Gustav Brecher was a German conductor, composer, and music critic. As director of the Leipzig Opera, he conducted world premieres of works by Ernst Krenek and Kurt Weill, including Jonny spielt auf and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. He was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, lived at risk in Stalingrad, Berlin, Prague, and finally Ostend, where he took his life together with his wife's.
Life
Brecher was born in Eichwald, Ore Mountains, then in Austria-Hungary. His Jewish family moved from Bohemia to Leipzig in 1889. Brecher was taught there by Salomon Jadassohn. Richard Strauss conducted his tone poemRosmersholm in 1896. Brecher made his debut in 1897 at the Leipzig Opera. From 1901, he conducted at the Vienna Court Opera alongside Gustav Mahler. Between 1903 and 1911 he was Kapellmeister at the Hamburg State Opera, where he conducted the world premiere of Busoni's Die Brautwahl. After conducting at the Cologne Opera and Oper Frankfurt, Brecher was Generalmusikdirektor at the Leipzig Opera from 1914. He was particularly controversial there because of the premieres of Krenek's operas Jonny spielt auf and Leben des Orest, and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: Although the Jonny opera was a success, Brecher was dismissed after the Nazis seized power in the spring of 1933, based on the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the musicologist Alfred Heuß wrote a malicious commentary on the occasion of the Rienzi performance during the Wagner Festival week on 12 February 1933: "Unsuspecting, Brecher handled his peculiarly small baton for the last time in a Wagner performance." His last appearance in Leipzig was probably Weill's Der Silbersee on 4 March 1933, when he left the podium during the performance because of constant roaring by the SA present, who were attacking his Jewish origins and objecting to the opera. The mayor of Leipzig, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, granted him leave on 11 March 1933. His path into exile cannot be traced in detail. He conducted the radio orchestra in Leningrad in five concerts. There in 1934, Georges Sébastian wrote: Brecher lived in Berlin for a while, when Erich Ebermayer noted on 13 October 1935 in his diary: Brecher moved to Prague, where he had to flee once more in 1938. In Ostend in May 1940, at age 61, he took his own life together with his wife Gertrud Deutsch for fear of falling into the hands of the German occupying forces in Belgium. A Stolperstein in front of the Hamburg State Opera reminds of his fate.
