Henry Jolles

Henry Jolles (born November 28, 1902 in Berlin , † July 16, 1965 in São Paulo ; actually Heinz Jolles ) was a German pianist and composer .

education and profession

At the age of five, Jolles took piano lessons in his hometown of Berlin with Moritz Mayer-Mahr and later with Rudolf Breithaupt . In 1922 he continued his studies first with Edwin Fischer and then with Artur Schnabel . Jolles also studied composition with Paul Juon and also took private lessons with Kurt Weill , who was two years older and with whom he was friends. He also attended musicological courses at Berlin University with the musicologists Max Friedlaender and Johannes Wolf . In 1924 Jolles was director of the piano class at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin. The following year he was a soloist with the Berliner Philharmoniker and played Sergei Prokofiev's third piano concerto in a German premiere. In 1928 he took over the piano class of the school music department at the Cologne University of Music and the piano training class at the Rheinische Musikschule . After a concert as a soloist with the Gürzenich Orchestra in 1932, the Kölner Stadtanzeiger called him “one of the best of the young generation of pianists”.

Emigration and exile in Brazil

In 1933, Jolles was publicly defamed as a Jew by the National Socialists and dismissed from all offices. He fled to Paris, where he managed to establish himself in the city's musical life. Jolles founded the concert company “La Sonate”, which held concerts at the Paris Conservatoire. France became his second home, especially after he married a French woman in Paris in 1939. But when Hitler began to occupy France a year later, the Jolles couple had to flee to Brazil. In 1940 Jolles received an entry permit for Brazil, settled with his wife in São Paulo and changed the first name from Heinz, which is inexpressible for South Americans, to Henry. Their son Oliver was born in October 1945. A little later Jolles learned that his mother and sister had been deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and gassed in 1943 .

Activity in Brazil

In the 1940s, Henry Jolles gave concerts in more than 40 cities in Brazil and Uruguay. He expanded his repertoire to include contemporary Brazilian piano works, namely by Heitor Villa Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri, Paulo Guedes, Barroso Neto, Lorenzo Fernandez and Agostino Cantu. In 1952 the composer and conductor Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (also a German exile) appointed him as professor for piano at the Escola livre de musica in São Paulo. On his European tours, which he was only able to organize himself with difficulty from Brazil, he played the second part of his concert program more and more often with Brazilian piano works alone. He recorded it in all major radio stations in Germany and also appeared again as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic. 1962–64 Jolles celebrated his last major, very successful concert tours through the USA.

plant

As far as we know, Jolles' compositions were created in exile in Brazil. Deeply shaken by the suicide of the Zweig couple, who also fled the National Socialists, he set Stefan Zweig's “last poem” to music in 1942 with “Ultimo poema” for voice and piano. Further compositions are the ballet “Carmen” (1943), a sonata for violin and piano (1951), “Schumanniana” for piano (1956) and “Pequeno notturno sobre um tema de F. Chopin”, F sharp minor for piano. He also wrote the cadenzas for Mozart's piano concertos himself and added fragments by Franz Schubert.

literature

• Flusser, Vilem: Henry Jolles, in: O Estado de S. Paulo, Suplemento Literário, OESP, 9 (440): 1, São Paulo, July 31, 1965, p. 1.
• Dirk Möller: Heinz (Henry) Jolles. “I often think I died in 1933”, in: Music in Exile. Consequences of Nazism for international music culture, Hanns-Werner Heister, Claudia Maurer Zenck, Peter Petersen (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1993, pp. 132–146.
• Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933. International biographical dictionary of Central European emigrés 1933-1945, 4 vols., Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss , Institute for Contemporary History Munich (ed.), Munich and others: Saur, 1983.
• Repressed music. Berlin composers in exile, Habakuk Traber, Elmar Weingarten (ed.), Berliner Festspiele GmbH, Berlin: Argon, 1987.

See also

• List of well-known German-speaking emigrants and exiles (1933–1945)
• Lexicon of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era

Web links

• Lexicon of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era
• Biography Henry Jolles on www.exilarchiv.de