Manfred Gurlitt

Manfred Gurlitt (6 September 1890 – 29 April 1972) was a German opera composer and conductor. He studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and conducting with Karl Muck. He spent most of his career in Japan.

Manfred Ludwig Hugo Andreas Gurlitt was born in Berlin on 6 September 1890 to the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt (1854-1893) and Annarella Gurlitt (1856-1935). The Gurlitt family included many who distinguished themselves in the arts. Manfred was the cousin of musicologist Wilibald Gurlitt (1889-1963) and the great-nephew of the composer Cornelius Gurlitt. Another cousin was Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), an art dealer who was one of a very few authorized by the Nazis to deal in "degenerate art" and whose holdings of art works looted from Jews during the years of Nazi rule came to light in the 21st century.

He studied for a time with Engelbert Humperdinck. From 1908 to 1910, he was a coach at the Berlin Court Opera and in 1911 acted as musical assistant to Karl Muck at Bayreuth. In 1911-12, he was second conductor in Essen, then in Augsburg for two years. in 1914 he was given the post of first conductor at the Bremen Stadttheater, a position he held until he became general music director there in 1924. In 1920 he founded a Society for New Music in Bremen to encourage avant-garde and rarely heard pre-classical works. His first opera Die Heilige, set in 12th-century Japan, premiered in Bremen in 1920.

His opera Wozzeck after the play by Georg Büchner premiered with Gurlitt conducting in Bremen on 22 April 1926 four months after the opera of the same title by Alban Berg. Berg called it "not bad or unoriginal" but added that "the broth in the kettle of this opera, that is, in the orchestra, is too watered down". Like Berg, he used selected scenes from the play, added a lengthy elegy after Wozzeck's death, and added an epilogue. He used an offstage choir of sopranos that, in addition to commenting on the action, began and ended the opera with the text "we poor people". Unlike Berg, he provided a distinct musical setting for each scene without connecting interludes. In another assessment, "Musically, he stands closer to Strauss and Hindemith than to Schoenberg. His instrumentation is less sophisticated and complex than Berg's; his orchestra is subordinated to an accompanying role in the drama".

...
Wikipedia