Wilhelm Bender (church musician)

Wilhelm Bender at the carillon in 1938

Wilhelm Bender (born February 10, 1911 in Frankfurt am Main , † March 23, 1944 in Sedes near Saloniki ) was a German church musician, bell player and composer. He was a contemporary witness of church-political and musical currents: the youth music movement, folk singing, National Socialism, the search for an individual musical language and - in the context of the current church music zeitgeist - the Protestant church struggle with liturgical renewal movement and the struggle for contemporary church music. The mutually influencing impact stories of these trends are reflected in person, profession, personal environment and the compositions of Wilhelm Bender.

Life

Wilhelm Bender passed his exams for church music at the State Academy for Church and School Music in Berlin in 1934 and 1935 and for the artistic teaching post at secondary schools with distinction.

While still a student, he accompanied a special morning program for children aged three to five as a "musician" at Berlin's Deutschlandsender , with a clear tendency towards early musical education , i.e. with the aim of making music creatively. He carried out this activity on the radio as a part-time ban music officer for the Hitler Youth , which was not a political commitment: the Academy for Church and School Music became a HJ model music training facility as early as 1933 and urged its students into the HJ.

Wilhelm Bender created his famous children's songs for his own use on the radio - e.g. B. “Our cat is called Mohrle, has a black ear and a black fur. And if there is something to lick, then she is right there ". The German Folk Song Archive counts this song among the German folk songs.

In 1936 Wilhelm Bender became cantor and bell ( carillon ) player at the Parochial Church in Berlin and held his office there until 1940. The radio broadcast numerous of his organ and glockenspiel concerts all over Germany and made him famous beyond the region. According to today's standards, his bell concerts achieved cult status with 2,000 to 3,000 listeners and literally triggered a “glockenspiel movement”.

As a carillon player at the Parochialkirche, a German-Christian- dominated staff congregation with only a small, unstable membership, Wilhelm Bender took on a leading role in the “attractiveness competition” of (church) politically active Protestant city churches: As a conspicuous Berlin church, they wanted to advertise additional congregation memberships among the population and gain influence as a politically compliant church towards the National Socialists, also to benefit from their willingness to donate.

This publicly staged, political-secular attitude to the glockenspiel in an emphatically secular context stood in stark contrast to the theologically and musicologically sound elaborations of the devout Wilhelm Bender within the framework of the church music renewal movement (hymn book and organ reform), for which Wilhelm Bender with his parishioners and with promoted his regional church. His reform ideas coincided with the ideas of liturgy of the Confessing Church: He wanted to bring the liturgical sound image of sacred music back to the clarity and simplicity that had existed in the post-Reformation period, a return to simple, linear and polyphonic structures. The liturgical music bound to the text was again to be radically narrowed down to the task of proclaiming the word. In the Protestant church struggle, Wilhelm Bender opposed the German Christians' demand for a romantic Germanization of the traditional liturgy and for popular, non-liturgically bound church music in order to separate it from its basis, the gospel.

In 1940 Wilhelm Bender became a member of the NSDAP in order to avoid military service - albeit in vain. As a radio operator, he performed military services in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1942 he became a university professor and head of the department ("Institute") for school music at the State University of Music in Frankfurt / M. where he was responsible for training future high school teachers in music. He was promised a professorship “after probation in office” in two to three years.

It was then that the idea of ​​writing a scientific paper on his favorite instrument, the glockenspiel - a doctoral thesis on "European glockenspiel", which he was only able to start but not to finish due to his stress in the war and due to his early death, matured.

In 1943 he did another military service in a propaganda company in Southeast Europe as a trainer of Wehrmacht singers in an army music school. Previously, well-known musician colleagues tried to put Wilhelm Bender on the " God-gifted list ", which would have earned him an exemption from military service in order to devote himself to National Socialist propaganda.

Wilhelm Bender died in Greece in March 1944.

Services

Wilhelm Bender is remembered as a composer of children's songs and bell music. The two most important musical groups of works of his oeuvre could hardly be more different: In the nursery rhyme the invention of melodies for the voice as the most natural and simplest "instrument", mostly sung as house music in small groups at home or in kindergarten, there melodies for the glockenspiel, the impressive “Exotic” among the musical instruments, which can only be heard far and loudly outside from the tower.

The greatest independent, species-specific lifetime achievement of the composer Wilhelm Bender is probably in his glockenspiel music, while he exudes the greatest musical warmth in his children's songs. Wilhelm Bender's most independent achievement as a church musician was that he had kept National Socialism and a German-Christian sentiment at least "internally" out of the church service of the Parochial Church and instead kept the owed National Socialist music with his "secular" commitment to the Parochial Glockenspiel "externally" on the Carillon offered.

Works

(Selection; the complete works include almost 91 opus numbers)

Bell music

• 5 Bell Dances op.61
• Suite for Glockenspiel op.65
• Ostinato op.66
• Prelude and chorale variations on “Now thank all God” op. 69

Nursery rhymes

• The fountain: (12) New children's songs for the piano op.24
• (12) New Songs for Little People, Op. 29
• Our cat is called Mohrle (song collection: 24 songs) op.30
• Weisse Blum - Rote Blum (song collection: 8 songs) op.31
• Annual dance: music with songs and dances for 2 recorders in C or other melodic instruments op.32

Holy songs

• Psalm 150 “Praise the Lord” for single part or choir op. 5
• Small cantata: “I sing you with heart and mouth” for choir, individual part and strings op. 8
• Small motet: "Sing the Lord a new song" for choir and string trio op. 9

Secular songs

• “Nothing can rob us of love and faith in this country” op. 3
• One asks: "What comes after" (after Theodor Storm) op. 4
• 4 songs for soprano: "Drink, o eyes" (circle of songs based on Gottfried Keller) op. 83

Piano music

• 15 song movements: Arrangements for piano “Tomorrow we march” op. 76
• Dance series: Eight pieces for piano op.84
• The fair: 10 piano pieces op.85

Flute music

• Die Jägerei: Music for 2 recorders or other melody instruments op.25
• Sonata for treble recorder in f and piano op.73

literature

• Ulrich Bender: Wilhelm Bender. Church musician in the “Third Reich”: Wilhelm Bender (1911 to 1944). Musicians at the Berlin Parochial Church. Person and work in church-political competition. Mauer Verlag, Rottenburg a / N 2011. ISBN 978-3-86812-246-6
• Ulrich Bender: Wilhelm Bender; Church musician and beneficiary in the Nazi cultural system. In: Archive report number 19 of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, Jürgen Stenzel, pages 97–147. Berlin 2015.
• Jeffery Bossin: The Carillons of Berlin and Potsdam: Five Centuries of Tower Glockenspiel in the Old and New World, Berlin 1991.

Web links

• Complete works by Wilhelm Bender at the German Glockenspielvereinigung

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the Wilhelm Bender catalog raisonné in: Ulrich Bender: Wilhelm Bender, musician at the Berlin Parochial Church; Notes on biography with catalog raisonné. In: Archive report number 19. Published on behalf of the Consistory of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg by Jürgen Stenzel. Berlin 2014.