Harro Heinz Theodor Fromme

Harro HT Fromme (born December 12, 1921 in Bremen ; † July 21, 2008 in Bremerhaven ) was a German opera singer (bass baritone), film director and painter .

Life

youth

Fromme was one of two children of the officer Robert August Jacob Eugen Fromme and his wife Clara Marie nee. Drewes. Due to the frequent relocation of the family due to work, he had to attend ten different educational institutions during his school days.

At the age of 16, at the request of his father, he became a cadet on the four-masted barque Priwall , although with his talent for painting he would have preferred to attend an art academy. At the Priwall he met the Munich art professor and marine painter Kay Heinrich Nebel (1888–1953), who recognized his talent and encouraged him to study.

Prisoner of War and Training

From 1937 to 1939 he was an ordinary seaman on the schooner Adalbert and a crew member of the East African steamer Ussukuma , which sank itself in 1939. After a brief internment in the Falkland Islands , he was a prisoner of war in Baviaanspoort near Pretoria until 1947 . Here he got to know different artists. In 1940 he became a student of Heinrich von Michaelis, then, from 1942 to 1945, of Otto Schröder and in 1947, after his internment, of Annemarie Oppenheim. During his internment, he made friends with the poet Ernst Engelken, for whom he made an etching in his volume of poetry, The Inner Circle , published in South Africa in 1947 .

Back in Germany he became a student of Victor Schulte with whom he restored a church ceiling in Kirchrode . In the same year, 1948, he was admitted to the BBK .

Return to Africa

Fromme did not stay in Germany for a long time; he moved back to South Africa, where he represented two classes in landscape painting at the Royal Academy. Several solo exhibitions followed in Pretoria and Johannesburg . During this time he also made a portrait for Vivien Leigh , Cecil Coomer (member of the Old Vic Theater Company), and for the Marquesa of Annendale.

He moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town in 1952 , where he had his voice trained by Alessandro Rota, Beatrice Gibson, but mainly by the singing teacher Madame Daisy Bell Nussbaum. Concerts, opera evenings and live radio broadcasts followed. Always striving to learn something new, he stepped in at Pan African Films as a cameraman and later even became film director there. He could also be seen as an actor at Empire Films around 1950. At the end of the 1950s he shared a studio with J. Beuys and Frank Cassell. During this time he created portraits of Monsignor O'Rourke (Knight of the Holy Cross and Chief Minister of the Sacred Heart Church in Green Point, Cape Town), the Mayor of Cape Town and David Tomlinson. He also met his first wife Marlene here, with whom he has two children.

Opera singer in Germany

His singing teacher made it clear to Fromme that he could only start a successful career as an opera singer in Germany, where he returned in 1959. He sang in Hildesheim, Braunschweig, Osnabrück, Würzburg and various other theaters and there were recordings from NDR . His career ended in 1967 after two seasons at the Stadttheater Bremerhaven .

In 1964 he was accepted into the Hildesheim Freemason Lodge Pforte zum Tempel des Lichts .

From 1967 to 1987 he worked for the Nordsee-Zeitung in Bremerhaven. There he became head of the advertising studio. Here he met his second wife Sigrid, with whom he has a son.

freelance artist

In 1986 he opened his first German exhibition in the Paul Ernst Wilke Atelier . This was followed by exhibitions with the BBK in Bremerhaven, Dorum, Cuxhaven, Stade and Macharaviaya near Málaga in Spain as well as retrospectives in 1997 in the Geestbank gallery in Bremerhaven and in 2002 in Dorum and exhibitions in the Deutsche Post and the university in Bremerhaven. In 2004 the sculptor Barbara Uebel and Fromme designed the chapel's prayer room for guests of all religions of the seamen's mission in Bremerhaven. In 2005 a retrospective followed in the castle in Hagen . His works are in public and private ownership in South Africa, Namibia, England, the USA, Germany and Spain.

Fromme lived in Spaden near Bremerhaven until his death . He is the father of the calligrapher Roma Fromme-Monsees.

literature

• Catalog for the 1997 retrospective: Harro, works from 1940 to 1996 .
• Ralph Hübner: Who's Who in the Federal Republic of Germany VI. Issue . 1999, ISBN 3-7290-0026-8 .
• Elke Grapenthin: Artists in Bremerhaven and the surrounding area 1827 - 1990 . 1991, ISBN 3-926598-40-9 .