Roland Bocquet

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Hugo Erfurth: Roland Bocquet

Roland Bocquet (actually Hugh Rowland Bocquet , born June 3, 1878 in Saharanpur , India, † October 16, 1956 in Zurich ) was a British composer and pianist based in Dresden.

Life

Roland Bocquet was born as the son of the British railway engineer William Sutton Bocquet (1848-1889) and his wife Jessie Van Zuylen van Nyevelt de Gasbeke, a Flemish baroness. He first began an officer career with the Royal Engineers , but soon switched to music. In 1900 he moved to Dresden, where he worked as a composer and accompanist. In the winter of 1906/1907 he received a visit from Arnold Bax , who dedicated the ballad The Twa Corbies to him. With the singer Leon Rains (1870-1954) engaged at the Dresden Opera, Bocquet undertook a tour of the USA in 1913, where his own works were also performed. After the outbreak of the First World War he was interned in the Ruhleben internment camp (Berlin) until 1918 . He then returned to Dresden and in 1936 became professor of music theory at the local conservatory . After the war he moved to Meissen before emigrating to Switzerland in 1954. He died of a heart attack in Zurich in 1956.

plant

Roland Bocquet wrote over 60 songs, including texts by Joseph von Eichendorff , Hermann Hesse , Friedrich Nietzsche , Max Dauthendey , Otto Julius Bierbaum and the Dresden poet Friedrich Kurt Benndorf, with whom he also maintained personal relationships. He also wrote numerous, e.g. T. virtuoso piano works. Most famous was his ballad in C minor (December 1910), of which an orchestral version by Frederick Charles Adler, written in Ruhleben, has been preserved in the Wiesbaden main state archive .

During his lifetime his works were popularized in the major music centers in Dresden, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Paris, London and New York. Well-known artists - including Erna Berger , Georg Anthes , Max Reger and Adrian Boult - are listed. The press praised his music, which oscillates between tradition and avant-garde, between Art Nouveau and Impressionism and is characterized by great sensuality and refined harmony, mostly very positively. In Dresden there was the "Roland Bocquet Society", which was dedicated to printing and performing his works and was deleted from the register of associations after the end of the war, in 1946, when it was no longer alive. The chairman of the society was initially the lawyer Franz Benndorf, from 1927 the pianist Walter Schaufuss-Bonini.

Score by Charles Frederic Adler, arrangement of a ballad by Roland Bocquet for large orchestra (Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden Abt. 3037 Nr. 1)

Archival material

literature

  • Erich H. Muller: German Musicians Lexicon. Dresden 1929, column 121
  • Paul Frank, Wilhelm Altmann : Concise Tonkünstler Lexicon for musicians and friends of music. Regensburg 1936
  • Percy Alfred Scholes: The Oxford companion to music: self-indexed and with a pronouncing glossary and over 1,100 portraits and pictures. Oxford: OUP 1955, p. 113
  • Rouven Pons: esotericist of sound. The life of the Dresden composer Roland Bocquet (1878-1945?). New Archive for Saxon History 86 (2015), pp. 145–176.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary , accessed October 29, 2014
  2. ↑ There is no evidence of his studies at the Royal Academy of Music, mentioned in Scholes (lit.)
  3. ^ Leon Rains , biographical information of the SLUB
  4. ^ Obituary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from October 19, 1956, page c7. The cremation took place in Zurich on October 19, 1956, Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, October 19, 1956, issue 2924. The place of the burial is unknown.
personal data
SURNAME Bocquet, Roland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bocquet, Hugh Rowland (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British composer and pianist based in Dresden
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Saharanpur , India
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1956
Place of death Zurich