Max Ettinger

Max Ettinger (born Markus Wolf) was born in Lemberg, today Lviv, on 27 December 1874, and died in Basel on 19 July 1951. He was a German composer and conductor whose career spanned the Weimar Republic and the exile caused by Nazism, a context that explains both his works for the stage and his compositions of Jewish character.

He trained in Berlin with Herzogenberg and in Munich with Rheinberger and Thuille. After brief posts as Kapellmeister in Saarbrücken and Lübeck, he made his name as a composer with the ballet Rialon, premiered in Munich in 1911, and the opera Judith, presented in Nuremberg in 1921. He resumed his career as a conductor in Leipzig in 1920 and later conducted in Berlin between 1929 and 1933. During these years he turned to what is known as literary opera, with works based on texts by Boccaccio, Hebbel, Kaiser, Goethe, Wedekind and Zola.

In 1933, the political situation in Germany forced him into exile in Switzerland, where he composed works opposing the Third Reich. Among them stand out oratorios and cantatas on Jewish themes and texts, such as Das Lied von Moses and the Yiddish Requiem, in which he drew on Hebrew folk melodies and cantorial chant. His Second String Quartet, from 1945, reflects influences of Hasidic melodies.

Ettinger is today remembered above all as a representative of stage and choral music marked by his commitment to Jewish cultural memory in a context of persecution.