Hanka Petzold

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Hanka Schjelderup Petzold at a young age, photographed by Mary Steen
Edvard Grieg, drawn by Hanka Schjelderup's sister Leis
Hanka Petzold's husband Bruno (1920)

Hanka Schjelderup Petzold (born June 27, 1862 in Kristiansand , † August 14, 1937 in Tokyo ) was a Norwegian - German singer, pianist and music teacher. She has been referred to as the "founder of Japanese vocal music".

biography

Origin and education

Hanka Schjelderup came from an upper-class Norwegian family. The parental home is described as “European and cosmopolitan” and “extremely warm”. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a talented pianist. She had two brothers and two sisters who, like herself, were encouraged by their parents to be artistically active. One of her brothers was the composer Gerhard Schjelderup , her sister the painter Leis Schjelderup . In 1871 the family moved to Bergen , where the father assumed an office comparable to that of an alderman. The family was on good terms with the composer Edvard Grieg . Her brother Gerhard exchanged over 100 letters with Grieg and wrote a biography about him, and her sister Leis painted the musician.

Schjelderup received piano lessons from her mother and gave her first concert under the aegis of the composer Ole Bull , who thought she was a “ child prodigy ”. In 1878 her parents sent her to Paris to pursue her musical training there. Her teachers there were Élie-Miriam Delaborde and Marie Jaëll . When Jaëll got the impression that she couldn't teach Hanka Schjelderup anything more, she introduced her student to the composer Franz Liszt in Weimar , where he lived temporarily. Liszt gave her further lessons and gave her playing the "finishing touches".

Hanka Schjelderup decided to also train as a singer. She took singing lessons from Mathilde Marchesi in Paris, Aglaja Orgeni in Dresden and finally from Julius Kniese and Cosima Wagner in Bayreuth . Her first appearance as an opera singer was in the role of Elisabeth in Wagner's Tannhauser at the Copenhagen Opera .

Marriage to Bruno Petzold

In the mid-1890s, Hanka Schjelderup met the eleven years younger German student Bruno Petzold in Leipzig . Her husband later described it as a mixture of "the carefree freshness of the Norwegian mountains" and "Parisian refinement". The couple married, lived first in Paris (1896-1901) and then in London (1901-1907), where Petzold worked as a journalist. With the marriage, Hanka Petzold took on German citizenship. In 1908 Bruno Petzold was sent to Tientsin in China as a foreign correspondent , where he also published a German-language daily newspaper until 1910. The couple now had a son, Arnulf (1905–1980), who later became a renowned architect.

Music teacher in Japan

Hanka Petzold felt cramped in the colony society in Tientsin. In 1909 she traveled with her son to Japan and gave a concert at the Tokyo Music Academy , where she played the piano and sang, in the hope that she would be recommended for further engagements. Her concert left a strong impression on a professor at the music college, the cellist Heinrich Werkmeister , and she was hired as a teacher. Her husband was able to follow his family to Japan in 1910 after he had got a job as a correspondent in Japan for the Kölnische Zeitung . In Tokyo, the couple led an "elegant lifestyle".

By 1937, Hanka Petzold gave at least 111 concerts in Japan. Above all, she performed romantic music that she knew from her own training. On her initiative there were Japanese premieres of works by Grieg and Liszt. Solvejg's song from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite , which appeared on record more than 20 times in Japan by 1940, became particularly popular .

Hanka Schjelderup Petzold taught over 350 students in Japan. Among them were the soprano Hatsue Yuasa , who later lived in Berlin, and the contralto Yanagi Kaneko , the first Japanese singer with an international reputation. Hanka Petzold called her "her daughter" and often accompanied her on the piano at her concerts. She mainly taught French and German arias. In addition to her work at the academy, from 1913 she took on vocal training in opera at the Imperial Theater and gave private lessons. In addition, a trio (violin, cello and piano) of music academy teachers was formed, who at times met and made music at the Petzold's home.

When it comes to teaching Western classical music, Hanka Petzold took a different approach than many of her German colleagues: As a rule, German music teachers in Japan were officially seconded from Germany with the task of conveying Western musical culture. Hanka Petzold, on the other hand, was active in Japan on her own initiative, was a native of Norway and had lived in several countries, which gave her an “open view of the people and culture in the other country”.

