Arno Nadel

Arno Nadel was a man of many talents: a composer, arranger, conductor, painter, poet, dramatist, and writer.

He was born on 3 October 1878 into a Hasidic family in Vilnius (then part of the Russian Empire). He began his musical education in Königsberg with the renowned cantor Eduard Birnbaum (1855–1920) and continued his studies with Robert Schwalm (1845–1912). In 1895 he enrolled at the Jüdische Lehrerbildungsanstalt (Jewish Teachers’ Training Institute) in Berlin, where he settled permanently after completing his studies in 1900. There he continued to study composition with Max Julius Loewengard (1860–1915) and Arnold Ludwig Mendelssohn (1855–1933). Among his earliest compositions are Trauermarsch auf den Tod der Kaiserin Friedrich (Funeral March on the Death of Empress Frederick [the name by which Victoria, Princess Royal—Empress of Germany and Queen of Prussia, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain—was known]) from 1901, and Der Parom from 1910. He also composed several chamber works, including two string quartets, a piano quintet, a suite for two pianos, and songs.

From 1903, Nadel was responsible for the musical supplement of the Jewish Zionist journal Ost und West, and between 1916 and 1918 also for the journal Der Jude, published by Martin Buber. He worked as a music critic for Vossische Zeitung, Vorwärts, and Der Musik, and also wrote on commission for many other periodicals. In addition, he gave private lessons in music, art history, and literature.

In 1916 he became choir director at the Kottbusser Ufer Synagogue. Over time, as part of this position, he also began supervising musical activities in all synagogues in Berlin. During this period, he became increasingly involved in composing and arranging works based on traditional synagogue chant, biblical texts, and Jewish folk music. Most of the works created at that time were published (Jüdische Liebeslieder, Jontefflieder) or served as musical supplements to his articles in the Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. With the exception of Zemirot Shabbat: Die häuslichen Sabbatgesänge, his compositions written after 1933 survived only in manuscript form.

Nadel’s compositions fulfilled several functions, as they were performed not only in concerts and synagogue services. They also acquired an educational dimension during the composer’s lecture-recitals, introducing Jewish audiences to various forms of music on both theoretical and practical levels.

In 1923, the Jewish community of Berlin commissioned Nadel to collect and prepare new music for the liturgy. This resulted in a seven-volume anthology of manuscript synagogue music for cantor, choir, and organ, completed on 8 November 1938. The anthology reflects Nadel’s passion for collecting a broad repertoire of Jewish music. It contains Central European folk and synagogue songs as well as cantorial music—works which, in Nadel’s view, deserved new arrangements. He also collected old manuscripts of Jewish liturgical music (for example, the Hannoversches Kompendium from 1744) and included repertoire he had worked on during his studies with Eduard Birnbaum in Königsberg. In this way, Birnbaum’s handwritten scores and notes became part of Nadel’s extensive music library.

The largest and best-preserved part of Nadel’s output consists of dramatic scripts. He wrote several librettos, seven dramas, and more than 2,000 poems and poetic cycles inspired by Polish and Russian Jewish theatre. A milestone of his work is the poetry collection Der Ton: Die Lehre von Gott und Leben (The Tone: The Teaching of God and Life) from 1920. As an expressionist, Nadel gained his greatest popularity in the early 1920s through poetry inspired by the spiritual philosophy of Taoism. Some of these poems were published as a collection in 1923. The poetry volume Der weissagende Dionysos from 1925 represents the result of twenty-five years of his literary work. By 1935, a total of a dozen books containing Nadel’s poems had been published and distributed throughout Germany. From 1910 onward, his poetry was compared with the works of major German lyric poets—Alfred Mombert, Theodor Däubler, and Oskar Loerke. With the rise of Nazism, all further publication of his poetic works was banned.

From 1918, Arno Nadel also devoted himself to painting. Rooted both in Judaism and expressionism, he created the cycle Vierzig Gestalten der Bibel (Forty Figures of the Bible) as well as numerous self-portraits.

After the introduction of Nazi repression, Nadel had the opportunity to obtain an exit visa to England, but he did not feel capable of undertaking such a journey. On 12 March 1943 he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered later that same year.

Before his deportation, Nadel managed to entrust his entire library to a neighbor, who succeeded in saving a significant portion of the material. After the war, it was returned to the composer’s family. It was later acquired and taken to the United States, together with his own collections, by the passionate collector and personal friend of the composer, Eric Mandell. Nadel’s diaries were saved by the painter Käthe Kollwitz.