His compositional work includes monophonic and polyphonic, mostly secular songs. There are some vinyl recordings of his performances. Wolters has also prepared folk song broadcasts with the choir for the radio. He also worked on Bach's St. John Passion with the concert audience by rehearsing the chorales beforehand in joint rehearsals so that everyone could sing along with the performance. In addition to his intensive choral work, it was his goal to bring people in Western and Eastern Europe together through travels and large singing meetings.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, p. 7.914.
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 675.
  3. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-s.html
personal data
SURNAME Wolters, Gottfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German choir director and composer
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Emmerich (today: Emmerich am Rhein )
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 1989
Place of death Emmerich (today: Emmerich am Rhein )