Hans Eppstein

Hans Eppstein (born February 25, 1911 in Mannheim ; † July 6, 2008 in Danderyd near Stockholm ) was a Swedish citizen of German origin and a German-Swedish musicologist, music teacher and pianist.

Family background

Hans Eppstein came from a Jewish family. His parents were the banker Oscar Eppstein (* 1873 in Gemünden in the Rhineland - † 1964 in Haifa ) and his wife Lili (* 1879 as Lili Behr in Karlsruhe - † 1968 in Haifa). In addition to Hans, the couple had three other children who - like their parents - were able to evade persecution during the Third Reich by emigrating to Palestine :

• Walter, * 1905 in Mannheim, bank auditor, emigrated to Palestine in 1934;
• Ilse (married Wreschner), * 1908 in Mannheim, around 1935 emigrated to Palestine, † 1965 in Haifa;
• Eugen, * 1917 in Mannheim, 1935 emigrated to Palestine.

education

A conversation conducted by Benjamin Teitelbaum in July 2006 with Hans Eppstein (see “Weblinks”) gives a good impression of Eppstein's early musical socialization in his parents' home. He reports on early music lessons from his mother, who had studied music herself, first chamber music experiments with the violin-playing father and the music-making with the singing mother who started at the age of five or six. Harmonica, piano and string instruments were familiar to him from early childhood.

Hans Eppstein attended grammar school in Mannheim and then studied piano and music theory with Max Sinzheimer in Mannheim and with Julius Weismann and Wilibald Gurlitt in Freiburg from 1929 on . In 1931 he passed the exam as a private music teacher in Karlsruhe. For him, however, the parallel studies with Heinrich Besseler in Heidelberg, who had also given him his dissertation topic on Nicolas Gombert, were more formative.

Hans Eppstein, who came from a family in which being Jewish did not play a major role, was nonetheless a member of the German-Jewish traveling association of comrades from 1922 to 1930 . But even this did not lead to the development of a stronger Jewish identity for him. “I was never proud to be a Jew, but never ashamed either. I am what I am. I remember my mother telling us when we were kids that we should be proud to be Jewish, but our father never said anything like that. I did not understand that. We were Jews, that's all. Nothing to be proud of, but also not the opposite, and that's how I still feel today. "

However, it was not just his Jewish religion that prevented him from completing his studies in Heidelberg. "The reason for the de-registration was not only the fact that Eppstein was Jewish, but he was also committed to the Red Student Union and was a member of the KPD." Hans Eppstein moved to Bern , where he started in 1934 with Ernst Kurth in Heidelberg Dissertation on Nicolas Gombert as a motet composer .

Eppstein's Caputher years

After completing his doctorate, Hans Eppstein returned to Germany and became a music teacher in the Jewish children's and rural school in Caputh . How this came about is not clear, but this step is apparently related to his future wife.

Excursus: Lilli Lipsky

Lilli Lipsky (born April 7, 1909 in Andernach - † March 15, 2006 in Danderyd) also came from a Jewish family and, after graduating from high school in 1932, took the piano teacher exam. Already as a student she had several times by Gertrud holiday led the Zion Lodge UOBB children's convalescent home on Norderney been and probably early due to this acquaintance had her Gertrud holiday offered a job as a music teacher after them in Caputh founded the children's and school camp . Lilli Lipsky, however, preferred to move to Sweden as early as 1933 and instead suggested Hans Eppstein for her intended position. How Lilli Lipsky and Hans Eppstein knew each other is not known.

In 1936 Lilli Lipsky returned to Germany from Sweden to marry Hans Eppstein. Shortly after the marriage, they both emigrated to Sweden. After emigrating, Lilli Eppstein worked as a piano teacher until 1965 and, according to Röder / Strauss, was a graduate student at Stockholm University. And apparently she was also a good friend of Lise Meitner , as Ruth Lewin Sime reports: “Lilli Eppstein, Danderyd, Sweden, made Meitner's Swedish experience with her astute memories of Meitner's personality and her friends in Sweden accessible to me; she generously allowed me to quote from her private correspondence with Meitner. "

