Thursday, August 23, 2018

Pencil sketch of a nazi by Dr k Prabhakar rao


HERMANN AMENDROTH. FORMER NAZI

Abendroth was born on 19 January 1883, at Frankfurt, the son of a bookseller. Several other members of the family were artists in diverse disciplines.
From 1915 to 1934 he was the Kapellmeister of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, and then also director of the Cologne Conservatory (1925–1934), which was reformed with his help, to become the Cologne Musikhochschule.[6] He also became the general music director of Cologne in 1918, and was a professor in 1919. He also was the general music director of Bonn, from 1930 to 1933.

In 1934, the Nazi Party seized the city council of Cologne, and the liberally minded Abendroth was promptly removed from the public function and detained. Nonetheless, other personalities of the arts interceded, and Abendroth was restituted into the public function, to head the department of education of the Nazi Reichsmusikkammer. Accepting such charge, Abendroth was criticized for relinquishing his ideals. Nevertheless, he formally joined the Nazi Party in 1937.
In 1934, Hermann Abendroth was appointed Kapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, replacing Bruno Walter, who was dismissed by the newly installed Nazi authorities because of being Jewish. From 1934 to 1945, Abendroth also was professor of the Leipzig conservatory (1941-1945 Leipzig Musikhochschule). In 1943 and 1944, he took part in the traditional Bayreuth Festival, conducting Die Meistersinger, its only opera for those two years. Adolf Hitler officialized and organized the festivity.After World War II, the Communist new authorities of Saxony rescinded all Abendroth's contracts of Leipzig, and so - with his past of the Nazi Party - he wouldn't manage to get a new stable position anywhere else in Germany either.[1] Abendroth then claimed that he had never attended any political meeting, and his fortune then would change at Thuringia, whose government appointed Abendroth for music director of Weimar from 1945 to 1956. In 1950 and 1954, Abendroth was elected the People's Chamber of the GDR for a four-year mandate ending in 1954 as a representative of the Cultural Association of the GDR.Hermann Abendroth died of a stroke, during a surgical procedure, in Jena, on 29 May 1956. A state funeral was then granted for him.

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