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Joseph Beer The son of
a wealthy banker and a doting "Jewish mother," Joseph Beer was born in
1908 and spent a pampered childhood
in the Habsburg Austrian city then known as Lemberg (later
Lwow, Poland; presently Lviv,
Ukraine). He had two siblings, Joachim, one year
older and a baby sister, Suzanne four years younger. While his father was a strict disciplinarian who showed his love through the high standards he set for the children's education, his mother was gentle and soft-hearted, secretly spoiling her children. Joseph was absolutely devoted to her, and she was for him a constant source of moral support and inspiration. Having tried to come up with
his own musical notation system at age seven, not aware that one already
existed, Joseph Beer, by the time he was thirteen, was already spending
most of his nights composing, the beginning of a lifelong
habit. While in high school, he also attended classes at the
Lwow Conservatory. Upon graduating from high school, despite his father's insistence that he become a lawyer, he was determined to be a composer. After completing a year in law school to please his father, he persuaded his family to allow him to go to Vienna (then the music capital of the world) and to audition at the Hochschule für Musik.
On arriving at the train station in Vienna, he happened to meet one of his best friends from back home, a gifted young violinist who was returning to Lwow following an unsuccessful audition at the Hochschule für Musik. Being admitted to an exclusive Austrian school which enforced quotas for both Poles and Jews was no mean accomplishment. Not only was Joseph admitted, but he was allowed to skip the first four years and enter directly into the Master Classes of the renowned composition teacher and composer, Joseph Marx. At this point, his father was completely won over. He set Joseph up in a two-bedroom apartment in central Vienna with his own baby-grand! Joseph had won the right to pursue his dream of musical composition. Little did he realize then that he had also escaped his hometown with his life. Joseph's violinist friend, along with but a handful of the 110,000 Jews of Lwow were murdered during the Holocaust. At the Hochschule für Musik, Joseph attracted the attention and support of Professor Marx and was graduated from the school with highest honors in 1930.
He soon joined an established Viennese ballet company Rainer Simons as chorus coach and conductor and toured with the company extensively in Austria and throughout the Middle East, garnering enthusiastic reviews.
It was the
Middle East tour which set the stage for his connecting
with a man who would become one of his closest associates,
Dr. Fritz Löhner-Beda,
perhaps the most acclaimed Viennese operetta librettist of his time.
While
touring Palestine, Joseph was persuaded by a local composer to take some
the fellow's compositions back to Austria to play for
Löhner-Beda. Back
in
Vienna a few months later, Joseph fulfilled his promise. But performing
the music
at the piano for
Löhner-Beda, he detected a lack of interest on
"Beda"'s
part. Simultaneously, he noticed through the glass panel of the
door that one of his old conservatory buddies was listening. He was
mortified to think
that his
friend might take this to be his own music. So when
Löhner-Beda signaled
the end of the audition, Joseph boldly asked if he might play a sample
of his own
music. . .
Following an extremely successful debut, the opera was taken throughout Europe to the major stages of Vienna (Theatre an der Wien), Salzburg, Warsaw (Teatr Wielki), Madrid (Teatro Fontalba) and Stockholm among others. It received extensive radio broadcast, was often recorded and taken on a tour of South America by the Luis Calvo Co.
All the
while, Joseph had been keeping his family back home in Poland abreast of
each and every one of his early successes. Even while signing a
contract, he later revealed that he would be mentally composing the
contents of a telegram home to communicate the good news. The entire
family came to Vienna to attend performances of the opera at the famed
Theatre an der Wien. And when the premiere of Prinz von
Schiras was broadcast in
Lwow over the short-wave radio, the
family and all their relatives gathered at the Beer's home. His father
timed the duration of the thundering applause given the tenor's
aria, "Du Warst Der Selige Traum": it had lasted 17 minutes. Three years later, in 1937, came the second of the two Beer/Beda operas, Polnishe Hochzeit, composed in but a few weeks. With a libretto co-authored by the established lyricist Alfred Grünwald, it was set during the Polish war for independence from Russian occupation in the early 1800's. it too premiered at the Zurich Opera House. A huge success, it was subsequently performed on some 40 stages and translated into 8 languages.
