In 1956, an article in the Japanese newspaper Mainichi shinbun asserted that “no other musician has had so vast and important an influence on the world of Japanese music as Manfred Gurlitt.” Without him, the history of Western classical music in Japan would have been very different. A successful conductor and opera composer in Berlin and Bremen, Gurlitt’s life is one of success, neglect and contradiction. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Gurlitt’s Jewish ancestry would eventually see his music banned, and he went into exile in Japan, where he would become a prominent conductor for the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Fujiwara Opera Company and his own Gurlitt Opera Company. What is Gurlitt’s story?
Manfred Gurlitt was born in Berlin in 1890, the fourth child to art dealer Fritz Gurlitt, who died three years after his birth. Following studies with Engelbert Humperdinck, he landed a position at the Bremen Stadtstheater, whose music director he became in 1924. There, he founded a Society for New Music, performing avant-garde and rarely heard pre-classical works.
Yet, as musicologist Luciana Galliano writes, his “absolutist style of leadership and personality clashes” led him to return to Berlin in 1927, teaching at the Charlottenburg Musikhochschule. He also worked as a guest conductor for the Berlin Staatsoper, making recordings for Deutsche Grammophon.
Gurlitt wrote his first opera, Die Insel, in 1918 – Die Heilige followed two years later. His operas are robust, dramatically convincing, with a strong sense of melodic momentum. Then, in one of those curious historical twists of fate, he composed an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Wozzeck at exactly the same time as Alban Berg.
Berg’s version premiered four months before his and has gone down in history, while Gurlitt’s is almost entirely forgotten. (The same thing happened when his adaptation of Lenz’s Soldaten was eclipsed by Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s post-war version.)
In 1932, Gurlitt adapted Emile Zola’s Nana, to a libretto by Kafka’s executor, Max Brod. Scheduled to open in Mannheim, its premiere was banned by the Nazis. It wouldn’t be performed until 1958.
Gurlitt’s relationship to the Nazi regime was initially ambivalent. He was, Galliano suggests, “neither a committed supporter of the brutal politics of Nazi Germany nor a dedicated objector”. His cousin, Hildebrand, was an art dealer who dealt in art confiscated from Jewish collectors. But Manfred himself was Jewish through his paternal grandmother.
At first, he tried to work within the system, joining the party in 1933. (His mother argued that his paternal grandmother had converted, and that, anyway, he was in fact the son of her second husband, Willi Waldecker.) But his membership was revoked four years later. The Gestapo raided his house and confiscated his manuscripts, and Gurlitt abandoned Berlin and fled to Munich to live with friends.
In Forbidden Music, a study of Austrian and German Jewish composers suppressed by the Nazis, Michael Haas writes of “the perplexing contradictions of this uniquely exceptional composer”. Haas suggests that Gurlitt was “a victim of [his] own tragic devotion to an image of Germany that appealed to the Third Reich.” Galliano likewise describes Gurlitt’s 1938 Goya-Sinfonie as “[his] idea of music adapted for German regime tastes”.
Deutsche Grammophon’s Dorothea Schuldt, by contrast, suggests that Gurlitt identified with Goya as a political exile, and his “encrypted criticism” of the regime of his day. After a somewhat clichéd opening movement of cheerful scene painting, complete with castanets, we turn to a piquant and bitter march. By the final movement, tonality itself has almost dissolved in a series of variations. It’s music of profound ambivalence.
It was clear that Gurlitt would have to flee. But where? Japan was a staunch ally of Germany, enacting its own antisemitic policies and heavy censorship. But Gurlitt’s first opera had been set in 12th-century Japan, and in 1937, he was offered employment at the Tokyo School of Music by a Japanese composer he had met in Berlin, Hashimoto Kunihiko.
After a year of delays, the appointment was blocked by the Nazi regime. Gurlitt decided to leave anyway. Obtaining a “study, observation, and documentary” visa, he left behind “all his worldly goods” and arrived in May 1939, on a German steamboat packed with diplomats and traders. A month of negotiations followed for him to gain permission to enter the country. But he soon set to work teaching classes for the Tokyo School of Music.
Its origins dating back to 1911, in 1941 the ensemble later renamed the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra came under the control of record label Nippon Victor. Known in Japan thanks to his recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Gurlitt was chosen as chief conductor and music director. Introducing work by Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss, he led the orchestra in a hugely successful concert series.
