Hans Helfritz

Hans Helfritz ( born July 25, 1902 in Hilber near Chemnitz, † October 21, 1995 in Duisburg, Germany ) was a German composer, musicologist, writer and photographer.

Life

At the insistence of his parents Hans Helfritz began an apprenticeship as a banker, but he soon broke off to start in Berlin and Vienna to study music and musicology. Inspired by his teacher Erich von Hornbostel in 1930, he traveled Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, to collect folk music for ethnomusicological research. In 1935, he traveled to India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Republic of China and Singapore.

Helfritz turned to continue on behalf of Ufa films about Yemen and Mexico. He evaded deliberately prescribed by Joseph Goebbels Directive, represent foreign nations as culturally inferior.

1939 fled Helfritz whose homosexuality and political attitude had earned him the enmity of the Nazi state, first to Brazil and Bolivia before he settled down in Chile. As the official photographer Helfritz participated in the Chilean Antarctic Expedition. In the late 1940s he became a Chilean citizen.

After Helfritz had explored archaeological and ethnological in the 1950s Central America and West Africa, he changed his occupation to the first guide, then talk to travelers. In 1959 he settled in Ibiza.

Work

Composer

As a composer began Helfritz excited by the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg, from jazz and the language of Paul Hindemith, whose pupil he was even briefly. Further cooperation in the '30s united him with Carl Orff. Hellfritz dealt early on with the then new forms of radio and film music, his movies he paid with his own music. Helfritz ' style is characterized by great clarity in sentence and instrumentation, he favored small ensembles and the technique of linear counterpoint.

Writer and photographer

As a writer Hans Helfritz became known especially through numerous travel reports. His publications ranged from YA to art historical and anthropological representations of non-European peoples. His photographic estate (over 80,000 images) can be found in diamond -Joest - Museum of the City of Cologne.

Writings

  • Expeditions in South Arabia. On unknown paths through Hadramaut and Yemen ( 1933 and 1935). DuMont, Cologne 1977, ISBN 3-7701-1023-4.
  • South America: Pre-Columbian civilization and the art of the colonial period. A travel companion to the art facilities in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. 9th edition. DuMont, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7701-0624-5.
  • Lika Antai / In the Land of Atacameños. In: cosmos. Issue 12 Franck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1954, p 561-566,
  • Arabia: the last wonder of the desert. P.LIST, Leipzig 1944
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