Manfred Gurlitt

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Manfred Gurlitt (born in Berlin 6 September 1890 – died in Tokyo 29 April 1973) was a German opera composer and conductor. He studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, conducting with Karl Muck, and piano with Moritz Mayer-Mahr.

From 1908 to 1910, he was a coach at the Berlin Court Opera, and then 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 job he held until 1924 when he was made their general music director. In 1920 he founded a Society for New Music in Bremen to encourage avant-garde and rarely heard pre-classical works.

He moved to Berlin in 1927 where he taught at the Charlottenburg Musikhochschule, and conducted for the Berlin Radio. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was denounced as a 'cultural Bolshevist' and lost his official posts. In order to avoid being arrested by the Gestapo, he emigrated to Japan in 1939 where he became active as an opera conductor. In 1953 he founded his own Gurlitt Opera Company in Tokyo, and in 1969 he became a professor at the Showa College of Music.

In 1956, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross of the German Federal Republic's order of merit, however he never returned to live in Germany, bitter at the neglect of his music in post-war Germany.

His opera Wozzeck (1926), after the play by Georg Büchner, appeared four months after the opera of the same title by Alban Berg and has remained in its shadow. He also wrote Soldaten (1930) after the play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and Nana (1933) after the novel by Émile Zola.

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