Ludwig Lenel

Ludwig Lenel (born May 20, 1914 in Strasbourg , † 2002 in Allentown , Pennsylvania , USA) was an organist and composer .

origin

Ludwig Lenel's great-grandfather on his mother's side was the Prussian democrat Friedrich Kapp (1824-1884), who emigrated to the USA but later returned and became a national liberal member of the Reichstag and a friend of Bismarck's . His youngest son Wolfgang , a great uncle of Lenel, led the Kapp Putsch in 1920 . The Lenels had lived in Heidelberg since 1918 . The father, from an industrial family in Mannheim ( Richard Lenel was his uncle), was a private scholar in Italian medieval history. In 1932 he was made an honorary professor at the university, waiving his remuneration: a position from which he was already on leave in April 1933 “for racial reasons”. His license to teach was revoked in August of the same year. The father died in Heidelberg in 1937. Ludwig Lenel, of “half-Jewish” descent, was the last of his family to emigrate from Germany in 1939 because he had relatives in the USA.

Career and works

The meeting with Albert Schweitzer , who stayed with the family during his visits to Heidelberg, was decisive for his son Ludwig . In exchange, after graduating from high school in 1932, Lenel received organ lessons in Schweitzer's hometown Gunsbach in Alsace . A concert for saxophone and orchestra penned by Lenel had previously been performed at a school concert, and in early 1933 his concert for two violins and string orchestra was premiered in a concert by the Heidelberg Collegium musicum. This was followed by three years of study in Cologne and another three years in Basel . The organ was and remained Lenel's main instrument.

After emigrating, Lenel worked as an organist and continued his composition studies at Oberlin College (Ohio). After working in Illinois , Pennsylvania and New York City , he finally came to Muhlenberg College in Allentown (Pennsylvania) , where he taught music as a professor for 27 years - until 1979. He also led the college choir, with which he also went on tour, initiated a series of concerts and built up an opera department. The Muhlenberg College awarded Ludwig Lenel an honorary doctorate in 1989.

In 1998 Lenel returned to Heidelberg again when his main work “Death and Atonement” for speaker, violin, oboe, brass, piano and percussion was performed on November 9th in memory of the Holocaust . The roughly 20-minute work, which was created between 1976 and 1992, is based on Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge" and texts by Nelly Sachs . The composer Wolfgang Fortner mentions Ludwig Lenel along with René Frank , Laurence Feininger and others in his “Story of Life” in the appendix to his denazification files ( Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe ) as witnesses and examples of his teaching by pupils from Jewish families before and during the war.

literature

• E. Ruth Anderson: Contemporary American composers. A biographical dictionary . Second edition, GK Hall, Boston 1982.
• Edith Borroff, J. Bunker Clark: American opera. A checklist . Harmony Park Press, Detroit 1992.
• Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung Heidelberg 4th and 9th November 1998.
• Givannini / Moraw (eds.), Remembered Life - Autobiographical Texts on the Jewish History of Heidelberg , Heidelberg 1998.