Paul Bekker

Max Paul Eugene Bekker ( born September 2, 1882 in Berlin, † March 13, 1937 in New York ) was a German conductor, artistic director and one of the most influential music critic in the first third of the 20th century.

Life and work

Bekker took Fabian Rehfeld and Benno Horwitz violin lessons, his piano teacher was Alfred Sormann. He made his debut as a violinist (first violinist ) with the Berlin Philharmonic as a conductor and then went to Aschaffenburg and Görlitz. From 1906 Bekker worked as a music critic and writer. He wrote for the Berliner Latest news from 1909 for the Berlin Allgemeine Zeitung, 1911-1922 for the Frankfurter Zeitung. In 1919 he coined the term New Music and sat now on for the first of a pioneer: Gustav Mahler, Franz Schreker, Schoenberg and Ernst Krenek.

In 1925 he was at the suggestion of Leo Kestenberg, was close to its open-minded and focused on popular education cultural policy Bekker, general director of the Staatstheater Kassel. From 1927 to 1932 Bekker was director of the State Theatre Wiesbaden. In 1933, he went first to Paris and then to New York. There he wrote mainly on behalf of the émigré press. He wrote, for example, 1935 for legal immigrants journal Intellectual Property, International Journal for Theory and practice of copyright and its Dependencies a treatise on the musical copyright law.

Bekker was married in second marriage with the German painter, collector and art dealer Hanna Bekker vom Rath.

Writings (selection )

  • Jacques Offenbach, 1909
  • Beethoven, Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler 1911
  • The German musical life - attempt at a sociological observation Music, 1916
  • Policy and intellectual work, 1908
  • The symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, 1918
  • Franz Schreker, 1919
  • Art and Revolution, 1919
  • International Recognition of German music, 1920
  • Gustav Mahler's symphonies, 1921
  • Critical time images ( Collected Writings 1), 1921-26 articles from the Frankfurter Zeitung 1911-1921
  • Sound and Eros ( Collected Writings 2), 1922-43 articles from the Frankfurter Zeitung 1907-1922
  • German music of the present, 1922
  • New Music ( Collected Writings 3 ), 1923 - six lectures 1917-1921
  • Richard Wagner - Life in the Works, 1924
  • From the nature kingdoms of the sound. Floor plan to a Phenomenology of Music, 1924
  • Music history as the history of the musical form transformations, 1926
  • Materials Fundamentals of Music, 1926
  • Organic and Mechanical Music, 1927 - five essays 1923-1925
  • The Opera Theatre, 1930
  • Letters to contemporary musicians, 1932
  • Transformations of the Opera, 1934
  • The Story of the Orchestra, 1936 (first German edition: The orchestra's history, composers, styles, Kassel, Germany. )
  • Paul Bekker / Franz Schreker: correspondence. With all the reviews about Bekkers Schreker, ed. by Christopher Hailey, Aachen 1994
Intendant Neue Deutsche Biographie Project Gutenberg Integrated Authority File
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