Leopold Reichwein

Leopold Reichwein (born May 16, 1878 in Breslau , Lower Silesia , † April 8, 1945 in Vienna ) was a German conductor and composer .

Life

From 1909 to 1913 Reichwein was court conductor of the Grand Ducal Badischer Hofkapelle Karlsruhe . In 1913 he succeeded Bruno Walter as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera . With Wilhelm Furtwängler he was concert director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna from 1921 to 1927 . From 1926 to 1938 he directed the Bochum Symphony Orchestra . Under his direction, the modern compositions by Paul Hindemith , Ernst Krenek , Erwin Schulhoff and Anton Webern , which had been cultivated by this orchestra, took a back seat in the repertoire in favor of classical-romantic music. When he published the article Die Juden in der Deutschen Musik in the party newspaper of the NSDAP Völkischer Beobachter in 1932 , in which he borrowed from Richard Wagner's anti-Semitic pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik , he drew the anger of those from Bochum who were still resisting.

Reichwein was a staunch National Socialist and was a member of the NSDAP (membership number 1.009.765) and the nationalist , anti-Semitic Kampfbund for German culture as early as 1932 . Among other things, he published tirades of agitation against Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in the Völkischer Beobachter , to whom he assumed primarily financial interests as the driving force behind their artistic work. After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists, he was a member of the Reich Chamber of Music . On April 20, 1938, Adolf Hitler appointed him General Music Director. After the invasion and " Anschluss of Austria ", he propagated the call for a "referendum" with the following words: "Since Adolf Hitler has regained freedom for us German artists in Austria, we all have a deep need to prove our gratitude through confession and action." In the following years he was a conductor at the Vienna State Opera and head of the conducting class at the State Academy for Music Vienna . Reichwein founded the NS. Wiener Tonkünstler Orchestra new.

Towards the end of the Second World War , Reichwein committed suicide on April 8, 1945 in Vienna .

His works include operas, operettas, stage music and songs.

literature

• Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950, Volume 9 (Delivery 41), pages 37f.
• Kater, Michael H. (1997): The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich New York. 327 pp. Oxford University Press.

Web links

• Works by and about Leopold Reichwein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature list in the online catalog of the Berlin State Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Annkatrin Dahm: Der Topos der Juden: Studies on the history of anti-Semitism in German-language music literature . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2007, p. 327
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, pp. 5.653-5.654.
3. ↑ Fred K. Prieberg: Handbuch , p. 5.659; also with Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 477 printed.