Paul Graener (11 January 1872, Berlin – 13 November 1944) was a German composer and conductor.
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Graener was born in Berlin and orphaned as a young child. A boy soprano, he taught himself composition and in 1896 moved to London, where he gave private lessons and served briefly as conductor at the Haymarket Theatre. Before the move, he had married Maria Elisabeth Hauschild, who was to bear him three children in London. Graener is recorded in the United Kingdom Census of 1901 as a "musical director (theatre)" living at 3 Poplar Grove in Hammersmith together with Maria (born in Kiel), their first two children (Heinz and Paul, aged 4 and 2) and Graener's author cousin, George.
In around 1910 Graener moved to Vienna, where he took up a teaching post at the Neues Wiener Konservatorium. He moved several times in the 1910s, living in Salzburg, Dresden, and Munich, eventually accepting the position of professor of composition at the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre which had previously been held by Max Reger. In 1925 he quit the post in order to focus on composition.
Returning to Berlin in 1930, he directed the Stern'sches Konservatorium and, from 1935 to 1941, served as professor of composition at the Reichsmusikkammer. This position, previously held by Wilhelm Furtwängler, was within a Nazi-sponsored organization, although the extent to which Graener sympathized with Nazi ideals is a subject of debate. In the late 1920s Graener had joined the Militant League for German Culture and on 1 April 1933 he became a member of the Nazi Party. During World War II, Graener's Berlin apartment was bombed and he moved with his family to, successively, Wiesbaden, Munich, Vienna, and Salzburg. Graener died in Salzburg at the age of 72 in 1944.
Stylistically, Graener was heavily indebted to the late Romanticism of Richard Strauss and Max Reger.