Conductor; born 1903 in Berlin, died 4 December 1960 in Sheffield.
Biography
The conductor Walter Goehr was born in Berlin in 1903, where he was later a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. He became a conductor at the Berliner Rundfunk between 1925 and 1931, emigrating to the United Kingdom in 1933.
Between 1933 and 1939 he was a conductor and music director of Columbia Records. In 1942, Goehr became a conductor, composer and arranger for the BBC, and from 1943 was on the staff at Morley College in London.
He also conducted the UK premiere of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie in 1953. Walter died in City Hall, Sheffield, on December 4th 1960, immediately after conducting a performance of Handel's Messiah. Walter's son, Alexander Goehr, is a composer living in the United Kingdom.
Links and Sources
Walter Goehr’s biography on Naxos Music
Walter Goehr’s obituary in The Musical Times
Walter Goehr’s film credits on IMDB.
Music and the Holocaust article on Walter Goehr
Listen to Goehr’s suite from his score for Great Expectations
Listen to the Malpopita, Goehr’s 1931 opera, released in 2003.
Goehr, Lydia. ‘Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life’ in ‘Driven Into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States’. Ed. Reinhold Brinkmann, Christoph Wolf. (London: University of California Press, 1998) pp. 66-71.
