Otto Wrede

Otto Wrede (born January 29, 1883 in Landsberg an der Warthe , † April 1945 ) was a German music publisher.

Life

Otto Wrede completed an apprenticeship as a music dealer in the music and instrument shop Richard Rühle at Moritzplatz in Berlin , which he completed in April 1900. He was then taken on as an employee by his teacher and continued to work for the Apollo publishing house, which Rühle founded together with Paul Lincke , and for the music shop. This was renamed the Apollo music store Lincke & Rühle in the course of the collaboration with Lincke. On October 1, 1907, he founded the Regina publishing house. However, he had signed the first contract for a work to be published, Per aspera ad astra , with Ernst Urbach in December 1905 . Further contracts must also have been secured before the Regina Verlag was officially founded.

In the first few years the Regina publishing house could not yet support itself. Otto Wrede therefore worked part-time as an employee for the Harmonie-Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, later as the deputy director of the Thalia-Theater-Verlag. After that, his participation in the First World War interrupted his career as a publisher.

After his return he rented premises for his publishing house in Hobrechtstrasse 48 in Neukölln . From 1918 the sales figures were positive. Per aspera ad astra experienced print runs of around 40,000 copies. In 1920 he bought the rights to the Schlager Bummel-Petrus from Hermann Frey and Max Werner-Kersten, which had previously been rejected by all publishers . It took two years for this hit to become really popular, but then the success was huge. Wrede sold about 2,000,000 piano editions and received $ 750 just for purchasing the printing rights from an American sub-publisher. According to Hermann Frey, this sales success was the reason for the later GEMA to get a better participation rate for the lyricists.

Letter and drawing by Zille on Wrede's tenth wedding anniversary

Hermann Frey also introduced Otto Wrede to Heinrich Zille , which soon developed into a friendship and a business relationship. Several cover images that the publisher used come from Zille, including one for Walter Kollo's masked ball in the goat stable , for which Frey wrote the texts.

In 1922 Otto Wrede moved his publishing house, which now had ten employees, to Kottbusser Damm 63/64. He now mainly produced sheet music for popular music in the 1920s, but also the Golden Music series , in which arrangements of free works by well-known composers were put together. These were mainly used in coffee houses and cinemas during the silent movie era. Another series that he founded at this time was Im Konzertgarten , which mainly contained brass music.

The composers whose works he published included Gerhard Winkler , Erich Gutzeit , Jim Cowler and Willi Kollo . In 1922 he also brought out Paul Scheinpflug's opera Hofkonzert , the libretto of which was by Heinrich Illgenstein .

Sheet music for mandolin quartets as well as for zither and bandoneon also sold well . Wrede also included background music specially arranged for silent film cinemas in his publishing program: TR Leuschner created the Prima Vista cinema in 1922 , in which set pieces were made available for popular film scenes. However, with the advent of the talkie, these notes became almost unsaleable.

After his landlord had raised the price for the publishing premises on Kottbusser Damm, Otto Wrede built his own publishing house and residential building at Schwarzen Grund 21 in Berlin-Dahlem , which was used from 1926. He has now also published operettas , including works by Eduard Künneke , who signed his first contract with him in 1928.

After radio became more and more widespread in the 1930s , Wrede changed his publishing program and now dealt specifically with orchestral works that were played and broadcast live on the radio. Here, too, he was able to fall back on numerous works by Künneke. In 1932 he signed a contract with Künneke for the Dance Suite, Op. 26 , which, however, could not always be successfully marketed. In the 1930s the publisher ran into financial difficulties and Otto Wrede had to cut some of the staff. From 1939 to 1945 Wrede could almost only conclude contracts with Künneke; Reprints were hardly possible due to the lack of paper during the war . Since opera and theater performances gradually became almost impossible, the earning opportunities were also very limited here.

Otto Wrede's son Harry Wrede, who was born in 1913, had completed his training as a music dealer in 1932 and was supposed to go abroad afterwards, but this was not possible due to time restrictions. He therefore worked at STAGMA from 1935, which would later become GEMA, and from 1938 in his father's company, but was drafted into military service in 1939.

Otto Wrede himself had to work as a conscript in an armaments factory from 1944 and was called up for the Volkssturm in 1945 . He fell in the last days of World War II. At the same time, his wife Bertha was shot dead by strangers in the Schwarzer Grund in Dahlem.

successor

Harry Wrede returned from American captivity in 1947 and found his parents' house damaged and occupied by strangers. He had to laboriously fight back the publishing rights and the house and soon after he had succeeded in moving the company headquarters to Wiesbaden . Since the employee Martha Fischer had saved the publishing contracts, archive copies and many manuscripts, Harry Wrede was able to build on his father's publishing activities. He managed the publishing house successfully almost until his death in 1983. His daughter Edda, then 26 years old, took over the publishing business, supported by her mother Gerlinde Wrede as a general partner until 1999.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Künneke's Dancer Suite op. 26, the rights of which Otto Wrede had bought in 1932, was performed in Leipzig under Kurt Masur and became better known again. The publishing house founded by Otto Wrede celebrated its centenary in 2007.

Web links

• History of the Regina publishing house

Individual evidence

1. ^ Albert E. Wier (ed.): The MacMillan Encyclopedia Of Music And Musicians In One Volume . The MacMillan Company, New York 1938, p. 2040
2. ↑ cf. Entry for Otto Wrede in the online grave search of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V.