Ottmar Gerster

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Ottmar Gerster (left) with Guido Masanetz , 1952
Ottmar Gerster's grave in Leipzig's southern cemetery

Ottmar Gerster (born June 29, 1897 in Braunfels , Hesse ; † August 31, 1969 in Borsdorf near Leipzig ) was a German composer , violist and conductor . Gerster wrote compositions under the Nazi regime as well as in the GDR in accordance with the respective ruling regime.

Life

Gerster, the son of a neurologist and a pianist, first received violin and piano lessons. In 1913 he began studying at Dr. Hoch's Conservatory in Frankfurt , a. a. with Bernhard Sekles (improvisation) and Adolf Rebner (violin). There he made the acquaintance of Paul Hindemith . In the years 1916 to 1918 he had to temporarily interrupt his studies because he was called up for military service, but in 1920 he was able to successfully complete them. From 1921 Gerster was active in the Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra, initially as concert master , from 1923 to 1927 as a solo violist. In the 1920s, Gerster joined the labor movement and looked after workers' choirs. From 1927 to 1947 he taught violin, viola, chamber music , music theory and composition at the Folkwang School in Essen .

Time in the Nazi dictatorship

During the time of National Socialism he composed texts loyal to the regime, such as an ordination and a battle chorale by the German Christians in 1933 You should burn on a text by Baldur von Schirach , or in 1936 the folk game The Foreign Bride and the choir song Deutsche Flieger vor . In 1939 he had to do military service as a road construction soldier for a short time. In 1940 he composed the song of the Essen road construction company based on his own text . In 1941 his opera Die Hexe von Passau had its world premiere in Düsseldorf, further performances followed immediately in Bremen, Magdeburg, Essen and Liegnitz . For this opera he was awarded the Robert Schumann Prize of the City of Düsseldorf in the same year. In 1943 he received a government commission of 50,000 RM from the Reich Office for Music Processing to compose his opera Rappelkopf (later, The Enchanted Me ). In the final phase of the Second World War , Adolf Hitler added him to the list of God-gifted composers in August 1944, which in his view freed him from any further war effort, including on the home front .

Time in the GDR dictatorship

After 1945 Gerster was on the " black lists " of the US military government , but continued to work as a lecturer in Essen. In 1946 he became a member of the SED . In 1947 Gerster accepted a professorship for composition at the Music Academy in Weimar . There he worked until 1951, from 1948 as director. In 1950 he was a founding member of the German Academy of the Arts in Berlin . In 1951 he moved to the University of Music in Leipzig, where he stayed until his retirement in 1962. From 1951 to 1968 Gerster was chairman of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR . A particularly successful work by Gerster was the 1948 festival overture written by Gerster for the centenary of the revolution of 1848 . Officially praised as a work of "high socialist quality", the work begins with the battle song Die Internationale , which is followed by the Marseillaise and numerous workers' hymns. The musically extremely simple and in the sense of the socialist conception of art "easily comprehensible" and "popular" was held for the first time on the occasion of the 1st culture conference of the SED from May 5th to 7th 1948 and is one of the most frequently performed compositions in the GDR.

style

Gerster was a relatively traditional composer. He always moves within the framework of the extended tonality , often using church modes. Its harmony is essentially based on fifths and fourths. The form of his works is also based on classical schemes (such as the sonata form ). He felt connected to the folk song throughout his life and sometimes used original folk tunes in his works. There is also an emphasis on the “craftsmanship” in his tonal language. Early on, Gerster oriented himself towards the demands of music for the masses, so that in the GDR he had no problems following the “guidelines of socialist realism ” (at least required in the early 1950s) . A certain neoclassical influence is often noticeable, but Gerster is by no means alien to great pathos. His style is partly similar to that of his fellow student Hindemith.

Gerster was hardly interested in more modern processes such as twelve-tone technology; He never used the latter in his works, but only in individual cases (as in the introduction to the finale of his third symphony) composed melodies that consist of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, but even this remained the exception in his work. While Gerster enjoyed tremendous popularity during his lifetime - he was one of the most important composers of the first two decades of the GDR - he was as good as forgotten later.

Political criticism

The musicologist Friedrich Geiger assesses Gerster's work in the GDR as a smoothly completed double change of sides from the composer of the workers to the Nazi composer and finally to the model musician of the GDR. A common denominator is the appellative character of his music, the political content of which has simply been exchanged.

