Otto Jagermeier

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Otto Jägermeier (born October 29, 1870 in Munich ; † November 22, 1933 in Zurich ) is a fictional German composer , symphonist and ethnomusicologist . As a scientific joke , the sometimes contradicting information about his life and work is continued in bogus lexicon articles . He is represented in the Riemann Musiklexikon and in contemporary composers .

Life

Otto Jägermeier grew up in a wealthy family. His father was a private scholar and later a professor of zoology who specialized in entomology . His mother was very musical and encouraged her son from early childhood. Ludwig Thuille and Joseph Gabriel Rheinberger , who were only nine years older than him, are regarded as future teachers and role models . Thuile came from Bozen, Rheinberger from Vaduz, both worked in Munich. The young Jägermeier received significant impulses from Peter Lohmann , an influential journalist and theoretician of the music press. Lohmann came from the Bergisches Land ; he lived in Leipzig from 1856 until his death in 1907.

Jägermeier spent the summer of 1900 on the island of Texel . Here he wrote his Texel elegies , later called Texelegien in the specialist press . Jägermeier lived in Iceland from spring 1901 to autumn 1902 . During this time he wrote his sagalia , dark melodies that are based on the Icelandic sagas .

Further trips took him to numerous European countries. In Cologne he met the married couple Ferdinand and Isabella Schmitz while attending an organ concert in Cologne Cathedral . Jägermeier maintained this acquaintance until his death in 1933.

Madagascar

Around 1910 - an exact year is not known - Jägermeier first traveled to Madagascar . After several months he returned to Europe. At the beginning of 1915, after all , the war in Europe was not "over at Christmas", the forty-four year old settled permanently in Madagascar. After initial difficulties as a German in a French colony, he lived relatively undisturbed on the island for eighteen years. He studied local music and, on the basis of mutual respect, found access to French music lovers and local artists. In the last years of his life he maintained an intensive exchange with the local writer Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo , who himself wrote texts for folk operas.

On a vacation trip to Europe, Otto Jägermeier died unexpectedly on November 22, 1933 in Zurich.

Works

  • 1900: Texel elegies
  • 1900: Psychosen (first performed in Breslau 1901. The (not fictional) Max Steinitzer claims in 1906/07 in "Die Musik" that it was a composition by the (fictional) Willi Tädde)
  • 1900: Nine joints from a later period
  • 1901: Battle of the Titans
  • 1902: depth of sea
  • approx. 1910: The physiological nonsense of women
  • approx. 1919: Concerto nostalgile
  • approx. 1920: In the jungle
  • ca.1925 : Suite tananarivienne (a hymn to the capital of Madagascar, which was then called Tananarive)
  • approx. 1930: Le Steinlaus apopoudobaliant
  • Night Thoughts ( Heinrich Heine : I think of Germany at night ...): Jägermeier set this famous poem to music twice. The first time during his stay in Iceland, the second time in Madagascar in the 1920s. In a letter to the Schmitzes in February 1928, he mentions both versions. The second is, as he writes, "significantly sunnier". A copy of this letter is kept at the Heinrich Heine Institute in Düsseldorf.

estate

Otto Jägermeier, who was not married and also had no children, deposited most of his works, manuscripts, letters and other documents from the years before 1915 with the Schmitzes. Isabella Schmitz, who outlived her husband by a few years, handed over the entire written estate to the historical archive of the city of Cologne in 1936, three years after the death of the important composer . The Jägermeier estate was also fully affected by the collapse of the archive on March 3, 2009. A rescue of around 90% of the archives seems possible. The restoration work is expected to take about thirty to fifty years.

The scholar T. Sakarahnive was able to use the estate on Madagascar at the end of the 1950s, i.e. before the island state became independent, for his 1964 dissertation on L'influence madégasse sur la musique européenne ("The Malagasy Influence on European Music"). In it he explores the allure of the exotic in Jägermeier's oeuvre. Later investigations in the city archives of the capital Antananarivo (the former Tananarive ) did not lead to any result. Many of Jägermeier's records from the last decades of his life are therefore also considered lost.

