Keller, Hans Heinrich, 1919-1985 (music critic)
Dates
- Existence: 1919 - 1985
Biography
Hans Heinrich Keller (1919-85), music critic, was born in Döbling, Vienna, Austria, on 11 March 1919, the son of the architect Fritz Keller (d. 1939) and his wife, Grete Grotte (1883-1959). In the 1940s he took his licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music, played violin in string quartets and orchestras, and later became a coach (or 'anti-coach') of string quartets; he reviewed film music, and in a book's worth of polemical notices, essays, and pamphlets related practice to (his own) theory; he began to champion the music of Benjamin Britten, on whom he edited an influential collection of essays (1952); he wrote music and dramas (though little remains) as well as the librettos for Benjamin Frankel's opera Marching Song and Josef Tal's Der Turm; he later taught composition and translated librettos. He died childless from motor neurone disease at his home, 3 Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, on 6 November 1985 and was cremated at Golders Green crematorium. He was one of many distinguished Austro-German émigrés who enriched British musical culture in the post-war years.
Found in 1 Collection or Record:
Hans Keller: Music manuscripts
MS music compositions, sketches, 'functional analyses'; also a composition by Judith Bingham (1981), first proof opers vocal score of Benjamin Britten's 'The turn of the screw', amended by [Britten], [Imogen Holst] and [Keller] (c.1955); vocal score of Britten's 'War Requiem', pre-publication dye-line, not published in this form, with amendments possibly by Britten (1961); André Chaikowsky, 'Trio notturno for violin, violoncello and piano', MS score (1978).