Music teacher Eppstein

In the mid-1970s, Hans Eppstein gave a short lecture on his memories of his time in Caputh between 1934 and 1936 under the title Musik in Caputh at an alumni meeting also of the circumstances of the time, which made special demands on music lessons. Private teachers who give music lessons usually have to deal with highly motivated children, but as a school musician he often had to come to terms with children who, for personal or politically motivated reasons, were hostile to music lessons. Many children had already learned that Germany was hostile to them, which is why they rejected everything German and emphasized being Jewish - also in music. They asked for Jewish or Hebrew songs, which in turn were completely foreign to their music teacher. Eppstein reported on his tightrope walk, in which he preferred to leave everything Jewish to others: “In my work I mostly adhered to the great European tradition, and since the children in general have a sure instinct for the real and a critical nose for the artificial and made, so they recognized this attitude in the long run. ”And so, in addition to Paul Hindemith's children's opera We build a city ,“ dance movements and 'strict' pieces by Bach such as classical sonata movements, preludes and mazurkas by Chopin, interludes by Brahms, small pieces by Debussy, by Bartók “Entrance into Eppstein's music lessons and everyday school life in Caputh. Because: In Caputh, music was not just learning material in the classroom, it was also part of everyday life. Eppstein raves about the daily morning music, where a short piece of music was performed before breakfast, or about the communal evening singing where Hebrew songs alternate with German canons. And there were the big performances, musical accompaniments for theatrical performances, for example. For himself he sums up: “This Caputh, it was a worthy final vignette of the German years, an oasis in the midst of an evil and mad environment, in which there were of course all sorts of unpleasant things, but above all goodwill, friendliness, intellectual freedom and intellectual exchange. "

Sweden

As already mentioned, the emigration to Sweden was preceded by the marriage to Lilli Lipsky. Hans Eppstein traveled to Sweden on a tourist visa in October 1936, and their son Peter Heinrich was born in Stocksund near Stockholm in 1937. In 1939, Eppstein's German citizenship was withdrawn, so that from then on he was considered stateless; In 1947 he received Swedish citizenship.

Little is known about Eppstein's professional career in the early years of his exile in Sweden. “In April 1939 he performed with his wife Lilli at a concert by the Stockholm Emigrant Self-Help. The self-help group had been founded a year earlier by Ernst Emsheimer , among others , in order to be able to provide practical support to German refugees in exile. Cultural events like this provided a good opportunity to make contact with people with similar problems. ”Benjamin Teitelbaum reports on working as a freelance piano and composition teacher in Stockholm in the 1940s.

It was only towards the end of this decade that a more secure professional career appeared to have emerged. In 1948 he became a member of the Tonkonsten.Internationellt musiklexikon music dictionary and was its main editor from 1953 to 1957. Also in 1948 he was elected to the board of the Swedish Piano Teachers Association and held this position for the next five years. From 1957 to 1963 he headed the music department of Framnäs Folkhögskola , an adult education center in Öjebyn near Piteå in northern Sweden.

In 1965 Hans Eppstein started his academic career. He became a lecturer for music history and formal theory at the Music Conservatory in Gothenburg and received his doctorate again in 1966 at Uppsala University with a thesis on Johann Sebastian Bach (see works). After completing his doctorate, he worked as a lecturer at the musicological institute at Uppsala University until 1977. "At this point at the latest, Eppstein was established in Swedish musicology."

In addition to his teaching activities , Hans Eppstein was the main editor of Edition Monumente Musicae Svecicae from 1972 to 1986 and published other musicological editions, including for the Swedish Society for Music Research , of which he was a board member from 1975 to 1987.

Since 1979 Hans Eppstein was a member of Sweden's Royal Musical Academy . In 1985 he was honored with a medal for his commitment to art and music.

Services

Friedhelm Krummacher gives an overview of Hans Eppstein's work, which also includes accompanying texts for records and later CDs, in his obituary from 2009:

