Walter Gronostay
Walter Gronostay ( born July 29, 1906 in Berlin, † October 10, 1937 in Berlin) was a German composer who was particularly active as a film composer.
Life and work
The Berlin, whose ancestors came from East Prussia, the basic knowledge of music taught self-taught. 13 -year-old, he presented his first composition, a year later, he took composition lessons with Hugo Kaun.
Soon after, he worked as a music teacher, as a violinist in Kreuzberg and as a conductor of an orchestra Kreuzberg. At the age of 16 he attended the piano class at the Academy of Music. Thanks to a scholarship, he was admitted to the master class in composition at the Academy of Arts three years later.
His teacher here was Arnold Schoenberg. The music composed by him string trio was first performed at the first concert of the pupil of Schoenberg in 1927 by members of the Vienna String Quartet (Rudolf Kolisch, Eugene Lehner and Benar Heifetz ). In the same year his short opera was created in ten minutes, which came in 1928 in Baden -Baden with great success on the stage.
Gronostay then received a job as a coach and auxiliary director at the German Opera House. With his opera radio drama Murder (1929 ) he succeeded another success. The young composer was at that time outstanding reviews for its innovative atonal music. He composed songs, piano pieces, chamber music, orchestral works (Romanian sketches for orchestra, 1937) and the one-act opera Judith. In 1932, he set to music with her husband in the concrete. A proletarian ballad the text of Günther manner Born and Robert Adolf Stemmle for the German Workers ' Choral Society, a piece for male chorus, speaking chorus, 7 solo speaker, photographs and concert band.
For the radio, he wrote music for radio plays, as shall their deeds ye see Goetz Otto Stoffregen (1933 ), stone, give bread by Alfred Karrasch (1934 ), The Aviator ( Radio Ballad of Peter Hagen, 1935) or angle, colorful pennant (1937, text: Karrasch ).
Since 1929, he devoted himself to film music. Gronostay came at a relatively ambitious productions for use, including the two Olympics documentation youth of the world and Olympics Leni Riefenstahl. His music was conventional in the era of National Socialism, only in the broadcasting of his work have even more experimental. It is disputed whether Gronostay joining after the seizure of power of the Nazi Party. Although it claims a great option letter of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation from 1935 this, but there is no corresponding entry in the central file of the party.
The Jewish pupil of Schoenberg Bernd Bergel has testified that Gronostay has ( until his emigration to Palestine ) helped him during the time of National Socialism through the mediation of lucrative contracts crucial. Bergel wrote for the Berliner Rundfunk, as well as film music under the pseudonym Walter Gronostay, for example, the music for the films Lady Windermere's Fan (1935 ), the last four of Santa Cruz (1936) and Savoy Hotel 217 (1936). These soundtracks were officially declared Bergels of Gronostay than his own, which is why they are still sometimes erroneously listed as works Gronostays. It even came to the fact that music has been used by Bergel ( under Gronostays name ) for a Nazi propaganda film.
Walter Gronostay had married in 1930 the Jewish Eva Schönfeldt. From this marriage the daughter Sylvia came out, who was born shortly before his death. Eva and Sylvia Gronostay escaped the Nazis in Austria, where they were hidden by a courageous family till the end of the Third Reich. Walter Gronostay died unexpectedly at the age of only 31 years. His daughter gave his estate to the archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The Israeli musicologist Peter Gradenwitz wrote about Gronostay: " The October 10, 1937 robbed the German music scene and the musical world of one of the most original, far-sighted pioneers of the music for the newly created media of radio, record, film, a composer whose works today > contemporary < interested, amuse and delight as the > contemporary Divertimento in 1929. ' "