Maria Leo

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Bertha Pauline Marie Leo (born October 18, 1873 in Berlin ; † September 2, 1942 there ) was a German pianist and music teacher .

Life

Stumbling block for Maria Leo

Maria Leo grew up in Berlin as the daughter of the Jewish businessman Ludwig Philipp Arthur Leo (1838–1896) and his Protestant wife, the pianist Anna Leo. She spent her school days at the Kaiserin-Augusta-Gymnasium (today "Ludwig-Cauer-Schule") in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Supported by the musical environment in particular at home, she took private piano lessons with Wilhelm Blank and private theory lessons with Ludwig Bußler and Georg Kulenkampff . She began her musical career as a pianist in Berlin in 1895, but went to New York as a répétiteur in 1896/1897. Due to an arm problem, however, she soon had to give up her pianist career. Back in Berlin, Maria Leo worked as a piano teacher at the Eichelberg Conservatory in Berlin from 1898 to 1908. At the same time she studied pedagogy, psychology, anatomy and engineering at the Berlin University . At the Eichelberg Conservatory, Maria Leo founded a seminar course together with Nina Gorter in 1903, which for the first time placed teacher training on an educational-psychological basis. In this one-year course she taught ear training, elementary theory and theory of forms.

In 1905 she met the music teacher Agnes Hundoegger , the founder of the Tonika-Do teaching, with whom she worked from 1906. The Tonika-Do teaching, a method "according to which children, even without a special natural disposition, learn to read and sing any melody correctly and purely from the sight in a relatively short time". made Maria Leo her own and from then on represented her in her classes: in 1926 she was appointed second chairman of the Tonika-Do-Bund and was entrusted with the management of the office. In 1928 she also took over the management of the Tonika-Do publishing house.

In 1909 Maria Leo founded the first private seminary that was not affiliated with a conservatory. There the training in the respective major was in the hands of a private teacher, but the pedagogical and musicological training was provided by the teachers of the seminar. In response to the rejection of female students by the Institute for Church Music in Berlin, the local branch of the Association of German Music Teachers opened the Musikseminar der Musikgruppe Berlin e. V. launched a private music seminar, the direction of which Maria Leo was entrusted.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Maria Leo had to give up the leadership of the seminar because of her “non-Aryan” origins and left there at Easter 1934 as a teacher. In August 1935 she was expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer, but lodged an appeal against it. An interim decision from November 1936 forbade her to teach “Aryan” students due to her separation from the Reich Chamber of Music. On July 9, 1937, she was finally excluded from the Reichsmusikkammer and thus given a de facto professional ban. Because she still gave lessons to an “Aryan” schoolgirl “without permission”, Maria Leo was given a fine by the Reich Chamber of Music and, in February 1939, her passport was also confiscated. This also deprived her of any opportunity to emigrate. When she received the news in August 1942 that she would be forcibly taken to a Jewish old people's home in the Alexanderplatz district and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto after three weeks , she committed suicide in her apartment. Maria Leo has had a stumbling block in front of her house at Pallasstrasse 12 since 2006.

Fonts (selection)

  • Maria Leo: The activities of the local groups of the Association of German Music Teachers (music section of the A. D .L.-V.) In the association year 1907-1908 . In: The teacher in school and home: central body for the interests of teachers at home and abroad . tape 25 , no. 23 , 1908, pp. 667–670 , urn : nbn: de: 0111-bbf-spo-9987971 .
  • Maria Leo: Agnes Hundoegger . In: Die Frau: Monthly for the entire women's life of our time; Organ of the Federation of German Women's Associations. tape 35 , no. 9 . Herbig, Berlin-Grunewald 1928, p. 526-532 .
  • Maria Leo: The working group between school and private music teachers . Lahr 1930.

Web links

http://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00002957 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Agnes Hundoegger: Guide to the Tonika-Do teaching. Tonika-Do-Verlag, Berlin and Hanover 1925 (5th edition). P. 2 (from the foreword to the 1st edition, 1897).
  2. ↑ http://schoeneberger-norden.de/Ein-Stolperstein-fuer-Maria-Leo-vor-der-Pallasstrasse-12.1085.0.html .
personal data
SURNAME Leo, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leo, Bertha Pauline Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pianist and music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 2, 1942
Place of death Berlin