“An earlier Brahms monograph (1948) was followed in 1972 by his book Heinrich Schütz (German 1975), which again endeavored to convey its own insights and new research results to a wider audience. The benchmarks were set by his Bach studies, which were based on analytically based stylistic criteria and also based on the results of the philologically founded chronology. He supplemented his investigations with numerous essays, he was a welcome guest at Bach congresses - most recently in 2000 - and the fact that he was given the chapter on solo and ensemble works in the Bach Handbook (1999) is evidence of his recognition. In addition to many smaller contributions, his broad horizon is shown by numerous essays that focused on Mozart like Beethoven , Mendelssohn like Brahms and also looked at new music by Hindemith or Ligeti . In addition, works by Swedish musicians such as JM Kraus , H. Ph. Johnson or Ms. Berwald found his interest, and in addition there were almost 20 scientific and practical editions, of which important volumes should be emphasized in the complete editions of Bach and Berwald's works. In publications as well as in teaching, he knew how to combine his analytical insights with aspects of the history of ideas, and how attentively he followed German research is shown by the long series of his reviews of current books. "

Works

For further works by and about Hans Eppstein see:

• Literature by and about Hans Eppstein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Hans Eppstein in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Dissertations

• Nicolas Gombert as a motet composer , Bern Philosophical Dissertation, Würzburg, 1935.
• Studies on JS Bach's sonatas for a melody instrument and compulsory harpsichord , dissertation, Gothenburg, 1966

swell

• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933 (International biographical dictionary of Central European émigrés 1933 - 1945), Volume 2: The arts, sciences, and literature, edited by Fred Bilenkis and Hannah Caplan , Saur, Munich 1999 (unchanged reprint of the 1983 edition).
• Hans Eppstein in the Lexicon of Persecuted Musicians of the Nazi Era (LexM)
• Bengt Olof Engström:  Eppstein, Hans E .. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 6 (Eames - Franco). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2001, ISBN 3-7618-1116-0 , Sp. 389-390 ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
• Hans Eppstein: Music in Caputh in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz, Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise. The Jüdische Kinder-Landschulheim Caputh 1931–1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3-7638-0184-7 , pp. 109–114.

literature

• Friedhelm Krummacher: In memory of Hans Eppstein (1911-2008). In: Die Musikforschung , Volume 62, Issue 1 (January – March 2009), p. 1.

Web links

• Benjamin Teitelbaum: A Conversation with Hans Eppstein
• The teacher Hans Eppstein with his students during music lessons in the Landschulheim Caputh, 1936
• Tombstone of Hans and Lilli Eppstein on the Djursholm begravningsplats .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Unless other sources are named, all of the following biographical information comes from the literature listed under "Sources". In detail there are sometimes divergent representations in the individual sources, but these do not prevent a stringent reconstruction of Eppstein's life.
2. ↑ Max Sinzheimer in the Lexicon of Persecuted Musicians of the Nazi Era (LexM)
3. ↑ This reference can be found in Werner Röder and Herbert A. Strauss (see "Sources"). Hans Eppstein himself does not mention this in his conversation with Teitelbaum, in which he only addresses his loose attachment to Judaism.
4. ^ Benjamin Teitelbaum: A Conversation with Hans Eppstein , p. 76. "I have never been proud of being Jewish, but also never ashamed. I am what I am. I remember from when I was a child that my mother told us that we should be proud of being Jewish, but our father never said anything like that. I did not understand that. We were Jews, that's it. Nothing to be proud of, but also not the opposite, and still today I feel that way. "
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Hans Eppstein in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM)
6. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz, Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise. The Jüdische Kinder-Landschulheim Caputh 1931–1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3-7638-0184-7 , p. 330
7. ↑ Hans Eppstein does not go into this either, who otherwise confirms that he came to Caputh through the mediation of his future FRau. ( Music in Caputh in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz, Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise , p. 111)
8. ↑ Ruth Lewin Sime: Preface and Acknowledgments  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . ("Lilli Eppstein, Danderyd, Sweden, has made Meitner's Swedish experience accessible to me with her astute recollections of Meitner's personality and her friends in Sweden; she has generously permitted me to quote from her private correspondence with Meitner.") It concerns the foreword to Ruth Lewin Sime: Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996, ISBN 0-520-20860-9  
9. ↑ ^{a b c d} Music in Caputh in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz, Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise , pp. 111–114
10. ↑ All of the following information can be found almost consistently in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era and Bengt Olof Engström.
11. ^ Friedhelm Krummacher: In memory of Hans Eppstein (1911-2008). In: Die Musikforschung , Volume 62, Issue 1 (January-March 2009), p. 1. A more detailed bibliography can be found in Bengt Olof Engström (see “Source”). The last name of the H. Ph. Johnson mentioned by Krummacher is correctly Johnsen.