Manfred Ludwig Hugo Andreas Gurlitt was born in Berlin on 6 September 1890 to the art dealer
Fritz Gurlitt (1854-1893) and Annarella Gurlitt (1856-1935). The
Gurlitt family included many who distinguished themselves in the arts. Manfred was the cousin of musicologist
Wilibald Gurlitt (1889-1963) and the great-nephew of the composer
Cornelius Gurlitt. Another cousin was
Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), an art dealer who was one of a very few authorized by the Nazis to deal in "
degenerate art" and whose holdings of art works looted from Jews during the years of Nazi rule came to light in the 21st century. He studied composition for a time with
Engelbert Humperdinck and music theory with
Hans Hermann and
Hugo Kaun. From 1908 to 1910, he was a coach at the
Berlin Court Opera and in 1911 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 position he held until he became general music director there in 1924. In 1920 he founded a
Society for New Music in Bremen to encourage avant-garde and rarely heard pre-classical works. His first opera
Die Heilige, set in 12th-century Japan, premiered in Bremen in 1920. His opera
Wozzeck after
the play by
Georg Büchner premiered with Gurlitt conducting in Bremen on 22 April 1926 four months after the
opera of the same title by
Alban Berg. Berg called it "not bad or unoriginal" but added that "the broth in the kettle of this opera, that is, in the orchestra, is too watered down". Like Berg, he used selected scenes from the play, added a lengthy elegy after Wozzeck's death, and added an epilogue. He used an offstage choir of sopranos that, in addition to commenting on the action, began and ended the opera with the text "we poor people". Unlike Berg, he provided a distinct musical setting for each scene without connecting interludes. In another assessment, "Musically, he stands closer to Strauss and Hindemith than to Schoenberg. His instrumentation is less sophisticated and complex than Berg's; his orchestra is subordinated to an accompanying role in the drama". Gurlitt's work attracted much attention at the time and marked the zenith of Gurlitt's career. Malicious gossip, charges of "debauchery and loose living", caused him to move to Berlin in 1927 where he taught at the
Charlottenburg Musikhochschule and conducted for the Staatsoper, Krolloper,
Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, and Berlin Radio. He wrote
Die Soldaten (1930) based the 1776 play by
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and
Nana (1932) based on
the novel by
Émile Zola. In the former he anticipated the operatic treatment of the same Lenz play by
Bernd Alois Zimmermann, which premiered in 1965. In
Nana he took on a subject similar to Berg's
Lulu, also written 1933, but not premiered till 1937. Gurlitt's
Nana had a libretto by
Max Brod, and productions were cancelled because Brod's Judaism and Zola's politics offended Nazi ideology in Cologne and Mannheim. Gurlitt's music was banned by the Nazis when they assumed power, but his presence in Berlin was tolerated as he undertook to bring his music in line with the aesthetics of the
Third Reich. His mother Annarella tried to satisfy the Nazis of his non-Jewish heritage by certifying first that his Jewish paternal grandmother had converted to Protestantism and second that Gurlitt was not the son of Fritz Gurlitt, but of Willi Waldecker, the man Annarella married not long after Fritz died in 1893. Japan was then an ally of Germany, both soon to become parties to the
Axis Pact in September 1940. , 1942 Gurlitt became active as an opera conductor with
Fujiwara Yoshie's company, the
Fujiwara Opera. In 1940, he became Musical Director of the
Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In these positions he presented the Japanese premieres of many works from the standard repertoire by
Mozart,
Wagner, and
Richard Strauss. Gurlitt's attitude to the Nazi regime remained equivocal, and he was a regular guest at the German Embassy in Tokyo. In 1952 he founded the Gurlitt Opera Company in Tokyo, which had for its official opening the Japan premier of Mozart's
The Magic Flute in February 1953. In 1957, it presented the first staging of
Der Rosenkavalier in Japan. Other Japanese premieres he produced and conducted, and sometimes directed, included
Eugene Onegin (1949),
Falstaff (1951),
Otello (1953),
Werther (1955),
Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1956),
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1960), and
Salome (1962). Gurlitt conducted the world premiere of his Violin Concerto, written many years earlier, with the Tokyo Philharmonic on 1 February 1955. In 1955 he returned to Germany for a tour conducting his own works, but it was not a success. His idiom was judged
passé. On 28 February 1958 in Tokyo he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross of the
German Federal Republic's order of merit. He ceased to compose and never returned to Germany, bitter at the neglect of his music in post-war Germany. In 1958, his opera
Nana had its belated premiere in Dortmund, where it enjoyed a "modest success". It was staged in Bordeaux in 1967. In 1969 he was awarded an honorary professorship at the
Showa College of Music. His
Soldaten was performed in Nantes in 2001. ==Works==