Bekker, Max Paul Eugen

Director, music writer and critic

Born: 11.09.1882 in Berlin

Died: 13.03.1937 in New York

After training in violin, accompaniment and music theory, Bekker worked as a bandmaster in Aschaffenburg and Görlitz. From 1906, he wrote full-time as a music critic for the "Berliner Neueste Nachrichten", the "Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung" and the "Frankfurter Zeitung". His standard work on Beethoven was published in 1911. This was followed by "Das deutsche Musikleben" (1916), an early pioneering contribution to the sociology of music, writings on "New Music" and its representatives such as Gustav Mahler, Ernst Krenek and Arnold Schönberg, as well as monographs on Richard Wagner, "Gustav Mahler's Symphonies" and the "Weltgeltung der Deutschen Musik". In 1924, he published his outline of a phenomenology of music "Von den Naturreichen des Klanges".

On the recommendation of cultural politician Leo Kestenberg (1882-1962), Bekker became artistic director of the Staatstheater Kassel in 1925 and moved to Wiesbaden in 1927, where he introduced audiences to contemporary composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Paul Hindemith, Franz Schreker, Richard Strauss and Kurt Weill in exemplary productions. While his predecessors only staged five opera premieres in over 30 years, Bekker managed twelve premieres and 18 first performances of new operas. Contacts with Leo Blech, Fritz Busch and Sir Thomas Beecham, glamorous guest conductors, also enabled him to revive the May Festival. When the city took over the theater as the "Nassauisches Landestheater" from the Prussian state in 1932, Bekker's contract was not renewed.

Already hostile to the National Socialists since the end of the 1920s because of his Jewish origins, he emigrated to the United States via France in 1933. Bekker's second marriage was to the painter and gallery owner Hanna Bekker vom Rath, who separated from him in 1927.