Wilhelm Grosz

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Wilhelm Grosz (born August 11, 1894 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died December 10, 1939 in New York City ) was an Austrian musician whose brief career as a composer, conductor, pianist and musicologist was devoted to both classical and popular music .

Life

Wilhelm Grosz attended the Wasagasse grammar school in Vienna ; his parents ran a jewelry store on Graben . From 1913 to 1919 he studied composition, piano and conducting at the Vienna Music Academy with Richard Robert , Richard Heuberger , Robert Fuchs and Franz Schreker, among others . He also studied musicology at the University of Vienna . In 1920 he received his doctorate there under Guido Adler with the (unprinted) dissertation The fugue work in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's vocal and instrumental works . In 1919 his orchestral pieces Dance and Serenade were premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic under Felix Weingartner .

In 1921 he went to the Mannheim Opera as Kapellmeister for a year and then worked as a freelance composer and pianist in Vienna. In 1922 he composed a jazz band sonata for violin and piano and took part in the first music festival of the International Society for New Music in Salzburg . His behavior during this festival was inglorious (presumably because the tradition calls his name "Gross" instead of "Grosz"), when Grosz was one of the audience's disruptors during a performance of Anton Webern's Five Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 5 so noticed that the architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) stepped onto the podium and, out of indignation, spoke out in favor of the ostracism of Grosz. In 1925 Grosz's one-act play Sganarell was premiered in Dessau and Vienna. In 1928 his pantomime jazz ballet Baby in the bar based on the libretto by Béla Balázs came out in Hanover .

In 1927 he received the Music Prize of the City of Vienna . In the same year he married Elisabeth Schoen and moved to Berlin. There he became artistic director of the newly founded Ultraphon record company, where he also released his own song accompaniments and hit compositions, including a conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker . He composed hits such as Sieben kleine Tillergirls , arranged songs and Strauss waltzes, accompanied singers and played on records with Walter Kauffmann (1907–1984) piano duos of popular music and with the Berlin concert club Potpourris .

For the Schlesische Funkstunde in Breslau , he created the Afrika Songs collection of songs based on texts from Afro-American poetry, primarily by Langston Hughes , and composed the funk operetta Eine kleine Melodie . For Erich Engels film Who Takes Love Seriously (1931) he wrote the film music that was performed by Dajos Béla . Further productions were the opera burlesque Achtung , aufnahme , which premiered in 1930 at the Frankfurt Opera, and a grotesque, parodic song cycle under the title Bänkel und Balladen for Friedrich Hollaender .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he had to leave Germany as a Jew. The performance of his music was banned and in 1938 he was called " degenerate music ". After returning to Vienna, he became Kapellmeister at Otto Preminger's Wiener Kammerspiele . Austrian anti-Semitism caused him to flee to England with his family and parents in 1934. There his talent for light music immediately gained recognition when he brought out Isle of Capri, the most successful hit of the 1934 season. In the following years he also produced hits with the songwriter Jimmy Kennedy for the music publishers in London's Denmark Street (also known as “Britain's Tin Pan Alley ” since the 1920s ): Harbor Lights , Red Sails in the Sunset and When Budapest Was Young . The Beatles played Red Sails in the Sunset in 1962 at the Hamburg Star Club . Since he composed the hits under the pseudonyms Hugh Williams and André Milos, A Ship Goes to Shanghai (Red Sails in the Sunset) also found its way to National Socialist Germany.

On the recommendation of his school friend Erich Wolfgang Korngold , Grosz traveled to the USA with his wife in May 1939. In New York he composed a few more hits. His first composition for the Hollywood film industry was intended for the film Along the Santa Fé Trail . The title song was the reworked version of a tango that Grosz had written in 1929 for the tenor Joseph Schmidt . Grosz died in December 1939 of a heart attack , the film was shot in 1940, the soundtrack was then made by Max Steiner .

Compositions (overview)

  • Sganarell , Opera buffa
  • Attention admission! tragicomedy
  • Poor Reinhold , dance fairy tale
  • Baby in the bar , ballet
  • Stage music for Franz Werfel's Spiegelmensch and Bockgesang
  • Incidental music for Gerhart Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell
  • Film music for Who Takes Love Seriously , 1931
  • Orchestral works, orchestral songs
  • Chamber music
  • Songs, songs, hits

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hanspeter Krellmann: Webern . In: Rowohlt monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1975, p. 42 .
  2. ↑ Ross Laird: Tantalizing Tingle. A Discography of Early Ragtime, Jazz, and Novelty Syncopated Piano Recordings, 1889-1934 . Greenwood Press, Westport (Conn.) 1995, p. 76.
  3. ^ The Lost Lennon Tapes Project . Lulu.com, September 2010, ISBN 978-0-9699363-0-5 , p. 15.
personal data
SURNAME Grosz, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Groß, Wilhelm; Gross, Wilhelm; Grosz, Will; Hugh Williams (pseudonym); André Milos (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian musician and composer of serious and popular music
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 1939
Place of death New York City