Karel Reiner

Karel Reiner (born June 27, 1910 in Saaz as Karl Reiner , † October 17, 1979 in Prague ) was a Czech composer.

The son of a Jewish chief cantor Josef Leib Reiner and his wife Sine, b. Scherlag studied at the Vienna Conservatory and was then a student of Zdeněk Nejedlý , Alois Hába and Josef Suk in Prague . From 1931 to 1938 he worked as a concert pianist for new music and led a. a. the quarter-tone works of his teacher Hába. In 1943 he came to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where he belonged to the composer's group. He was the only survivor from this group. The composition for the Esther play (libretto by Norbert Frýd ) was written in the concentration camp . Participants in the performance and the author Milan Kuna later succeeded in reconstructing the work. In 1944 Reiner was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp and from there to Dachau , where he experienced the liberation .

After 1945 he lived as a freelance composer and worked as chairman of the Czech Music Fund and member of the Czech Composers Association. Disappointed with KSČ's policy , he resigned from the Communist Party after the crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1970. In 1975 he set five poems by Reiner Kunze to music .

Reiner left an extensive work to which u. a. Two operas and a ballet , an overture and a suite , a violin and a piano concerto and a concerto for bass clarinet, numerous chamber music compositions, organ and piano pieces, choirs and songs, plays and film scores count. The short film Motýli tady nezijí ( Butterflies Don't Live Here , 1958), made by Miro Bernat , with music by Reiner, was awarded the Palme d'Or in 1959 at the Cannes International Film Festival .

literature

• Petr Kaňka: Kompozice v pojetí Karla Reinera . In: Hudební věda 21, 1984, 3, ISSN  0018-7003 , pp. 231-250.
• Fritz Bauer Institute , Katharina Stengel (ed.): Victims as actors, interventions by former Nazi victims in the post-war period , Frankfurt (Main) 2008, pp. 289–291

Web links

• Media by and about Karel Reiner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature and other media by and about Karel Reiner in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Anke Zimmermann:  Karel Reiner in the Lexicon of Persecuted Musicians from the Nazi Era (LexM), as of March 30, 2017
• Karel Reiner ( Memento from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at exilarchiv.de
• http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/musik//exil/wettbewerb/quartette/reiner.html
• Motýli tady nezijí (1958) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Reiner, Karel ( Memento from October 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: Theresienstadt Lexicon.