Sammendrag
One of the most important music critics of the early twentieth century, Paul Eugen Max Bekker was born in Berlin on September 11, 1882, to a tailor and a seamstress. After a career as a violinist and a short stint as a musical director, he began his journalistic profession in 1906. He initially worked for the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten and the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1911, his book on Beethoven was published and was very well received. This earned him the position, beginning in that year, of music critic at the Frankfurter Zeitung: one of the first such positions in Germany. As a critic and theorist, Bekker produced more than thirty books, along with numerous other publications, including Das deutsche Musikleben (1916), Franz Schreker, Studie und Kritik der modernen Oper (1919), Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921), and Wagner, das Leben im Werke (1924). As Intendant in Kassel (1925–27) and Wiesbaden (1927–32), he was responsible for many performances and produced several operas, including Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, Schreker’s Der singende Teufel, and Weill’s Die Bu¨rgschaft. Bekker left Germany in 1933 and lived in New York, where he was a critic for the New Yorker Staatszeitung, from 1934 until his untimely death on March 7, 1937. Only a handful of his books have appeared in English translation, and many of his theories of music’s role in society have yet to be introduced to non-German readers. [...]
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