Awards

Works

  • Orchestral works
    • Old Style Dance Suite (1934)
    • Symphony No. 1 Small Symphony (1933/34)
    • Festive Music (1935)
    • Serious Music (On the Death of an Aviator) (1938)
    • Symphony No. 2 Thuringian Symphony (1949–1952)
    • Symphony No. 3 Leipzig Symphony with final chorus (1964/65, 2nd version 1966)
    • Symphony No. 4 Weimar Symphony (only 1st movement completed, 1969. On the 20th anniversary of the GDR)
    • Upper Hessian Peasant Dances (1938)
    • Toccata (1941/42)
    • Festival Overture 1948 (1948)
    • Dresden Suite (1956)
  • Concerts
    • Piano concerto in A (1931, rev. 1955)
    • Violin Concerto (1939)
    • Concertino for viola and chamber orchestra op.16 (1930)
    • Violoncello Concerto in D major (before 1946)
    • Horn Concerto (1958)
    • Capriccietto for four timpani and string orchestra (around 1932)
  • Stage works
    • Madame Liselotte , Opera (1932/33; premiere October 21, 1933, Essen)
    • Enoch Arden or Der Möwenschrei , Opera (1935/36; premiered November 15, 1936, Düsseldorf; text: Karl Michael Freiherr von Levetzow )
    • Hessian wedding dance game , ballet (1938)
    • The Eternal Circle , Ballet (1939)
    • The Witch of Passau , Opera (1939–1941; premiere October 11, 1941, Düsseldorf)
    • The Enchanted Me , opera (1943–1948, premiere 1949, Wuppertal)
    • The happy sinner , opera (1960–1962)
  • Other vocal works
    • The Song of the Worker (1928)
    • The Mysterious Trumpeter , Cantata (1928)
    • Soldantenlied (Goethe) male choir and orchestra (1930)
    • We! , socialist festival (1931/32)
    • You shall burn , battle chorale of the German Christians (Text: Baldur von Schirach , 1933)
    • Hymn to the Sun (Andersen), male choir and orchestra (1937)
    • Hanseatenfahrt (Höpner), male choir and orchestra (1941)
    • Remember her , cantata for soprano, speaker, male choir and orchestra (1939, for Heroes' Remembrance Day )
    • Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost , cantata (1951)
    • His red banner , song on Karl Marx (1954)
    • Ballad of the man Karl Marx and the change of the world (Text: Walther Victor , 1958)
    • numerous choirs
    • Songs
    • Folk song arrangements
  • Chamber music
    • String Quartet No. 1 in D (1920/21)
    • Divertimento for violin and viola (1927)
    • Cheerful music for 5 wind instruments (1936)
    • String Quartet No. 2 in C (1954)
    • String trio op.42 (around 1922)
    • String sextet in c op.5 (1921/22)
    • Sonata for violin and piano (1950/51)
    • Sonata for viola and piano No. 1 in D (1919–1922)
    • Sonata for viola and piano No. 2 in F (1954/55)
    • Pig quartet for 4 double basses (1932)
    • Sonatina for oboe and piano (1969)
    • Works for accordion
  • Piano music
    • Phantasy in G op.9 (1922)
    • Sonatina (1922/23)
    • other smaller pieces
  • Film music
  • 1954: story of a street

(most of the works were published by B. Schott's Sons, Mainz)

Others

The public music school in Weimar was named Ottmar Gersters from 1975 to 2016.

literature

  • Hans Bitterlich: Ottmar Gerster . In: Dietrich Brennecke, Hannelore Gerlach, Mathias Hansen (eds.): Musicians in our time. Members of the music section of the GDR Academy of the Arts . Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1979, p. 48 ff.
  • Rainer Malth: Ottmar Gerster. Life and Work , Edition Peters, Leipzig 1988, ISBN 3-369-00043-1 .
  • Torsten Musial, Bernd-Rainer BarthGerster, Ottmar . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933-1945 . Kiel 2004, CD-ROM Lexicon, p. 2055 ff.
  • Gerster, Ottmar. In: Brockhaus-Riemann Musiklexikon. CD-ROM, Directmedia Publishing, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89853-438-3 , p. 3925 f.

Web links

Commons : Ottmar Gerster  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Fred K. Prieberg: Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, pp. 2.055–2.056.
  2. Fred K. Prieberg: Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , p. 2.057.
  3. ^ A b 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. 181.
  4. Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, p. 2.055.
  5. ^ Controversy over opportunist - Borna region Bornaer music school Ottmar Gerster sticks to the name
  6. ^ Anne-Kristin Schmidt: Music as a tool of indoctrination: using the example of the 1948 Festival Overture by Ottmar Gerster and the Mansfeld Oratorio by Ernst Hermann Meyer , Are-Musik-Verlag, 2009, p. 62
  7. ^ Friederike Wißmann : Deutsche Musik , Berlin Verlag, 2015, pp. 281 to 283
  8. Friederike Wißmann: Deutsche Musik , Berlin Verlag, 2015, pp. 279 and 280. See also on the turning maneuvers: Jörg Fligge: “Schöne Lübecker Theaterwelt.” The city theater during the Nazi dictatorship. Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 2018. ISBN 978-3-7950-5244-7 . Pp. 520f., On Gerster: pp. 150–152.
  9. Christiane Weber: Weimar Music School sheds its name. In: Thüringische Landeszeitung. October 29, 2015, accessed March 16, 2018 .