Harry Goldschmidt (17 June 1910 in Basel – 19 November 1986) was a Swiss musicologist.
Goldschmidt was born in Basel on 17 June 1910,[1] the second child of Siegfried Goldschmidt, a banker from Frankfurt, and Vally Goldschmidt-Peiser, a teacher from Breslau. The boy was given the first names of Heinrich Heine: Heinrich (Harry) Leopold. The classically educated parents came from non-practising, fully assimilated German-Jewish families and acquired Swiss citizenship on 8 August 1919 in the city of Basel, where father Siegfried had become the youngest bank director in Switzerland at the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (now Credit Suisse) in 1905.
After attending the Humanistische Gymnasium in his home town, Goldschmidt began studying musicology (Karl Nef and Jacques Handschin), ethnology at the University of Basel in 1928. and psychology. A doctoral thesis in music ethnology was begun after 1936, but remained unfinished due to active service in the Swiss Armed Forces (1939–1945) during the Second World War. A youth novel Ellen and Ott (Zurich 1937), published under the pseudonym Konrad Illi, was always steadfastly denied by Goldschmidt with a mischievous smile.
At the same time, Goldschmidt trained as a musician (piano, composition, conducting) at the City of Basel Music Academy, which he had attended alongside the school since 1926, and after only one year with Felix Weingartner, who was in Basel at the time, he obtained his conducting diploma.[2] For further training he went to Hermann Scherchen in Königsberg in 1929.[3] ( Prussia). 1930–31 Goldschmidt completed his music studies at the State Academy of Music in Berlin. Returning to Switzerland, he went to Paris and London in the early 1930s as a writer and music reporter for several Swiss newspapers and as a permanent contributor to various international music journals. In 1933, Goldschmidt became music critic at the Basler National-Zeitung (today Basler Zeitung), which he remained – with interruptions due to the war – until 1948.
Goldschmidt was particularly interested in the music of the "primitive peoples" in the 1930s, partly through the influence of Hermann Scherchen and Felix Speiser. In 1939, he was one of the first to take part in a musical-ethnological expedition to West Africa (especially Senegal), together with mythologists and linguists, and was one of the first to use the new technical means of tape recording. However, the expedition had to be abandoned after four months due to the outbreak of war in September 1939. Nevertheless, Goldschmidt's experiences with the music of non-European peoples continued to shape his life.
After his demobilisation from military service in 1945, Goldschmidt continued to be a music critic for various magazines and newspapers, including the Swiss "Vorwärts", the daily newspaper of the newly founded, left-socialist Partei der Arbeit (a merger of the SP Left with the KPS), whose cultural work he subsequently headed. As part of this work, he founded and directed a mixed choir, the Singgruppe Basel, and played a major role in the organisation of the Volkssinfoniekonzerte. This was a commission from the Basler Gewerkschaftsbund, in which the PdA played a major role at the time. Goldschmidt not only conceived the concerts from a music-historical point of view, but also prepared them in a popular-scientific manner by means of introductory evenings that illustrated the connection between music and society, and they were held at the highest level, according to the motto: "For the working class – the best!" Thus, memorable encounters between simple workers and artists such as Yehudi Menuhin, Clara Haskil, Pablo Casals and others took place.
During this time, that is from 1945 to 1947, Goldschmidt was also secretary of the Basel Study Commission for Radio Questions and from 1947 on secretary of the Swiss Film Archive. Goldschmidt had developed the concept of the Swiss Film Archive together with Georg Schmidt, who had been director of the Kunstmuseum Basel since 1939, and others with an academic interest in new media.
Goldschmidt, who had active contacts with the anti-fascist German emigration in Switzerland during the National Socialist era, received various requests from Germany in the post-war period to participate in the construction of a new, democratic cultural life. As a result of his public appearance for the PdA, of which he had already become a member when it was founded in 1944, he became increasingly broke in the course of the beginning Cold War. He decided to follow the call to Berlin, where he was offered a position at the newly founded Berliner Rundfunk.
In February 1949, Goldschmidt moved to Berlin with his wife, the choreographer Aenne Goldschmidt-Michel. There, living in the soviet sector, he became head of the main music department at the Berliner Rundfunk, which at the time was run as a bizonal British-Soviet project of the occupying powers in the British sector in the Haus des Rundfunks on .
But the idiosyncratic Goldschmidt, who was used to thinking independently and critically and to expressing his opinion openly, soon came into conflict with the Soviet occupying authorities: his musical line was too "cosmopolitan", too "western", too "elitist" and took too little account of "the music of the peoples of the Soviet Union". But these were only pretexts to get rid of Goldschmidt, as were many other non-conformist "Western immigrants" – especially after the so-called field affair, whose Stalinist show trials and "purges" shook the entire Soviet sphere of power. In addition, Noel Field had operated from Switzerland during the war, and Goldschmidt was quite familiar with it.
