Overture of Hope by Isabel Vincent

Author:Isabel Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Before he was arrested by the Gestapo in the summer of 1939, Georg Maliniak had been assistant conductor and chief coach at the Vienna State Opera under Clemens Krauss. The master conductor, who first hired Maliniak when he was director of the Frankfurt Opera in 1923, took the young man under his wing, guiding what then seemed to be a very promising music career. Maliniak soon became indispensable to Krauss. In fact, when speaking of Maliniak to the Cook sisters, Krauss paid him a rare compliment, calling him “probably the finest operatic coach in Europe.”12

Maliniak was born on December 1, 1895, in Warsaw. His father, Jakob, was an accountant at a sugar refinery, and one of his distant relatives was Solomon Herschel, the first Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. A promising music student, Maliniak made the move to the Austrian capital at the height of the First World War to study under some of the most important composers of the day. He counted both Franz Schreker and Alban Berg among his teachers, both of whom were musical giants in the Weimar Republic, which saw a renaissance of German-language arts and culture during the period between the end of the First World War and 1933 when the Nazis rose to power. Schreker’s works were among the most performed after those of Richard Strauss, while Berg’s Wozzeck was considered one of the finest operas of the century following its premiere at the Berlin State Opera in 1925. Despite their critical acclaim, both these musicians’ illustrious careers would come to an abrupt end in the Third Reich. Schreker’s works would cease to be performed because of the composer’s Jewish background and Berg’s compositions were deemed too modern.

Although Maliniak would also go on to suffer marginalization and discrimination, during the Weimar years his future seemed assured. In 1922, when he was twenty-seven, Maliniak garnered rave reviews when he made his debut as a conductor at the municipal theater in Graz. “A new man appeared at the conductor’s podium, with very expressive gestures,” wrote a critic in the Neues Grazer Tageblatt. “With the overture…the conductor and his orchestra received rapturous applause.… Certainly a remarkable initial success.”13

While he was working as Krauss’s deputy in Frankfurt, Maliniak met Ellen Gerda Rissler, whom he married in June 1928 when she was already three months pregnant with their daughter. Public records show that Maliniak, then thirty-three, changed his religion to “evangelical” Christian, presumably to marry Gerda, who was not Jewish.

When Clemens Krauss had agreed to take the role of conductor in Vienna, he demanded that Maliniak work with his singers. Krauss was planning to stage Wozzeck the following year and Maliniak was considered one of Berg’s best interpreters, skilled in the staging of what is considered a difficult and very complex work—the story of German soldiers billeted in a small town during the First World War. The Vienna premiere of Berg’s opera, which also benefited from the participation of the composer, was to be the highlight of the 1930 spring season.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.