The Leo Kestenberg Music School in the Berlin district of Tempelhof-Schöneberg will host a celebratory concert at Schöneberg Town Hall on July 20. The occasion is the 70th anniversary of the Aharon Shefi Conservatory in Giv‘atayim near Tel Aviv. The connection to this exchange partner stems from the school’s namesake, Leo Kestenberg, who was involved in founding the conservatory. During the Weimar Republic, Kestenberg served as music advisor at the Prussian Ministry of Culture, and the reforms he initiated make him a key figure in the history of the UdK’s music faculty. This month’s column is dedicated to Leo Kestenberg.

Leo Kestenberg (1882–1962) was appointed professor of piano at the Berlin University of Music in 1921. Prior to World War I, the student of Ferruccio Busoni had already held comparable positions at the two major private conservatories in Berlin: the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and the Stern Conservatory of Music. However, since the days of the revolution on November 9, 1918, he had headed the music division at the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art, and Public Education and did not take up his teaching post; he was released from it. When he was promoted to Ministerial Councillor in 1929, he formally resigned from his teaching position.

Following up on his 1921 programmatic publication Musikerziehung und Musikpflege ("Music Education and Music Culture"), the Prussian Ministry of Culture initiated a reform across all areas of music education. The decrees and regulations concerning school music and private music instruction that Kestenberg proposed and coordinated are known today as the “Kestenberg Reform.” Yet Kestenberg did not always act as confidently as the term might suggest. His activities, however, extended beyond education into the broader realm of music culture – what he called “Musikpflege.” One outstanding example of this was his role as the spiritual father of the Kroll Opera, an avant-garde “people’s opera” under the artistic direction of Otto Klemperer (1927–1931). With the support of liberal state secretary and minister Carl-Heinrich Becker, Kestenberg succeeded in launching a genuine “music reform,” in which the promotion of new music was closely tied to the democratic goals of “popular education.”

Kestenberg’s importance to the Berlin University of Music – and thus to the music faculty of the present-day UdK – does not lie in his piano professorship, which he held only in name, nor in the reform itself. Rather, it was his focused attention on the university that proved decisive: through his efforts, the institution underwent a fundamental renewal. This reform agenda was supported by his close coordination with the then-deputy university director Georg Schünemann. Appointed in 1920, Schünemann was a musicologist and former student of Hermann Kretzschmar. He quickly developed a close and productive working relationship with Kestenberg, which is well documented in numerous, often very personal letters from Kestenberg. Unfortunately, Schünemann’s replies did not survive; along with Kestenberg’s entire private archive, they were destroyed in the bombings of Berlin.

Details of the reform process at the university are discussed repeatedly in this newsletter; it would be impossible to summarize them all here. This sketch therefore focuses on Kestenberg’s life and personality, particularly within the context of “Weimar culture.”

Leo Kestenberg was born on November 27, 1882, the son of a Jewish cantor. He grew up in Liberec (then Reichenberg, Bohemia), a city of the Habsburg monarchy near the border with the German Empire. His father sympathized with the Social Democratic movement and instilled his beliefs in his son, while also being a strong advocate of education. As Kestenberg movingly describes in his memoir Bewegte Zeiten (1961), for him, “socialism” and “music” formed a “unity” – fully in line with his father’s worldview.

Leo studied piano in Berlin and Dresden, with teachers such as Franz Kullak, José Vianna da Motta, and Felix Draeseke. Later, Ferruccio Busoni became his mentor. Shortly after the turn of the century, he moved permanently to Berlin and became active in the workers’ education movement. He organized concerts for the Volksbühne (People’s Theatre), a cultural association affiliated with the Social Democratic movement. The organization was so successful that it built its own theatre – the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (then Bülowplatz) – which opened in December 1914.

Kestenberg was a highly accomplished pianist and a successful piano teacher, but it was his talent as a concert organizer that stood out. He managed to win over the largely untrained Volksbühne audience for concerts of high artistic quality. In the midst of World War I, the art dealer Paul Cassirer appointed Kestenberg – who opposed the war – as director of his publishing house. In this role, Kestenberg met artists, writers, and actors such as Ernst Barlach, Tilla Durieux, Oskar Kokoschka, and Else Lasker-Schüler, with whom he remained close friends throughout his life. Through his acquaintance with Gustav Landauer, he came under police surveillance by the imperial authorities; he even visited Rosa Luxemburg in prison.

Following the 1918 revolution, the German Empire became a republic, and Kestenberg, then a member of the far-left Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), entered the Prussian Ministry of Culture. While the ministry required much pragmatism, he was able – as previously mentioned – to pursue a highly active and reform-minded agenda. His motto, “Education toward humanity through and with music,” remains well-known among music educators today.

With the onset of the economic crisis in 1929 and the rise of National Socialism, Prussia’s progressive music policy came increasingly under pressure. As a result of the 1932 “Preußenschlag” – essentially a coup that ousted the still-social democratic Prussian government – Kestenberg lost his position at the young age of fifty. He had hoped in vain to return to his teaching role at the university. In April 1933, just weeks after the Nazis seized power, he fled to Czechoslovakia.

In Prague, Kestenberg drew on his extensive Berlin network to build an internationally active music education society under the auspices of the local government. In 1938, he and his wife Grete left just in time before the Nazi occupation and emigrated to Paris, then on to Palestine. There, he took on the organizational leadership of the Palestine Orchestra. In his final years, Kestenberg contributed to building the music education system in Israel and also taught piano. In the summer of 1953, he returned to West Berlin for a brief visit. He died in Tel Aviv in 1962, nearly eighty years old.

Kestenberg’s significance for the Berlin University of Music is reflected in the fact that recent Kestenberg research has been closely tied to activities at the Berlin University of the Arts, its successor institution. In 2005, a scholarly conference was held under the direction of Susanne Fontaine, Ulrich Mahlert, and the author, in cooperation with the Leo Kestenberg Music School. This led to a collected edition of Kestenberg’s writings and the founding of the International Leo Kestenberg Society (IKG).

Author: Dr. Dietmar Schenk (former head of the University Archives)
In 2023, Dietmar Schenk published the book Education Through Music: Leo Kestenberg and Weimar’s Music Reform 1918–1932 with edition text + kritik.