In 1924 her contract with the academy was not renewed by means of a "snub" announcement. The reason for this is believed to be her participation in a concert in favor of a Korean art museum. Korea was a Japanese colony at the time , and such cultural emancipation efforts were not welcomed in Japan. In the same year she was awarded the gold medal Litteris et artibus by the Norwegian King Haakon VII . The Prussian Minister of Culture Carl Heinrich Becker officially thanked her, and she received the Red Cross Medal in silver for her cultural merits. Petzold's successor at the Tokyo Music Academy was Margarete Netke-Löwe , who was born in Wroclaw .

The grave of Hanka and Bruno Petzold on the Hiei-zan

After their release, Hanka Petzold's students founded the Nadeshiko-kai (“Prachtnelken-Gesellschaft”) and held annual thanksgiving concerts in their honor. In a newspaper article on this in 1928 she was referred to as the "founder of Japanese vocal music". A year later the society held a charity concert for the benefit of the Petzolds after their house burned down and Bruno Petzold broke his leg while jumping on a burning staircase. On May 9, 1934, the group of pupils and friends celebrated the 25th anniversary of their teacher's stay in Japan with a gala concert.

According to a report by the German embassy in Tokyo, Hanka Petzold is said to have had a "positive" attitude towards National Socialism. Bruno Petzold, on the other hand, rejected the political developments in Nazi Germany . So he voluntarily withdrew from the board of the German Society for Nature and Ethnology of East Asia (OAG) in Tokyo, where Germans living in Japan and German-speaking foreigners came together. From 1934 onwards, members of the NSDAP increasingly set the tone in the OAG, so that Jewish Germans also turned their backs on society. B. Klaus Pringsheim , twin brother of Katia Mann , who taught music in Tokyo. Bruno Petzold had meanwhile turned to Buddhism - he achieved the rank of priest - and attacked "carefree and fearless the inhuman actions of Hitler".

In the years up to her death in 1937, Hanka Petzold lived withdrawn from the German colony in Tokyo and was mainly in contact with her Japanese students. Because of these developments and because she did not leave any written documents, her work was largely forgotten. Her husband died in 1949. The couple are buried together on the Hiei-zan , near the Enryaku-ji monastery , a headquarters of the Buddhist Tendai school, which Bruno Petzold was connected to.

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b Aaron M. Cohen, p. 6.
  2. ↑ a b c d Kobayashi, p. 2.
  3. ↑ Detlef Schauwecker: Bruno Petzold (1873-1949). Part 1. (PDF) OAG Notes, 2008, p. 13 , accessed on September 10, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Detlev Schauwecker: Bruno Petzold (1873-1949). Part 1. (PDF) OAG Notes, 2008, p. 14 , accessed on September 10, 2017 .
  5. ↑ a b Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 74.
  6. ↑ Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 65.
  7. ↑ History of the Steveston Buddhist Temple, p. 12 (pdf)
  8. ↑ Detlef Schauwecker: Bruno Petzold (1873-1949). Part 1. (PDF) OAG Notes, 2008, p. 10 , accessed on September 10, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 11.
  10. ^ Kobayashi, p. 3.
  11. ^ Bieber, Hans-Joachim: SS and Samurai. IUDICIUM Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-86205-043-7 , p. 49 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  12. ↑ Kobayashi, p. 5 f.
  13. ↑ Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 57.
  14. ↑ Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 57 f.
  15. ↑ Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 64 f.
  16. ↑ a b c Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 62.
  17. ↑ a b Schauwecker, Hanka Schjelderup Petzold, p. 61.
  18. ^ Aaron M. Cohen, p. 15.
  19. ↑ In the mid-1930s, the Jewish singer and her husband Martin Netke were increasingly excluded from the German and the OAG as so-called "Jewish Versippte" , and she was expatriated. Margarethe Netke-Löwe ​​was only able to return to the service of the Music Academy in 1948. See: [1]
  20. ↑ Hans-Joachim Bieber: SS and Samurai. German-Japanese cultural relations 1933–1945 (=  monographs from the German Institute for Japanese Studies . Volume 55 ). Iudicium, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-86205-043-7 , pp. 203 .
  21. ↑ Detlev Schauwecker: Feature: Bruno Petzold (1873-1949). Part III: The Politics. (PDF) OAG Notes, p. 15 , accessed on September 11, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Petzold, Hanka
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schjelderup, Hanka (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian-German music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Kristiansand
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1937
Place of death Tokyo