The work Sakarahnives, which preceded his music theoretical considerations with a vita of Otto Jägermeier, contains some grotesque claims. According to this, Bavaria and Germany are two different sovereign states. The city of Munich is a district of Ottobrunn . The latter is given as the place of birth and is said to have been the reason for choosing the first name Otto.

aftermath

After his death in 1933, Jägermeier was soon forgotten. It was only the pianist Karl Betz and the writer Herbert Rosendorfer , who, like Ludwig Thuille, came from Bozen, who stood up for Otto Jägermeier and his work. In a review of 2012 by the Süddeutsche Zeitung , columnist Hermann Unterstöger suggested that 2013 be celebrated as the Jägermeier year. The occasion could be the 80th anniversary of the composer's death. Then the symphonic poem Le Steinlaus apopoudobaliant could finally be premiered. However, Unterstöger relativized his suggestion by referring to the Pilz year 1956, when Wolfgang Hildesheimer commemorated the centenary of Gottlieb Theodor Pilz's death .

Others

"Otto Jägermeier Society"

In 1984 some personalities of the then West Berlin musical life, including the composer and musicologist Wilfried W. Bruchhäuser, Hellmut Kotschenreuther, music critic of the Tagesspiegel , and the conductor and musician Hans-Jürgen Roeber, the Otto Jägermeier Society Berlin e. V. founded. For several years there was a lot of activity around Otto Jägermeier's “estate”. The association, to which the Berlin Senate temporarily granted non-profit status, organized numerous concerts in Berlin in the years that followed. a. the comedian Ingo Insterburg participated several times . The association published several editions of Ottomania , according to a magazine "for the rediscovery and laudable promotion of unjustly neglected or forgotten composers, for the critical consideration of existing as well as research and testing of alternative concert forms".

Herbert Rosendorfer

The author Herbert Rosendorfer (1934–2012) mentions Otto Jägermeier several times in his works:

  • Rosendorfers book Don Ottavio remembers (1989) contains the essay The Hermit on Madagascar. Composer Otto Jägermeier - a fiction .
  • In his novel Das Messingherz (1979), Rosendorfer had the character Jakob Schwalbe invented by the composer Jägermeier. Quote (p. 37): The editors of a renowned music lexicon made the mistake of asking Schwalbe to collaborate. In addition to about a hundred serious articles about musicians and musical terms, he slipped eight complete biographies on musicians who never existed. He invented ... the new German composer Otto Jägermeier, whose - of course, false - correspondence with Richard Strauss he published and from whom he had an incredibly abstruse piece for two trombones and guitar performed in his concert cycle (actually composed by Schwalbe himself).
  • In the story Ball bei Thod (1980) Rosendorfer writes: Between the swallows in Armagnac and the flambéed horse's ears, the landlord asked for a 'Marche nocturne silencieuse' for solo harp by the once world-famous, who later disappeared in Madagascar when looking for a motif and is now allowed Wrong to play completely forgotten composer Otto Jägermeier. (P. 15)
  • A return happens to Otto Jägermeier as composer Thremo Tofandor in Rosendorfer's novel Der Meister (2011), which is described as a “novel” .

Rosendorfers regular readers had known since 1979 that Otto Jägermeier was a fictional character; Rosendorfer confirmed this in the article (1989). Rosendorfer was a judge throughout his professional life. In legal writings there are some fictional lawyers, e.g. B. the constitutional lawyer Friedrich Gottlob Nagelmann and the OLG President Henriette Heinbostel .

See also

  • PDQ Bach - the last son of Johann Sebastian Bach invented by a US music professor (* 1935)

literature

  • Martina Helmig: On the trail of the phantom composer Otto Jägermeier. In: Berliner Morgenpost from April 11, 1989
  • Albrecht Gaub: Jägermeier, Jaegermeier, Otto . In: Music in the past and present . Person part, Volume 9. Kassel 2003, pp. 849–850.
  • Hermann Unterstöger: What else needs to be said . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung - The great annual review . Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich 2012, p. 184 .
  • Hanns-Werner Heister, Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer: Otto Jägermeier , in: Contemporary composers , in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
  • Jürgen Schaarwächter: Reger and Otto Jägermeier - and a lost Reger work? In: imrg (International Max Reger Society) messages 17 . 2008, p. 11-15 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hermann Unterstöger : Jägermeier, the music ghost. The composer who had never lived died 80 years ago. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 22, 2013, p. 12.
  2. ↑ a b c d work analysis ( Memento from April 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
  3. ↑ Boris Kehrmann: Herbert Rosendorfers novel "Der Meister" ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Fictional and yet very lively