In the Allied firebombing of Tokyo, the orchestra’s rehearsal hall and much of its equipment was destroyed, with some musicians perishing in air raids. It was a time of trauma and destruction. But after the war, Gurlitt would begin to build Japan’s classical music scene in earnest.
The Fujiwara Opera Company was founded in 1932 by Scottish-Japanese tenor Fujiwara Yoshie, whose performances of Rudolfo in La bohème in the US earned him the moniker “the Japanese Valentino”. Working for Fujiwara, Gurlitt “worked with missionary-like zeal to construct an operatic world in Japan,” Galliano writes.
In 1951, he founded his own opera company, opening with the first Japanese staging of Die Zauberflöte, featuring German tenor Gerhard Hüsch and his fourth wife, soprano Hidaka Hisako. A decade later, he was frequently working with NHK (Japanese State Radio) Orchestra. Conducting a final Rosenkavalier at Osaka and Tannhäuser in Tokyo in 1966, he retired at the end of the decade. He died in 1972 and was buried with full Shintoist rites, at his request.
Conductor Wakasugi Hiroshi remembers Gurlitt saying in 1958: “All the singers of opera in Japan are my students.” Wakasugi agreed: “If it wasn’t for his insistent efforts, opera in Japan would still be at kindergarten levels”. But Gurlitt’s success as conductor perhaps came at the expense of his reputation as a composer. “My ardent desire to be listened to here in Japan as ‘creator’ in one of my own works has always remained an unfulfilled hope”, he wrote in 1963.
Nana was finally premiered in Dortmund in 1958, but further operas remained unproduced: Warum?, oder Feliza, based on the 1808 Spanish insurrection against Napoleon’s invasion, and Nordische Ballade, a grim tale of Scottish soldiers in Sweden based on a novel by Nobel-prize winner Selma Lagerlöff. Gurlitt was likewise unable to solicit performances for his concert works Drei politische Reden, for baritone, choir and orchestra, based on Büchner’s Danton’s Death, and a two-hour Shakespeare Sinfonie for multiple vocal soloists and orchestra.
A lawsuit to recover his abandoned property and lost earnings in Germany dragged on for years and was unsuccessful. Solicitations to Alfred Einstein, Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler bore little fruit. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau politely declined an opportunity to collaborate. After the 1950s, Gurlitt gave up composing.
His personality may have played a factor. Known affectionally as “Guru-Sensei” to his Japanese students, Gurlitt was also reported to set impossibly high standards. In the staging of Der Rosenkavalier in 1957, “at the beginning of a performance, in front of a full house, [Gurlitt] burst into rage at one singer, demanding, ‘What are you doing after everything I have taught you?’”
Gurlitt did manage to record one of his own works in 1955, when he conducted the pre-teen virtuoso Shiego Watanabe in his Second Violin Concerto with the Tokyo Philharmonic.
The concerto is lengthy, at almost 40 minutes. Its forms are classical, the mood austere, but the occasional unexpected turn winds its way through the development of the melodies, before being swiftly resolved. Near the end of the melancholic andante, low strings hold a hovering drone in the background while the violin is doubled by horns and oboe: a moment at once of calm and tension, finally resolving into a sweetly-singing serenade.
There is a tragic footnote here. A few years later, the precocious Watanabe went to Julliard to study aged 14. Unable to speak English, and affected by profound culture shock, he attempted suicide and never performed in public again. Looking back, one is tempted to hear the work as a kind of elegy for Watanabe, as well as for the ambivalent frustrations of Gurlitt’s own career.
Today, there are two full recordings of Gurlitt’s Wozzeck, both under Gerd Albrecht, as well as discs of Nana, Soldaten, the Goya-Sinfonie and Vier dramatische Gesänge (Four Dramatic Songs), setting texts from Goethe’s Faust. His operas have likewise been staged in Bremen, Berlin and Darmstadt.
Meawhile, in Tokyo’s Ōmori suburb, where he lived, “maestro Gurlitt is remembered as being a handsome man, tall and impatient, whether at traffic lights or anything else, and always with a jacket and papillon perfectly placed,” writes Galliano. Yet even in Japan, neighbours sometimes need some reminding about this enigmatic exile.
Gurlitt’s music can feel tense to listen to, having a strictness of form and a melodic fluidity which yet seems to hold something in check. What we hear, perhaps, are the ambivalences of the era. But in his career as conductor in Japan, Gurlitt made a lasting impact. His career is ripe for rediscovery.
See upcoming performances by the Tokyo Philharmonic.
This article was sponsored by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra.
