Joseph Beer (composer, 1908)

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Joseph Beer (born May 7, 1908 in Gródek , Austria-Hungary ; died November 23, 1987 in Nice ) was an Austrian operetta composer .

youth

Joseph Beer was the second child of the banker Usi Isidore Beer and Amalie Esther Malka; he had an older brother and a younger sister. He began to compose as a boy and attended the conservatory in Lemberg, Poland, during his years at the grammar school.

Under pressure from his father, Beer studied law for a year, but then moved to Vienna to apply for admission to the State Academy. He earned not only the admission, he was allowed to skip the first four years of study and once in the master class of Joseph Marx participate. After this success, his father got him a two-room apartment in central Vienna, including a baby grand piano . In 1930 he graduated with the highest honors.

Career

After graduating, Beer became a conductor at a Viennese ballet, with which he went on extensive tours through Austria and the Middle East. Encouraged by artists he met on these trips, he played some of his compositions to the famous librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda , who was so impressed that he became Beer's agent. The first work of their collaboration, which also included the librettist Ludwig Herzer , was the operetta Der Prinz von Schiras , which premiered in 1934 at the Zurich Opera House and then went on extensive tours in Europe and South America.

His second operetta, Polish Wedding, based on a libretto by Alfred Grünwald and Fritz Löhner-Beda, achieved even greater success at its premiere in 1937, also in Zurich. The work was then performed on 40 stages and translated into eight languages.

After German troops marched into Austria in 1938, Beer had to flee; he received a visa from the French government and moved into a hotel room in Paris . He arranged instrumental works for orchestra and received a composition commission from a conductor at the Zurich Opera House for a work which was then published under his name. Without access to a piano, Beer wrote the score, including all of the orchestral and vocal parts, in three weeks.

After the German invasion of Paris in 1940, Beer fled to Nice , where he stayed until the end of the war. He continued to arrange for orchestra and wrote his third major work, Stradella in Venice , which was based on Alessandro Stradella's episode in Venice. From 1942 Beer lived in various hiding places. During this time his father, mother and sister, who had stayed in Lemberg, were murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp ; his librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda was murdered on December 4, 1942 in Monowitz / Auschwitz III .

After the events of the war and deeply affected by the deaths of friends and family, Beer was locked up and denied the performance rights to his earlier works. Nevertheless, Polish Weddings in Scandinavia were performed without his collaboration or consent until 1982, often under the title Masurkka . In 2011, the daughters of Joseph Beers agreed to an Austrian premiere of the Polish Wedding at the Vienna Operetta Summer 2012 . The premiere of his oratorio Ave Maria took place in 1946 in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Nice. Stradella in Venice , composed when Beer was hiding, premiered in 1949 at the Zurich Opera House. In his Musiklexikon der Welt, the conductor and musicologist Kurt Pahlen called the work “a comic opera of extraordinary rank”; André Roussin , member of the Académie française , translated it for the French stage. Beer spent most of the time up until his death in 1987 on revisions of his earlier works; two new compositions were the Singspiele Die Polin von Napoleon ( La Polonaise ) (1977) and Midnight Sun (1987).

Next life

After the war, Beer married Hanna Königsberg in Nice; they had two daughters, Suzanne and Béatrice. Suzanne became an artist and philosopher in Paris, Béatrice became a soprano singer in Philadelphia .

Beer obtained his doctorate in musicology at the Sorbonne in 1966 under the supervision of the philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch as a doctoral supervisor . The topic of his dissertation was The Development of Harmonious Style in the Works of Scriabin which was awarded the high distinction Très honorable avec félicitations du jury . Joseph Beer is " Composer-in-Residence In Memoriam " at The Atlantic Coast Opera Festival.

CD

Joseph Beer: The Polish wedding . Recording of the concert performance of the Munich Radio Orchestra under the direction of Ulf Schirmer . Georgsmarienhütte, cpo / Bayerischer Rundfunk 2016 (reconstruction: Robert Lillinger )

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Neue Merker: The Polish Wedding 2012 ( Memento from July 29, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ), accessed on December 11, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Beer, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian operetta composer
DATE OF BIRTH May 7, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Gródek
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1987
Place of death Nice