Fifty years ago, in 1975, Boris Blacher died — Director of the Hochschule für Musik (University of Music) from 1953 to 1970. His name stands for an entire era in the history of the institution: years of reconstruction in war-ravaged Berlin and reorientation between tradition and avant-garde. Blacher was an internationally respected composer and a successful, pedagogically gifted teacher. The 10th installment of the university history column is dedicated to him.

The postwar period was, in many respects, an era of "old men": individuals who had already proven themselves before the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and were able to reconnect with the time before the twelve terrible years of the "Third Reich." One such figure was the legendary Mayor Ernst Reuter, who appointed Blacher as Director of the Hochschule für Musik in 1953; Reuter had already been an influential city councilor during the Weimar Republic. The neighboring University of the Arts (Hochschule für bildende Künste) was led by Karl Hofer, a painter who had been an important teacher in the 1920s.

Blacher, by contrast, belonged to a different generation. Born in 1903, he grew into adulthood during the Nazi era. Yet his life story does not follow a typical path.

Like many Berliners, Blacher was not native to the city. The son of a Baltic banker, he grew up in China and Siberia, where European art music was known only among a small circle of diplomats, businessmen, missionaries, and émigrés. In the port city of Chefoo (now Yantai) on the south coast of the Yellow Sea, where he spent part of his childhood, he had his first musical experiences. Harbin, in Manchuria — where he lived after the Russian Revolution of 1917 — had a musical life shaped by exiled anti-Bolsheviks from Siberia. Blacher's own parents had fled Irkutsk, where he had worked as a teenage stagehand.

At the age of 19, Blacher traveled to the German capital with his mother to study architecture at the Technical University. But his interests lay in music. He later recounted an anecdote about how he found his composition teacher. The Hochschule für Musik on Fasanenstraße was not far from the Technical University. He asked the doorman there who he might study with. The reply was reportedly: “There’s Schreker, the director, though he’s a bit eccentric; alternatively, there’s Friedrich E. Koch.” Blacher became Koch’s private student. Koch, described by Artur Egidi as a "true Berlin character," was deeply rooted in the city’s music scene and stylistically followed in the tradition of Mendelssohn.

Blacher's life found its geographic anchor in Berlin: from 1922 until his death, he lived in the city. As a young man, he earned his living composing film scores, copying sheet music, and writing functional music. He was familiar with the New Music of the 1920s and with jazz. During the Third Reich, his gradual rise as a composer continued. The great success of his Concertante Music, premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic under Carl Schuricht in 1937, laid a foundation upon which he could build after 1945. Yet his personal situation in the Nazi era was precarious — labeled a "quarter-Jew" and a composer of modern music. Being stateless, however, spared him from military service. Even during that time, he taught several notable private students, including Gottfried von Einem and his future librettist Heinz von Cramer. In 1945, he married pianist Gerty Herzog, who, under the Nuremberg Laws, was considered "half-Jewish" and had therefore been barred from enrolling at the Hochschule für Musik. She studied privately with teachers such as Siegfried Borris.

After the war, Blacher initially taught at the International Music Institute in Zehlendorf, which was founded by Schönberg pupil Josef Rufer and Paul Höffer. In 1948, he joined the Hochschule, following Höffer, who had briefly served as its director before his early death. In 1953, Blacher himself took over the directorship, succeeding Werner Egk, with whom he also collaborated artistically. At the newly founded West Berlin Academy of Arts, Blacher became vice president in 1956 and served as president from 1968 to 1971.

With his informal, unpretentious, and sometimes non-conformist manner, Blacher did not represent the "old school" of leadership. His appointment as university director was met with public opposition, particularly because he worked with musicians from East Berlin — something many rejected during the Cold War. But thanks to his strong reputation, Blacher could afford his moderate nonconformism.

In Berlin, Blacher was also known as a stage composer. Just a few references to his work must suffice here: The Grand Inquisitor oratorio (after Dostoevsky), which could be interpreted as an allegory of the Nazi era, premiered in 1947 at the Staatsoper (then located in the Admiralspalast). During his appointment as director, the controversial ballet-opera Preußisches Märchen (1952) and Abstract Opera No. 1 (1953), which abandoned traditional narrative, were staged. With Berlin’s division, Blacher developed a close relationship with the Städtische Oper, later the Deutsche Oper. There, he often collaborated with Russian-German choreographer and ballet mistress Tatjana Gsovsky. He also worked as a "jazz composer" (Jürgen Hunkemöller) and explored electronic sound production. The Jewish Chronicle, a collaborative work composed in 1961 with Paul Dessau, Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, Karl Amadeus Hartmann (from East Germany), and Hans Werner Henze (from the West), was not premiered until 1966 due to the Berlin Wall’s construction.

Blacher stood between tradition and the avant-garde. At the Darmstadt Summer Courses, he was already seen as "bourgeois" in 1952, while broader audiences sometimes failed to grasp his works due to their modernity. His innovative spirit was tempered by skepticism. In a 1962 interview, he said: "Modern music is only for the composers." Even music students, he observed, remained “conservative.” With regard to his own oeuvre, such statements show a degree of self-deprecation.

His strength as a teacher lay in not forcing his students into a mold. Gottfried von Einem remarked, "He never wanted dependents, but human beings," and Aribert Reimann stated that the "lessons" with Blacher were "among the most beautiful moments in [his] life." In 1953, Blacher published An Introduction to Strict Counterpoint, issued by the traditional Berlin publisher Bote & Bock. His students, in addition to those already mentioned, included Claude Ballif, Francis Burt, George Crumb, Heimo Erbse, Klaus Huber, Maki Ishii, Roland Kayn, Rudolf Kelterborn, Giselher Klebe, Noam Sheriff, and Isang Yun.

Blacher's years as director were shaped by the material and intellectual reconstruction required after the devastation of the Nazi era and the war. One of his first actions was to appoint Ernst Pepping, who had previously taught at the Spandau Church Music School. The composition department also included Hans Chemin-Petit, Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling, and Heinz Tiessen. Composer and organist Joseph Ahrens held a professorship in church music. In 1954, the concert hall on Hardenbergstraße opened, serving as home to the Berlin Philharmonic until the Scharoun Hall was inaugurated in 1963. That hall’s architect, Paul Baumgarten, also designed Blacher’s house in Zehlendorf (Kaunstraße 6). The construction of the theater and rehearsal hall — today’s UNI.T — was delayed and only completed in 1975.

At the very end of Blacher’s tenure, student protests began to emerge. In 1969, an attempt to establish a jazz program with Friedrich Gulda failed. This led to unnecessary provocations: Gulda harshly criticized the “backward environment” of the university he was about to join. The Blacher era gradually drew to a close.

Author: Dr. Dietmar Schenk, former head of the University Archive