Reinhard Flender (Hamburg) - Rolf Liebermann - cultural innovation for Hamburg from NDR to the Staatsoper
From the Music of the Portuguese synagogue in the 19th to the Rolf Lieberman Era in the 20th century
The presence of Jewish Culture in Europe is going back to the times of the Roman Empire. In 2021 Germany has celebrated1700 years of Jewish live and culture. The city of Hamburg decided in 2020 to rebuild the largesynagogue on Bornplatz, which had been destroyed 1938 during the Reichskristallnacht. On this occasion, the University of Music in Hamburg initiates an international conference on Jewish music in Hamburg past and present.
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Reinhard Flender
Rolf Liebermann – cultural innovation for Hamburg from NDR to the Staatsoper
The Swiss composer and cultural manager Rolf Liebermann (1910– 1999) came from a widely branched Jewish family in Berlin. His great-grand-uncle was the famous painter Max Liebermann. He sur- vived the Holocaust thanks to his Swiss citizenship. In 1957 he took over the music department at the NDR and in 1959 moved to the State Opera, which he directed for fourteen years. He brought not only the world’s most famous composers to Hamburg such as Igor Stravinsky, but also pushed musical innovation at the opera of Ham- burg with 24 world premieres, including Kagel‘s „Staatstheater“. On a visit to Israel in 1966, he met Berlin-born composer Joseph Tal (his original German surname was Grünthal) and ordered an opera for Hamburg by him. Tal was a pioneer of electronic music and he produced an electronic tape for the opera at his electronic studio at Jerusalem University. His first opera Ashmedai, was premiered in Hamburg in 1967. It filled a gap in his oeuvre, because Israel did not have its own opera house until 1985. Along with Paul Ben Haim, Tal was one of the most influential composers in Israel.
Reinhard David Flender is a composer and musicologist. He studied piano and composition in Hamburg and musicology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 1977 to 1981 he pursued a field research among Oriental Jews about the relationship between the Massoretic accent system ta‘ame emet and the oral tradition of Hebrew psalmody in the Jewish diaspora communities in Israel. Sin- ce 1983 he has taught musicology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. In 1999 he founded the Institute for Cultural Innovation Research (IkI) at the University of Music in Hamburg.
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