Ulrich S. Leupold

Ulrich Siegfried Leupold (born January 15, 1909 in Berlin ; † June 9, 1970 in Kitchener , Ontario ) was an Evangelical Lutheran theologian and musicologist.

Leupold was the son of the Berlin organist to St. Petri Anton Wilhelm Leupold and the singer and music teacher Gertrud, geb. Hedgehog. After graduating from high school in 1927, he studied theology and musicology at the Berlin University and received his doctorate in musicology in 1932 with a thesis on the liturgical chants of the Protestant Church in the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism .

He broke off his theology studies in November 1933, but continued to study underground at the College of the Confessing Church . In 1935 he was excluded from the Reichsmusikkammer as a “half-Jew” (his mother came from a Jewish family) and was banned from working.

In 1938 he emigrated to the USA via England and settled in Kitchener, Ontario in 1939, where he was ordained a pastor in 1939 . In July 1942 he married Gertrude Daber (1917-2011). From 1945 he taught Protestant theology and church music at the Lutheran seminary in Waterloo (Ontario) as a professor and was also director of church music there. In 1968 he became dean and head of the seminar. In 1969 his work was honored with an honorary theological doctorate.

Leupold was an expert on Lutheran church music and published numerous works on the subject. In 1965 he was chairman of the church music committee of the Lutheran Church in America , and in 1966 he was president of the Canadian Society for Bible Studies.
His best-known church hymn is the adaptation of the African Easter song “Mfurahini, Haleluya” under the title “He has risen, Hallelujah” ( EG 116).

In 1969 Leupold fell ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) , an incurable disease with progressive degeneration of the motor nervous system, which led to Leupold's death in a short time.

literature

• Dieter Zahn: Ulrich Leupold, 1909–1970. In: Music and Church. Vol. 63 (1993), H. 6, pp. 328-332.
• Hartmut Ludwig, Eberhard Röhm : Baptized Evangelically - persecuted as "Jews". Calwer, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-7668-4299-2 , p. 216 f.
• Paul Helmer: Ulrich Siegfried Leupold (1909–70). In: Consensus: Vol. 34: Iss. 1, Article 2. (2012); available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol34/iss1/2

Web links

• Literature by and about Ulrich S. Leupold in the catalog of the German National Library
• “A life in two halves. A Protestant songwriter who had to flee from the Nazis and never spoke of Germany again ”, Sunday paper 2009/03.
• Entry about Leupold in the Canadian Encyclopedia
• Entry about Leupold in the encyclopedia of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ulrich Leupold | Lexicon of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era. Retrieved June 2, 2020 .