Oskar Boehme

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Oskar Böhme (born February 24, 1870 in Potschappel , † October 3, 1938 in Orenburg ) was a German - Russian trumpeter and composer .

Life

Oskar Böhme was the third of five children of the Saxon trumpeter and music teacher Heinrich Wilhelm Böhme and his wife Juliane Henriette. Böhme received his first musical training from his father, who played in the respected miners' band of the Baron von Burgker Steinkohlenwerke. His instrument became the cornet à pistons. From 1885 to 1894 he toured Europe as a soloist. During this time he also studied composition at the Hamburg Conservatory and in Berlin. After that he was a member of the Budapest Opera Orchestra until 1896 . He returned to Germany, studied music theory, composition and piano at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig , where he graduated.

In 1898 Böhme went to Saint Petersburg , where in September 1902 he was accepted as a cornetist in the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater , the Imperial Opera. One of the conditions for his employment was acceptance of Russian citizenship, which Tsar Nikolai II granted him . in November 1901. Böhme played in the orchestra of the Petersburg Opera for 19 years, as a soloist since 1916. Shortly after the start of the war, he became an honorary citizen of Saint Petersburg.

The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks also affected Boehme's life. Although he had volunteered for two years as a musician in a Petrograd border regiment of the Red Army in 1918 , he fell victim to the radical ideological changes in the Soviet theater landscape in 1921 and had to take his leave at the Mariinsky Theater. After 1921 Böhme led the trumpet class at the Rimsky-Korsakov Music School in Petrograd / Leningrad. From 1930 to 1934 he was a member of the orchestra of the Great Drama Theater, later the Gorki Theater.

Like many Petersburgers, Böhme fell victim to the Great Terror , the persecution campaign of Joseph Stalin, in the following years . After his first arrest in August 1930 for spreading chauvinist propaganda among the Leningrad Germans, the NKVD arrested him a second time in April 1935. This time the charge was "anti-Soviet propaganda" and "participation in a counter-revolutionary organization". Böhme was then exiled to the city of Orenburg on the border with Kazakhstan for three years. There was long speculation about his whereabouts. An eyewitness later claimed that he saw Böhme in a labor camp in Turkmenistan in 1941 .

In 2015 it became known in Germany through a publication in Spiegel that Böhme had already been shot in Orenburg in October 1938. The Belarusian Anatolij Jakowlewitsch Rasumow, who works at the Russian National Library and has been publishing the Leningrader Martyrologium book series since 1995 , which documents the fate of the victims of the Great Terror in St. Petersburg, had explained Boehme's death. Further investigation revealed that Böhme had been arrested for the third time in Orenburg on June 15, 1938. This time he was accused of forming an espionage organization that had prepared "diversion files on the railroad and at Orenburg airfields". On October 3, the troika of the Orenburg NKVD passed the death sentence, which was carried out immediately. It is not known where Böhme was buried.

Boehme's wife Alexandra Ignatjewna Jakowlewa, a Russian businesswoman born in 1855, whom he married in Petersburg in 1898, had died of a heart attack in 1909.

In January 1989 the military tribunal of the Volga military district rehabilitated Oskar Böhme. After examining all the files from 1938, it came to the conclusion that the accusations at the time had been falsified by the NKVD, that a counter-revolutionary organization led by Böhme never existed in the Orenburg area and that there was therefore no crime.

Even before he was employed in the theater, Böhme had composed his most important work in 1899: the “Concerto in E minor for trumpet in A (Cornet à pistons) with piano accompaniment” op. 18. Up until this time, not a single important composer of the Romantic era had a soloist Work composed for the trumpet. With the concerto in E minor, Böhme achieved a great success. It became “the only authentic trumpet concert of the romantic era”, that is to say for almost the entire 19th and early 20th centuries. The work was performed at the Leipzig Conservatory in June 1899, and in 1904 for the first time in the USA. Together with Wilhelm Wurm, who was born in Braunschweig and Wassili Brandt from Coburg, who also both went to Russia, Böhme is considered the most important founder of the Soviet brass school. His compositions have become part of the standard international trumpet repertoire and are played by brass bands all over the world. At many music schools it can be found as proof of trumpeter skills under the examination pieces of the trumpet classes. His works are also on the repertoire in Saint Petersburg today.

Works

• op. 7 Berceuse - Lullaby for cornet and piano
• Op. 18 Concerto in E minor for trumpet in A, Petersburg 1899
• op.20 24 melodic exercises for trumpet in Bb or A (Cornet à pistons), Petersburg, ca.1900
• op. 22 No.1 Serenade for Cornet and Piano
• op. 22 No.2 love song for cornet and piano
• op.23 Soirée de St Petersbourg, Romance for Cornet à pistons and harp or clavier, Petersburg 1900
• op.? Souvenir de St. Pétersbourg, Polka Brillante for cornet and piano
• op. 25 La Napolitaine, Tarantelle, Petersburg 1902
• op. 28 2 three-part fugues for trumpet, alto horn and baryton (trombone) or cornet, french horn and tenor horn (trombone); No.1 in E flat major, No.2 in E minor
• op. 30 Sextet in E flat minor for brass ensemble ("Trumpet Sextet"), Petersburg, approx. 1907
• op.31 ballet scene for piano and orchestra, Petersburg 1907
• op. 32 Danse russe, Petersburg, ca.1910
• op. 44 Night Music
• op. 45 Fantasy on Russian Folk Sounds
• op. 46 Rococo Suite

swell

• Edward H. Tarr , East meets West, The Russian Trumpet Tradition, Pedragon Press, Hillsdale, NY 2003
• Christian Neef , The Trumpeter of Saint Petersburg, Siedler Verlag, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-8275-0108-0
• Max Sommerhalder , text accompanying the CD Giuliano Sommerhalder : Romantic Virtuosity, Solo Musica Munich 2008
• Leningradski Martirolog 1937–1938, Tom 12, Saint Petersburg 2012

Individual evidence

1. ^ Edward H. Tarr: East meets West, The Russian Trumpet Tradition . Pedragon Press, Hillsdale NY 2003, ISBN 1-57647-028-8 .
2. ^ Russian State Historical Archive Saint Petersburg, Fund 1284, opis 99, delo 1643 .
3. ↑ Sergei Priwalow: Musykalnaja Schkola imeni Rimskogo-Korsakowa . Saint Petersburg 2013.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Archives of the FSB for Saint Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, file 3058, No. R-74581 .
5. ^ Christian Neef : Archivist of Terror . In: Der Spiegel 53/2015 of December 24, 2015, pp. 94–97, here p. 96 ( PDF )
6. ↑ ^{a b} Archive of the FSB Orenburg, file 6378, fund 8003, opis 5, delo 14070 .
7. ↑ Max Sommerhalder ,: Musique romantique russe pour trompette (record cover) . Paris 1979.
8. ↑ Russian Revolutionaries, Vol. 1 - Victor Ewald & Oskar Böhme - Prince Regent's Band | Songs, reviews, credits. Retrieved December 18, 2019 (American English).