Jella Braun-Fernwald
Jella Braun-Fernwald (born January 30, 1894 in Vienna , † March 13, 1965 in Baden near Vienna ; full name Jella Braun von Fernwald ; also Yella Gabriele von Braun-Fernwald ) was an Austrian opera and concert singer ( alto ).
family
Jella Braun-Fernwald, from a well-known Viennese medical family, took singing lessons from Rosa Papier -Paumgartner in Vienna during the First World War . In 1919 she married the conductor Hermann Ritter von Schmeidel (1894–1953), who was then an employee of Franz Schalk in Vienna. From this marriage a daughter, Christa (1920–2012), emerged.
Artistic development
From 1922 to 1924 she had an engagement at the Stadttheater am Brausenwerth in Elberfeld . In 1924 she separated from her husband and returned to Vienna, where she performed primarily as a concert singer and toured with Erika Rokyta and Luise Helletsgruber . An appearance at the Vienna State Opera in 1926 as a flower girl in Parsifal did not lead to any further stage engagements. By contrast, her career as a concert singer was far more successful. From 1929 to 1936 she could be heard regularly at the Salzburg Festival in the cathedral concerts and was particularly successful as a soloist in the Mozart Requiem . Guest performances took her to Warsaw in 1929 as a concert soloist and to Venice in 1932.
From 1932 she appeared at the Vienna Volksoper , including the world premiere of the opera Die Hochzeit der Sobeide by Alexander Tscherepnin on March 17, 1933.
In addition to her appearance in the concert hall, she appeared in many RAVAG programs . In her concerts she advocated contemporary music, especially the work of Arnold Schönberg and Egon Wellesz .
After the “Anschluss” of Austria , she fled into exile with the music historian and critic Paul Stefan in 1939 , first to Switzerland, then to France, where they both married in 1940 in Montauban . After another stay in Lisbon, the couple moved to New York in the spring of 1941, where she seldom appeared as a singer.
In 1952 she returned to Austria after her husband had died in exile in 1943.
literature
- Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Third, expanded edition. KG Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11419-2 (Volume 1).
- Jella Braun-Fernwald in the Lexicon of Persecuted Musicians of the Nazi Era (LexM)
Web links
- Works by and about Jella Braun-Fernwald in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Braun-Fernwald, Jella |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Braun von Fernwald, Jella |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian opera and concert singer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 30, 1894 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 13, 1965 |
| Place of death | Baden (Lower Austria) |