Manfred Gurlitt
Manfred Gurlitt (1890–1972) was a German opera composer and conductor who spent most of his career in Japan.
He was born in Berlin into a family of artists. He studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and music theory with Hans Hermann and Hugo Kaun. He began his career in Germany as a coach and conductor, working at the Berlin Court Opera, Bayreuth, Essen, Augsburg, and Bremen. In Bremen he helped start a Society for New Music in 1920, and his first opera, Die Heilige, premiered there in 1920.
Gurlitt later led the Bremen stage in 1924 and, in 1926, conducted the Bremen premiere of Wozzeck. His version used scenes from the play, added a long elegy after Wozzeck’s death, and featured an offstage choir. Critics compared him to Strauss and Hindemith and noted his orchestration as less complex than Berg’s.
Troubles at home pushed him to Berlin in 1927, where he taught at the Charlottenburg Music College and conducted for major Berlin companies. He wrote Die Soldaten (1930) and Nana (1932). Nana, with a libretto by Max Brod, faced cancellations because of politics and Brod’s Jewish heritage, and Nazi censors blocked it in parts of Germany. While his music was banned by the Nazis, he stayed in Berlin for a time, trying to keep his work in line with Nazi tastes. His mother attempted to prove he had non-Jewish ancestry, and in 1933 he briefly joined the Nazi party before being expelled in 1937 as a “Jew of Mixed Race.”
Unable to secure teaching jobs in Germany, Gurlitt moved to Japan in 1939, arriving in Yokohama with his third wife. In Japan he conducted with the Fujiwara Opera and became Musical Director of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1940. He introduced many standard works to Japanese audiences and later founded the Gurlitt Opera Company in Tokyo in 1952. Its opening production in 1953 was Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and in 1957 it staged Der Rosenkavalier. He also staged many other operas in Japan, including Eugene Onegin, Falstaff, Otello, Werther, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Salome.
Gurlitt’s own Violin Concerto had its world premiere with the Tokyo Philharmonic in 1955. He returned to Germany for a 1955 tour, but it was not well received. In 1958 he received the Distinguished Service Cross of Germany, but he stopped composing and remained in Tokyo, feeling neglected in postwar Germany. Nana finally had a belated premiere in Dortmund in 1958 and later in Bordeaux in 1967. He received an honorary professorship at the Showa College of Music in 1969. He died in Tokyo on 29 April 1972 at age 81. His opera Soldaten was performed in Nantes in 2001.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 21:36 (CET).