Ruth Bodenstein-Hoyme

Ruth Bodenstein-Hoyme (born March 13, 1924 in Wurzen ; † January 11, 2006 in Dresden ) was a German composer and piano teacher .

Life

Ruth Hoyme was born as the second daughter of the commercial gardener Walter Hoyme. She attended elementary school in Wurzen and later the city's state high school for a few years. Against her father's wishes, she took piano lessons from a Fraulein Reimann in Wurzen. At the age of nine she presented her first composition exercises. Through countless appearances, which she often achieved overland on her own bike, she had saved herself a grand piano over the years. After high school, she completed the women's school for housekeeping in Düsseldorf- Kaiserswerth .

In 1940 she was lucky enough to meet the Leipzig pianist Elisabeth Knauth (* 1894), who gave her inspiring piano and music theory lessons. She also encouraged Hoyme to study the piano and prepared her for the entrance examination at the Leipzig Conservatory. She passed this in 1941. But she first had to do an unavoidable year of labor service in Stettin before she could start studying in 1942. But since Germany was at war, she had to work as a locksmith in the armaments industry. She therefore interrupted her studies until 1946.

In 1947 she resumed her studies. Professors Oswin Kelle and Rudolf Fischer were her piano teachers, Paul Schenk taught them composition. Thanks to a teaching permit from the music college after the end of the war, she gave private piano lessons for children from Wurzen and Leipzig from 1946 to 1953. Several of them, including children in homes, without a fee. In Wurzen, Hoyme also founded a singing group that wanted to distract people from everyday worries after the war through song and music. She also drove with him overland to the area around Wurzens.

In 1953 Ruth Hoyme went to the Dresden University of Music as a piano teacher. She taught there until 1984. She continued the composition studies she had begun with Johann Nepomuk David and Paul Schenk while studying in Leipzig . In 1958 she married the bookseller Andreas Bodenstein. Their son Christof was born a year later, took musical lessons from his mother and ultimately made his debut as a singer at the Dresden Semperoper.

In 1966 she decided to study composition in the evening, which she completed in 1971 - as the first woman at Dresden University - with a state examination. From 1984 she worked as a freelance composer.

She was socially active in the CDU and the DFD of the GDR . She has received numerous awards for her diverse musical and pedagogical work as well as her social commitment, e. B. the Pestalozzi Medal in bronze in 1964 and in silver in 1973, the badge of honor for composers and scientists in bronze in 1976 and in silver in 1988. In 1982 the Dresden Academy of Music "Carl Maria von Weber" awarded her its highest distinction, the Carl-Maria -von-Weber badge. In 1993 she received the Albert Schweitzer Medal from the Albert Schweitzer Committee. She had dealt intensively with Schweitzer's work and texts.

The painter Rudolf Nehmer made a portrait of her, which was created between 1981 and 1982.

Ruth Bodenstein-Hoyme died in Dresden in January 2006. Her grave is in the municipal cemetery of her native Wurzen.

Works

Her main creative field was chamber music for strings, wind instruments, piano and the vocal area with song cycles, choral works or cantatas, mainly based on texts by Albert Schweitzer, but also by Goethe, Eichendorff, Storm, Becher, Morgenstern, Eva Strittmatter and Ho Chi Minh . There are also some symphonic works.

A selection of works:

• Minneliederspiel
• Spring cantata
• Piano sonatina
• Violin sonatina
• Fugue for 4 voices for piano (between 1966–1971)
• Five miniatures for violin and viola
• Sonatina for piano in d (1967)
• Symphonic Emotion 1969 (after Lion Feuchtwanger, 1969)
• 10 variations based on a Vietnamese children's song for 2 violins and double bass (1975)
• Cycle The Little Wisdoms (1977)
• Cantata Il progresso essemplificato for 3 strings and 3 singers, text: A. Schweitzer (1980)
• Impressions based on poems by Ho Chi Minh for baritone and piano (1981)
• Cheerful overture, dedicated to her hometown Wurzen (1983/84)
• Epigram for baritone and piano, text: A. Schweitzer, commissioned by the Dresden University of Music (1984)
• Calendar for speaker and piano, text: Sigismund v. Radecki (1987)
• Incidental music for Arbusov's Tanja (for the workers' theater of the record company Meißen)
• Orchestral suite with symphonic pictures from the Dresden Great Garden
• In Memoriam JS Bach and Albert Schweitzer for tenor, 2 violins and violoncello (1985)
• Evening serenade for voice, flute and guitar (1999)
• Wind quintet (2001)
• Festive music for wind septet

literature

• The panorama: From the culture and home of the Wurzen, Oschatz and Grimma districts. Issues 1958, 1975, 1984
• Beate Philipp (Ed.): Memoriter: On the life and work of the composer Ruth Bodenstein-Hoyme. Regensburg 1994
• Important women in the Leipziger Land. Special edition of the Heimatblätter des Bornaer Land, published by Heimatverein des Bornaer Land eV, Borna 2010