ICAMUS.org: Marian Anderson Collection Includes Eight Unpublished Lieder of German Jewish Composer & Holocaust Victim James Simon (1880-1944)

ICAMus The International Center for American Music Contralto Marian Anderson (1897-1993) with accompanying pianist Franz Rupp (1901-1992), early 1940s. Photographer: George H. Myles. Marian Anderson Collection of Photographs; Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Image Collections, University of Pennsylvania Libraries; Vol. 17, Page 13, Item 1.

Aloma Bardi writes:

Dear Mr Zick,

I made a discovery in Ms. Anderson's Collection. If you find it interesting, would you please, thorough your website and blog, help us get visibility on this research content, so far totally unknown, I believe, and invite your contacts to visit and and like our page? 

Thank you!

Aloma

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ICAMus The International Center for American Music

June 17 · Edited

The American journey of an unpublished manuscript by a Holocaust victim, to American contralto Marian Anderson’s collection of music scores.

Der Mensch lebt und bestehet (1935), by German Jewish composer and Holocaust victim James Simon (1880-1944) to a text by German poet Matthias Claudius (1740-1815): “Human existence only extends for a short time.”

Eight unpublished Lieder (1915-1935) by Simon are in Marian Anderson’s Collection. The acquisition of these manuscripts to Ms. Anderson’s large personal archive of chamber pieces, Songs, Lieder and Spirituals, may have been connected to the singer’s long, extraordinary artistic partnership with German-born pianist Franz Rupp (1901-1992), a refugee from Nazi Germany.

By the time he composed this Lied, James Simon had already left Berlin, never to return to his native country; arrested in The Netherlands, he was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.

ICAMus The International Center for American Music

June 17

The ever-expanding worlds of American contralto Marian Anderson (1897-1993).

The Marian Anderson Collection at the University of Pennsylvania offers surprising discoveries revealing this singer’s large span of musical and human interests.

Ms. Anderson was an interpreter of Art Songs, Lieder, and Spirituals. Her large Collection of music scores includes the unpublished manuscripts of 8 Lieder (1915-1935) by German Jewish composer, pianist and musicologist James Simon (1880-1944). Simon remains the least performed among the prominent composers who perished in the Shoah. He left Berlin for The Netherlands where he was arrested and deported to Terezín and later to Auschwitz; in the extermination camp he was murdered in October 1944. An important, still-to-be-written chapter in the Book of Music and the Holocaust.

Franz Rupp (1901-1992) was a German American pianist who lived in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, before expatriating to the US in 1938. A non-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, married to Jewish singer Steffanie Schwarz, he was Ms. Anderson’s accompanist from 1940 to 1965, when she retired from the concert stage. Rupp might have been the source or the connection for this extraordinary acquisition. Marian Anderson and Franz Rupp both knew the violence of racial discrimination.

The Marian Anderson Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries:
http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/manderson.html

Marian Anderson: A Life in Song - Exhibition:
http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/anderson/av/index.html

The Marian Anderson Website:
http://marian-anderson.com/