Thus Goldschmidt lost his job at the Berliner Rundfunk in February 1950 due to Stalinist intrigues. However, important cultural and political forces in the GDR, which was founded on 7 October 1949, were not at all of Soviet opinion: there, the anti-fascist attitude, the profound musicological knowledge, the experience in music education and the Marxist views of Goldschmidt were very much appreciated. Paul Wandel, Minister of National Education of the GDR, appointed him Professor of Music History at the newly founded German Academy of Music (from 1964 Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" Berlin) as early as August 1950.
Goldschmidt owed this to a large extent to the determined efforts of friends such as Georg Knepler, Hanns Eisler, Erich Weinert, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Paul Dessau among others.
In this way, Goldschmidt succeeded in developing a broad musicological activity in the first half of the fifties despite adverse circumstances: In addition to his appointment as a lecturer, he received commissions for the GDR's 1950 Bach Jubilee Exhibition and the 1952 Beethoven Jubilee Exhibition in Berlin and Leipzig.
Goldschmidt's most important work from this period is his Franz Schubert biography "Schubert – ein Lebensbild", which was published by Henschelverlag Berlin in 1954 and went on to be published in six further editions. This subsequent standard work of Schubert's biography was accepted as a dissertation by the Humboldt University in Berlin and Goldschmidt was awarded a doctorate in philosophy on 29 April 1959.
1950–55 Lecturer in music history at the East Berlin Academy of Music, Goldschmidt went to the People's Republic of China for half a year in 1955–56 on behalf of the GDR Ministry of Culture. In the People's Republic, founded on 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong's motto was: "Let a hundred flowers bloom! Accordingly, people were open-minded about European music and Goldschmidt gave lectures on German and European music history at various Chinese universities.
After his return from China in 1956, Goldschmidt worked as a freelance musicologist with guest lectures at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 1960 to 1965 he was head of the Central Institute for Music Research in East Berlin.
From the second half of the 1960s onwards, Goldschmidt turned more and more to the music and biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, including fundamental problems such as the relationship between the work of art, biography and contemporary history or the relationship between language, vocal and instrumental music. A whole series of writings were produced (essays, congress papers, Beethoven introductions, Beethoven studies). Goldschmidt organised the 1977 International Beethoven Congress in Berlin on behalf of the GDR government. The government made the newly built plenary hall of the Volkskammer in the Palace of the Republic available for this purpose. The Deputy Minister of Culture Werner Rackwitz gave the opening speech at the lectern of the Volkskammer and Goldschmidt the speech "Artwork and Biography".
The popular-scientific communication of the insights gained was not neglected: Goldschmidt conceived the Beethoven Complete Edition of the VEB Deutsche Schallplatten Berlin and wrote a large number of cover texts for it. The popular work introductions were later compiled into the Reclam anthology (1975). In addition, there were appearances on radio and television in the GDR, as well as popular science lectures for trade unionists and other non-experts.
In addition to a number of extensive books, a large number of publications have been published on Beethoven: see below. Works, Beethoven. Schubert also remained at the centre of his research: s. u. Works, Schubert.
In the years 1976–86 Goldschmidt, as he had been doing since the mid-1960s, was primarily concerned with the problem areas of biography and music aesthetics as well as the relationship between word and instrumental music. He was the organizer and co-editor of the discussion series "Musikästhetik in der Diskussion" (Leipzig 1981) and the International Colloquium Großkochberg 1981 "Komponisten auf Werk und Leben befragt" (Leipzig 1985).
Music Aesthetics: Thoughts on a Non-Aristotelian Music Aesthetics – Lecture at the II International Seminar of Marxist Musicologists (Berlin 1965), Understanding Music as Postulate (Cologne 1974), Cantando-Sonando. Some approaches to a systematic music aesthetics (Berlin 1977/78)
Word and instrumental music: On the unity of the vocal and instrumental sphere in classical music – Presentation at the International Musicological Congress of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (Leipzig 1966), Verse and Verse in Beethoven's Instrumental Music – Lecture at the Beethoven Symposium (Vienna 1970), The Word in Instrumental Music: The Ritornelle in Schubert's "Winter Journey" (1986; 1996 posthumously published), The Word in Beethoven's Instrumental Accompaniment (Beethoven Studies III, 1986; 1999 posthumously published)
In 1986, Goldschmidt gave a lecture at the Carl Maria von Weber Congress in Dresden on the subject of "The Wolf Gorge – a Black Mass?" and, as a result of the fiercest controversies, suffered a heart attack during the congress, at which he participated on 19. He died on 19 November 1986;[4] in an obituary in the SED central organ Neues Deutschland the GDR Ministry of Culture honoured him as the nestor of Marxist music research in the GDR.