Rosebery d'Arguto

Rosebery d'Arguto (pseudonym for Martin Rozenberg ; born December 24, 1890 in Szreńsk ; † 1943 Auschwitz-Birkenau ) was an important music teacher, composer and conductor who was primarily active in the workers' music movement.

Life

Rosebery d'Arguto was born in 1890 as the son of a landowner in Schrensk in the part of Poland occupied by Russia. He developed artistic talent and political interest. After joining the Polish independence movement in Warsaw in 1905, which is why he was persecuted by the Russian police, he fled to Austria a little later to avoid further persecution. He studied music in Vienna and then in Italy and finally received his habilitation.

At the beginning of the 1920s, d'Arguto went to Germany . In Berlin-Neukölln he took over a mixed choir of the workers' singing movement that had existed since 1890 and transformed it into a choral society with high musical standards. The association, soon to be called the “Rosebery d'Arguto Singing Community”, specialized in pedagogical work in the following years and helped working-class children to gain musical training.

With the repression of the workers' music movement after 1933, the Jude d'Arguto also came under increasing pressure. The choir was banned from performing under his direction and finally banned from working. In 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland , d'Arguto left Germany, but returned to Berlin a little later because of important errands . There he was immediately arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg on September 13, 1939 . In Sachsenhausen he set up a choir of Jewish prisoners in blocks 37 and 38 and tried to continue his work. As part of a 1942 order from Hitler that all Jews still in the Reich were to be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau , d'Arguto was also taken to the extermination camp, where he was murdered in 1943.

plant

Rosebery d'Arguto is almost completely forgotten today. This can be seen as a result of Nazi politics. All of d'Arguto's documents, including records for a planned publication on the subject of music education and compositions, were destroyed as planned by the authorities. Other documents hidden in a cellar were bombed. Contemporary newspaper articles and, above all, statements by members of the singing community and other contemporaries, however, point to the great importance of d'Argutos. His musical pedagogical approaches in particular were considered modern and groundbreaking at the time.

D'Arguto also wrote a number of compositions, mostly choral works, of great quality. The Absolute Symphonic Chants stand out here, in which d'Arguto treated the human voice like an instrument and dispensed with words. A few compositions from his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen have also survived. The Jewish Death Song (1942), which his surviving fellow inmate Aleksander Kulisiewicz often performed as a singer at concerts after the war , became famous . Only a few people in the world still sing it today, including the Yiddish stage performer Daniel Kempin : "Two people in the world still sing this song - I am one of them". Since 2004, Kempin's student, the German-Czech Yiddish singer Anna Werliková , has also been interpreting the Yiddish tojtngesang so that it is carried on from one generation to the next.

Documents on Rosebery d'Arguto and the singing community of the same name can be found primarily in the workers' song archive of the Akademie der Künste (Berlin) , where there is a separate collection for d'Arguto.

literature

• Peter Andert: Rosebery d'Arguto: Attempts to renew proletarian choral singing . In: Klaus Kellers, Helga Karolewski, Ilse Siebert (eds.): Berlin encounters. Foreign artists in Berlin 1918 to 1933. Articles - pictures - documents (= publications of the national research and memorial centers of the GDR for German art and literature of the 20th century ). Dietz, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-320-00836-6 .
• Aleksander Kulisiewicz: Address: Sachsenhausen. Literary snapshots from the concentration camp. Edited by Claudia Westermann. Translated from the Polish by Bettina Eberspächer . Bleicher, Gerlingen 1997, ISBN 3-88350-731-8 .
• Jörn Wegner: The Workers Music Movement in National Socialism . In: Kulturation. Online journal for culture, science and politics 2/2008 (web resource) .
• Juliane Brauer: Musical violence and means of survival music. Jewish musicians in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Part 2: “A person of great dignity.” Rosebery d'Arguto. In: musica reanimata-Mitteilungen, No. 64 (January 2008), pp. 1–19.

Web links

• Juliane Brauer:  Rosebery d'Arguto in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM)
• Rosebery d'Arguto collection in the archive of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Juliane Brauer:  Rosebery d'Arguto in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM)
2. ↑ Jens Höhner: With the moral index finger. Mazl un Shlamazl: Daniel Kempin sings Yiddish songs about happiness and unhappiness. In: Westdeutsche Zeitung, November 11, 1995.