Hermann Reutter

Hermann Reutter (17 June 19001 January 1985) was a German composer and pianist who worked as an academic teacher, university administrator, recitalist, and accompanist.

He composed several operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and especially many lieder, setting poems by authors writing in German, Russian, Spanish, Icelandic, English, and ancient Egyptian and Greek, among others.

He moved to Munich in 1920 and studied voice with Karl Erler and then, at the Musikhochschule München, piano with Franz Dorfmüller, organ with Ludwig Mayer, and composition with Walter Courvoisier.

He took part in the Donaueschingen Festival from 1923 and had contact to the "Donaueschingen circle", especially to Paul Hindemith.

From 1926, he was a frequent composer at the annual festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, for several world premieres of his works.

He focused on lied recitals as an accompanist from 1929, working with notable singers and conductors of the period.

Between 1930 and 1936, he toured the U.S. seven times as the accompanist of singer Sigrid Onegin.

In 1932, Reutter was appointed principal composition professor at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart.

He composed the opera Lübecker Totentanz based on Lübecker Totentanz at the Marienkirche in Lübeck.

Reutter was a member of the Nazi Party.

He was director of Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium in Frankfurt from 1936 to 1945 and of the Musikhochschule Stuttgart from 1956 to 1966.

He then taught master classes, regularly at the Musikhochschule München and at universities in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

In 1936, his opera Doktor Johannes Faust was premiered at the Oper Frankfurt.

The same year, he became the director of Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium in Frankfurt, which was called the Staatliche Musikhochschule after 1938.

After World War II, he returned to Stuttgart.

Reutter married Liselotte Lauk in 1940.

The couple had two daughters and a son.

Reutter died in Heidenheim an der Brenz.

He took part in the inaugural Ferienkurse für internationale neue Musik in Darmstadt in 1946, and accompanied Henny Wolff in selections from Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, songs from Ernst Krenek's Reisetagebuch, Op. 62, and his own compositions.

In 1948 and 1949, he was an instructor there for lied singing and its accompaniment.

In 1950, Reutter composed a "Hymne an Deutschland" which President Theodor Heuss suggested as the national anthem, but it was not chosen.

In 1951, a concert at the festival of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eugen Jochum, presented his Concerto for Two Pianos, Op. 63, with him and Hans Schröter as soloists.

From 1952, he was professor of composition and lied interpretation at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule.

Reutter received, among others, the Ludwig Spohr Award of Braunschweig in 1953, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959 (with one star in 1975), an honorary doctorate from the Music and Arts Institute in San Francisco in 1976, and the Hugo Wolf Medal of the International Hugo Wolf Society in Vienna the same year.

Reutter's compositions are published by Schott Music:

Reutter set poems by various Russian authors, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Rückert, Federico García Lorca, Icelandic poems, Friedrich Hölderlin, ancient Egyptian poems, Goethe, Sappho and Langston Hughes, among many others.

In 1955, he became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich.

He served as a juror of the ARD International Music Competition from 1956, and later as chairman of the jury in the category Singing.

Reutter became the director of the Musikhochschule Stuttgart in 1956 and director emeritus in 1966.

He taught internationally from 1960 in master classes at several universities in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

He held a master class for lied at the Musikhochschule München from 1966 to 1974.

He founded the Internationale Hugo-Wolf-Akademie in Stuttgart in 1968, serving as its president until his death.

Reutter was born in Stuttgart, where he took singing lessons with Emma Rückbeil-Hiller.

He founded the Hugo Wolf Academy in Stuttgart in 1968, and served as its president.