Josef Turnau

Josef Turnau (born October 10, 1888 in Kolin , † October 1, 1954 in New York City ) was an Austrian opera singer ( tenor ), opera director and opera director . Because of his Jewish descent, he had to emigrate to the USA during the Nazi era .

life and work

Turnau attended school in Prague and Vienna and then studied law and singing in Vienna. In 1918 he got his first engagement as a hero tenor and director in the Stadttheater am Brausenwerth in Elberfeld . After holding positions in Neustrelitz , Rostock and Karlsruhe , he was appointed senior director and assistant to Richard Strauss at the Vienna State Opera in the early 1920s . From 1925 to 1929 he was director of the Wroclaw City Theater .

In August 1929, the city of Frankfurt am Main appointed him to succeed Clemens Krauss as artistic director of the Frankfurt Opera House . At times he also taught as a lecturer at the Institute for Social Research . Soon after taking office, he was in the ethnically -national press as Ostjude denounced and publicly attacked.

On March 13, 1933, the National Socialists came to power in Frankfurt . Immediately, by order of the new Lord Mayor Friedrich Krebs, the synchronization of the municipal theaters began . Due to his Jewish descent, Turnau was given leave of absence on March 28, 1933, together with General Music Director Hans Wilhelm Steinberg and Acting Director Alwin Kronacher , and dismissed on May 22, 1933. In the letter of dismissal, the acting directors of opera and drama, Carl Stueber and Hans Geisow, accused him and Kronacher of “a non-German design of the program” and “the representation of the stage works, which was alien to the German character and offensive to national public opinion”.

As a Czechoslovak citizen, he left Germany and became a director at the Prague National Theater . In 1939 he emigrated to New York, where he worked on opera productions at Carnegie Hall and head of the opera department at the New School for Social Research . He taught at Hunter College from 1946 until his death .

literature

• Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . Second volume. M – Z (=  publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 2 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-7829-0459-1 , p. 466 f .

Web links

• Alexander Rausch: Turnau, Josef. In: Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon . Online edition, Vienna 2002 ff., ISBN 3-7001-3077-5 ; Print edition: Volume 5, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7001-3067-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Boris Slamka, The Seriousness of the Hour. The United City Theaters in Frankfurt am Main 1914–1918 , LIT Verlag, Münster 2014, ISBN 3643125798 , p. 187
2. ↑ Janine Burnick, Jürgen Steen: The "seizure" of opera and drama. In: Frankfurt am Main 1933–1945. Institute for Urban History , October 21, 2014, accessed on September 7, 2016 .