With the attendant acclaim and
publicity, the young composer's star was
on the
rise. Colleagues and critics alike agreed that he was among the foremost
composers of his generation. He was popular with opera singers who
appreciated his deft writing which showcased the voice to its best
advantage. The public thronged to fill the theaters with unabated enthusiasm
to hear Joseph Beer's music.
There were plans for productions of the opera in Rome and New York City among others, while back in Vienna, superstar tenor Richard Tauber was slated to appear. A few years out of conservatory, Joseph could already lay claim to quite a bright future. But in 1938, a Nazi government rose to power in Austria. With the advent of the Anschluss, a year only after the premiere of Polnische Hochzeit, Joseph Beer's name was taken off the roster of the Theatre an der Wien. Soon the operas of the ''Jew Beer" were banned from performance. Joseph had to flee the country in order to save his life. Backed by a recommendation from the director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, Joseph was granted a visa by the French government. Carrying only two suitcases, he left Vienna, the city of his brilliant success. His meteoric rise in the world of opera with its early taste of musical renown had just abruptly ended.
In Paris, now a refugee living in a hotel room, he survived by adapting instrumental works for orchestra. He accepted a commission from a Zurich Opera conductor to write an opera which would be performed in Zurich under the latter's name. Joseph closeted himself in his hotel room and emerged three weeks later with a fully finished opera, including all vocal and orchestral parts. The musical score had been written entirely without benefit of a piano. The first time he actually heard his work was during its radio broadcast from the Zurich Opera House. He then commented that aside from a couple of things here and there, he was basically pleased with his work!
After the Germans invaded Paris two years later in 1940, Joseph traveled to join his brother in Nice, which was as yet free of Nazi control. He was to remain there for the duration of the war. His livelihood still consisted in composing, much of the time without a piano, arranging pieces for local orchestras and writing music for others to claim as their own. It is also during that time that he composed his third major work, Stradella in Venedig, a "commedia dell' arte opera" inspired from the tragic life of the well-known seventeenth-century composer and set in Venice during that time period. Far removed from the composer's own threatened circumstances in its inspiration, it is quite different stylistically from his first two works.
So it was that his father, Uri Isidore, mother Amalie Esther Malka and his young sister Suzanne all perished at Auschwitz.
After the war, profoundly affected by the deaths of his loved ones, Joseph Beer recoiled from success. Many of his former associates had been killed, such as the celebrated librettist Löhner-Beda who died at Auschwitz. Others had been Nazi collaborators or, at best, passive bystanders with whom Joseph now adamantly refused to do business. In the decade following the war, there were several occasions when opera directors and agents came all the way to Nice to sign an agreement to produce his operas. Somehow he always found a way not to make a deal. A man who had been by all accounts before the war a witty, charming, dazzling man, was now becoming increasingly withdrawn and difficult, unwilling or unable to accept success any longer. Despite his recalcitrance, some works were produced. Polnische Hochzeit continued to be performed in Scandinavia until 1982 without his cooperation or consent, or even posthumously until 2002, often under the alternative title of Masurkka.
In 1946, an oratorio work, Ave Maria, a cantata for soloists, mixed choir and organ, premiered at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Nice, France, staring famed Austrian soprano Lotte Schöne and renowned tenor Enso Seri. Stradella in Venedig, the opera composed in hiding during the war, premiered at the Zurich Opera House in 1949. It received widespread acclaim and critics such as Kurt Pahlen wrote in his World Music History (Opern der Welt), "... a comic opera of the highest sort", while the libretto was adapted to the French stage by renowned French playwright and Académie Française member André Roussin. But Beer did little to encourage its performance after the initial run. He later confided that his mother, with her staunch faith and support for him, had been the secret behind his brilliant success as a young composer in Vienna. With her tragic death, he had become indifferent to professional distinction. He had survived her physically, but not emotionally.
From that time on, Joseph Beer composed in solitude. He toiled relentlessly, seldom taking a day off, typically working well into the night. He constantly refined his craft, tirelessly polishing and reworking each piece, always seeking higher standards of musical expression. The results are a tribute to his dedicated efforts. We are left with a greatly original body of work of tremendous power and beauty -- truly the work of a master. In these labors, Joseph was assisted only by wife Hanna, a young Jewish refugee from Munich whom he met in Nice after the war, and who, in later years, bore him two daughters, Suzanne Beer, an award-winning artist and philosopher based in Paris, France, and Béatrice Beer, an internationally-acclaimed opera singer based in Philadelphia, PA (USA).
