Gustave Adolph Dungeon

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Gustave Adolph Kerker (born February 28, 1857 in Herford , † June 29, 1923 in New York ) was a German-American composer .

Career

Gustave Kerker is a son of Westphalia, he was born on February 28, 1857 in Herford. As the child of a family of musicians, he enjoyed a musical education at an early age and learned to play the cello at the age of seven. In 1867, he is ten years old, his parents emigrate with him to America, more precisely to the Middle East of the USA, to Louisville, Kentucky, a rapidly growing industrial city that had been fiercely contested in the American Civil War a short time before. The young Gustav gets an Americanized "e" appended to his first name and soon draws attention to himself in Louisville with his musical talent. As a cellist he soon played in an orchestra and in the local “Deutsche Oper”, conducted Weber's “Freischütz” at the age of 16 and began to compose. He was 22 years old when his comical first opera “Cadets” (“Die Kadetten”) was performed in 1879 and toured the southern United States, albeit with modest success.

Kerker got to know the repertoire in various positions as a conductor and finally ended up in New York, where he became the conductor of the newly opened Bijou Theater on Broadway . Here he adapts and arranges works by other authors, especially successful European pieces that are not subject to copyright in the USA. Kerker also accommodates its own musical numbers in it - in keeping with the custom of the time. But he can now also perform “musical comedies” he wrote himself.

In 1888 we find him as musical director of the Casino Theater , one of the most important Broadway stages of the time. His name now appears more frequently as a composer on the theater slips here and elsewhere on Broadway. “Castles in the Air”, an Offenbach adaptation from 1890, “Venus”, written for Boston in 1893, the Offenbach-inspired “Kismet” (1895), the revue-like “In Gay New York” (1895), “An American Beauty ”(1896),“ The Telephone Girl ”(1897) or“ The Man in the Moon ”(1899) are some of the fashionable titles of this time.

In New York he composed a total of 29 musicals between 1888 and 1912 , most of which premiered on Broadway . Many of these works were quite successful with more than a hundred performances. His musical " The Belle of New York " (based on a libretto by Hugh Morton ), premiered on September 28, 1897 in the Casino Theater , was only a respectable success on Broadway with 64 performances, but it brought it to 697 performances at the Shaftesbury Theater in London . Kerker's international breakthrough was achieved, and numerous European and American theaters played the work, some in adaptations, in the following years. The "Belle" became the epitome of American "musical comedy".

Gustave Kerker also wrote operettas for Vienna ("Die Eisjungfrau", 1904 and "Schneeglöckchen", 1910), had a notable international success with "The Tourists" (1906) and suffered in later years from the "creations of the Viennese operetta", as he called them, who, in the episode of Franz Lehár's “Merry Widow”, which came on Broadway in 1907 as “Merry Widow”, supplanted his own work in the US. He died of a stroke on June 29, 1923 in his New York home.

Gustave Kerker was one of nine founding members of ASCAP in 1914 and, like the other two founders Jacob Wittmark and Silvio Hein, Freemason .

stylistics

In his “light operas” or “musical comedies” Gustave Kerker developed a style that picks up on the musical fashions of the time. Best contemporary light music, with characteristic numbers, based on the successes of Europe, Jacques Offenbach's and Charles Lecocq's Parisian successes, for example, or the Victorian “comic operas” by the team of authors Gilbert & Sullivan.

Kerker recognizes important principles according to which he designs his works: memorable, singable musical numbers, performed as rhythmically as possible in dance. "Having an original and individual rhythm," he reveals in an interview in 1913, "is as natural as having an individual rhythm when breathing." In addition, there is a must of imaginative texts and topics whose humor is based on a local or daily reference. A look at the title shows exactly this principle. The most difficult thing when writing a “musical comedy”, so Kerker flirtatiously in the interview already quoted, is to come across a suitable title, the easiest of all, to write the music for it. Gustave Kerker places himself on the music market with these principles, with vocal numbers that can be heard instrumentally on the piano at home as well as in the dance hall or at concerts. Arrangements for piano, with and without singing, for dance and concert orchestra of his works are created, increase his level of awareness and generate additional income.

Works (selection)

Title page of a vocal part for the operetta The Belle of New York (undated)
  • 1879: The Cadets
  • 1888: Pearl of Pekin (Libretto Charles Alfred Byrne)
  • 1890: Castles in the Air (Libretto Byrne)
  • 1893: Little Christopher Columbus , with Ivan Caryll , libretto George Robert Sims and Cecil Raleigh
  • 1894: Prince Kam or A Trip to Venus (Libretto Byrne and Louis Harrison)
  • 1895: Kismet or Two Tangled Turks (Libretto Richard F. Carroll)
  • 1896: In Gay New York (music revue; libretto Hugh Morton (CMS McLellan?))
  • 1896: The Lady Slavey (libretto George Dance ; texts by Morton)
  • 1896: An American Beauty (Libretto Morton)
  • 1897: The Whirl of the Town (music revue; libretto Morton)
  • 1897: The Belle of New York (Libretto Morton)
  • 1898: Yankee Doodle Dandy (Libretto Morton)
  • 1898: The Telephone Girl (Libretto Morton)
  • 1899: The Man in the Moon (with Ludwig Engländer and Reginald de Koven )
  • 1901: The Girl from Up There (Libretto Morton)
  • 1902: The Billionaire (libretto Harry B. Smith )
  • 1903: The Lobster Song (I Was Walking Round the Ocean) in The Wizard of Oz (Libretto Morton)
  • 1903: Winsome Winnie (Contributor; Libretto Edward Jakobowski ; Music largely by Harry Paulton )
  • 1904: Burning to Sing, or Singing to Burn. A Very Grand Opera (Libretto RH Burnside )
  • 1904: The Ice Maiden (Vienna)
  • 1906: The Social Whirl (Libretto Charles Doty and Joseph Herbert ; texts by Herbert)
  • 1906: The Tourists (Libretto RH Burnside )
  • 1907: The White Hen (Libretto Roderic C. Penfield; texts by Penfield and Paul West )
  • 1907: Fascinating Flora (Libretto Burnside and Herbert)
  • 1909: The upper ten thousand (American dance operetta in three acts, text by Julius Freund , Berlin)
  • 1910: Snowdrop (Vienna)
  • 1912: Two Little Brides (libretto Arthur Anderson and Harold Atteridge )
  • 1921: The Whirl of New York , based on The Belle of New York (Libretto Morton and Edgar Smith)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The upper ten thousand , staged in Stadttheater Gießen 2013
personal data
SURNAME Dungeon, Gustave Adolph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-born composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 28, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Herford
DATE OF DEATH June 29, 1923
Place of death New York City