Manfred Gurlitt and the Japanese Operatic Scene, 1939-1972

Abstract

Manfred Gurlitt (1890-1972), a gifted composer and conductor, came to feel he had to escape his native Germany in the late 1930s, as did many other musicians. Although he had, in an idiosyncratic fashion, come to terms with the National Socialist regime, he exiled himself to Japan in 1939, hoping to obtain a position that would allow him to maintain or even to burnish his reputation in the world of music. His most brilliant earlier successes had been in opera, and in Japan his career was mainly linked with opera. He worked diligently to affirm the correct European way of performing the operatic repertoire, and produced many first-time productions of high quality. His competent, rigorous work in the field grounded the whole operatic domain of postwar Japan, and indeed his influence continues to be felt to this day. An article in the Mainichi shin bun in 1956 stated that no musician has had such a vast and important influence over the Japanese musical world. His years in Japan, however, were spent with an underlying sentiment of displacement. His sense of unease was compounded by dissatisfaction with and unfulfilled desire for Western (particularly German) acknowledgment of the merit of his work. In this article I aim to shed new light on the place of Manfred Gurlitt in twentieth-century music history by reexamining his Japanese activity, with some reference to his early oeuvre as a composer and success as a conduc tor in Germany.

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