For the next forty years, Hanna would serve as his sole collaborator, critic... and often overworked typist! Beer rarely took a single day off from composing or went on vacation with his family. He did make time however for scholarly research. In 1966, he earned a Doctorate in Musicology from the Sorbonne University at the direction of the eminent French philosopher and musicologist, Vladimir Jankélévitch. His thesis topic: The Evolution of Harmonic Style in the Work of Scriabin. He received the highest honors for it (Mention Très Honorable et Félicitations du Jury) and Jankélévitch offered to get the work published with a foreword authored by him. But Beer declined. He had but one passion: composition.
Through the years, proposals to adapt his operas to the French stage came from prominent French librettists, including one of Ravel's lyricists Léopold Marchand, Arthur Honegger's librettist, Albert Willemetz, and one of Franz Lehar's librettist, Albert Gilbert. All were enthusiastic supporters of the composer. On one occasion, Gilbert wrote to him, "Joseph, you are the greatest composing genius of our century. This may sound simplistic to you, but I say as I feel." Beer, however, remained a confirmed loner. He continued to compose daily till his passing on November 23, 1987. He leaves behind a large body of work which he ceaselessly revised and polished till the end. The Beer legacy includes among others two operas, La Polonaise, a comic opera with a historic subject set in Russia-occupied Poland during the Napoleonic era, and Mitternachtssonne, a supernatural romance populated with lumberjacks and elf-like creatures called Nissen set in rural Norway of the 1930's. Both operas feature a wealth of profoundly beautiful, intensely felt arias where sublime levels of inspiration are clearly felt, set to highly innovative, intricate, sophisticated harmonies -- the culmination of a life time of composing. In 2006,
Joseph Beer's family started the internationally run Joseph Beer Foundation.
It is headquartered in Nice, France, with satellite offices in Paris,
France, and Philadelphia (USA). The Foundation's mission is to
propagate the works of the composer world-wide and to earn him the
widespread recognition he deserves. For more information on the Béatrice Beer Sings Joseph Beer: A Daughter's Tribute to her Father's Music concerts, please visit our Performance Page. Joseph Beer is currently Composer-in-Residence In Memoriam with The Atlantic Coast Opera Festival, a Philadelphia based international summer opera Festival which is planning to premiere one of the composer's opera in the near future. For more information, please visit http://www.atlanticcoastoperafestival.org/about.htm
Of late, Joseph
Beer’s music is experiencing the start of a major renaissance. Among
others, it was included in a sold out concert at the
Théâtre du Châtelet in
January 2010 featuring the famed
Orchestre Pasdeloup.
The event was broadcasted by France's major classical radio channel
France Musique mid-March.
In December 2010, the prestigious Viennese publishing house Doblinger Musikverlag signed up Joseph Beer. Its well connected CEO Peter Pany is presently starting with the promoting of Beer’s outstanding pre-war youth success, Polnische Hochzeit -- “a great and timeless work,” wrote Herr Pany – as well as Stradella in Venedig, Beer’s last publicly performed opera. Upcoming performances include international concerts and recordings, in Vienna, Austria, with the Metropolitan Kammerorchester Wien, in the greater New York City area with the Plainfield Symphony, both concerts under the baton of acclaimed international conductor Maestro Charles Prince, and in Ukraine, a Gala Concert with the excellent, 85+ piece strong Lugansk Philharmonic Orchestra, with young, up and coming Maestro Miran Vaupotić conducting. The events feature the composer's daughter, international soprano Béatrice Beer, along with celebrated Metropolitan Opera dramatic baritone Robert McFarland and young tenor on the rise Kenneth Wood.
And a grand Viennese Revival Premiere of
Polnische Hochzeit
is slated for the summer of 2012 by the excellent
Wiener Operettensommer
under the baton of
Maestro Charles Prince.
Compositional Style
Another of
Beer's composing characteristic is the incorporation of American jazz
elements into the classical texture of his works which also include
effervescently rhythmical pieces.
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World Premiere of Joseph Beer's Opera Stradella at the
Zurich Opera
Theatre
(1949)
