Hugo Knepler

Hugo Knepler around 1930

Hugo Knepler ( August 10, 1872 in Vienna - after April 13, 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ; also Hugo Knöpler ) was an Austrian bookseller and art dealer , music publisher and impresario .

Life

Hugo Knepler was born as the fourth of five children (including brother Paul ) of Moriz and Pauline Knepler. His father traded in tobacco pipes, which he also produced for the South American market.

An early childhood memory of Knepler's were the Sunday concerts of Carl Wilhelm Drescher's salon orchestra in Hadersdorf-Weidlingau in 1878 , which he always co-conducted. He learned the violin himself , stimulated by the eight-year-old Fritz Kreisler's visit to his parents, and achieved considerable skill for a layman.

He preferred the years of apprenticeship at the commercial school to attending the conservatory . After completing it, he joined Merkurbank as a trainee and a few years later became a stock exchange manager at a private bank. The financial and stock market crisis of 1905 made him unemployed. In the same year he married Hedwig Moser (* 1888) and founded a music store (around 1911/1912 verifiably in Habsburgergasse 2 / corner of Graben).

In 1916 he took over the "Verlag Paul Knepler", which had been run by the latter and which he had acquired in 1905, from his brother Paul. Originally it was the Wallishausersche kuk Hofbuchhandlung (Adolf W. Künast) founded by Johann Baptist Wallishauser in 1789 . Hugo Knepler ran the bookstore and the publishing house until it was sold to Eugen Walter Kende in 1927. During his leadership, the publishing house published works by Paul Czinner , Siegfried Loewy , Arthur Schnitzler , Friedrich Schreyvogel , Richard Specht and Paul Wertheimer, among others .

In 1907, together with a silent partner who soon left the company, he acquired Gutmann's Konzertdirektion (but not his music shop or Albert J. Gutmann's publishing house ). But it was only since 1912/1913 that the program slips and the stationery said “Konzertdirektion Gutmann (owner: Hugo Knepler)”. It was to remain the largest concert management in Vienna until 1931, organizing over 2100 events during that time, mainly in the Vienna Konzerthaus . The artists in charge of Knepler included Bronisław Huberman , Eugen d'Albert , Artur Schnabel , Erika Morini , Jascha Heifetz , Pablo Casals , the sisters Berta, Else and Grete Wiesenthal , Arthur Nikisch and Maria Jeritza .

In the Knepler's apartment at 3 Schellinggasse, which they had lived in since 1910, there was not only the private rooms but also the Knepler Concert Directorate's office, which was often used for artist soiré. Knepler's son, Henry (Heinrich), was born on May 8, 1922. Towards the end of the 1920s, the concert management got into economic difficulties, a consequence of the general economic crisis and the newly emerged forms of entertainment such as radio, film and sporting events. Insolvency proceedings were opened in 1931 ; little is known about Hugo Knepler's other activities.

After Austria's annexation on March 12, 1938, as a Jew , he had to give up his apartment at the end of April 1939 and move to a pension. On June 4, 1939, he was able to flee to France and even survive there until 1944. Carelessly, he went to Nice, to the unoccupied France of the Vichy regime , where he was picked up and deported to the Drancy assembly camp. With Transport 71 he was taken to Auschwitz on April 13, 1944 , where he was murdered.

Knepler's brother Paul was involved in the company for a number of years until he left the company due to his success as a librettist. For example, he worked for Lehár and Künneke . His son Henry came to London on a Kindertransport, where he was interned when the war broke out, first on the Isle of Man, then in Canada; his wife was able to survive as a “submarine” in Vienna because the writer Mela Deutsch Brady and her husband helped her to hide. In 1947 she moved to live with her son in Chicago, where she died in 1962.

Works

• Oh, these artists. Indiscretions of a manager . Preface by Ludwig Karpath . Fiba-Verlag, Vienna 1930.

literature

• Erwin Barta, Gundula Fäßler: The great concert directorates in the Wiener Konzerthaus 1913–1945 . Series: Musical Life - Studies on the History of Music in Austria , Volume 10. Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2001, ISBN 3-631-37053-9 .
• Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 2: J-R. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 696.
• Michael Aschauer, Monika Kornberger: Knepler, family. In: Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon . Online edition, Vienna 2002 ff., ISBN 3-7001-3077-5 ; Print edition: Volume 3, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-7001-3045-7 .

Web links

• Paul Knepler Publishing House (Wallishausser Buchhandlung)
• Entry in the Central Database of the Names of Holocaust Victims at the Yad Vashem Memorial