Oskar Fried
Oskar Fried (August 1, 1871 – July 5, 1941) was a German conductor and composer. An admirer of Gustav Mahler, Fried was the first conductor to record a Mahler symphony. Fried also held the distinction of being the first foreign conductor to perform in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He eventually left his homeland to work in the Soviet Union after the political rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, and became a Soviet citizen in 1940.
Biography
Born in Berlin, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, he worked as a clown, a stable boy and a dog trainer before studying composition with Iwan Knorr (1891–92, Hoch Conservatory) and Engelbert Humperdinck (as private student) in Frankfurt.[1] He later moved to Düsseldorf to study painting and art history.[1] After a spell in Paris, he returned to Berlin in 1898 to study counterpoint with Xaver Scharwenka.[1]
The performance of his composition Das trunkene Lied ("The Drunken Song") for chorus and orchestra brought Fried his first public success and led to his appointment in 1904 as the conductor of a Berlin choral society.
Fried first met Gustav Mahler in 1905.[2] The meeting resulted in an invitation to conduct Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony in Berlin in November 1905 (Otto Klemperer led the offstage band during this performance).[2] The next year, he introduced Russia to Mahler's music when he performed the same work in St Petersburg. From 1907 to 1910, he directed a choral society known as the Sternscher Gesangverein in Berlin.[3] In 1913 Fried conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the second performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
In 1922, he went to the USSR as the first foreign conductor invited to perform after the Russian Revolution, and was greeted by Lenin on the station platform.[2] In 1924, he made the first recording of any Mahler symphony, the Second, with the Berlin Staatskapelle in a performance that has been praised as "remarkably successful"[4] and a "highly adventurous undertaking for an acoustic recording" which required "careful planning and experimentation".[5] That same year, he also made the first recording of any complete Bruckner symphony: his Seventh.
In November 1927, at the invitation of the BBC programme planner and his own former student Edward Clark, he made his British conducting debut, in a program of Weber, Brahms and Liszt in London.[6]
Driven from Germany by the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime in 1934, he emigrated to the Georgian city of Tbilisi in the Soviet Union. He conducted the Tbilisi opera and later the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, eventually becoming a Soviet citizen.[2] He died in Moscow in 1941.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 de la Grange (1999), p. 243
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 de la Grange (1999), p. 244
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- ↑ Delius Society Journal, April 1985, Oskar Fried issue
Bibliography
- Peter Cahn: Das Hoch'sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main (1878-1978), Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1979.
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- David Ewen, Encyclopedia of Concert Music. New York; Hill and Wang, 1959.
