Paul Schramm

Viennese pianist and composer Paul Schramm (1892-1953) was a celebrated child prodigy and studied piano with the eminent teacher Theodor Leschetizky, under the patronage of the Queen of Romania. At the age of 15, he moved to Berlin, where he commenced an international career, performing with Sir Henry Wood, Wilhelm Mengelberg, Gregor Piatigorsky and Zoltán Székely. He also taught the young Claudio Arrau, who fondly  recalled him as “a very nice man, very intelligent and full of ideas, but a little crazy… I liked him, and I did learn a lot.” He later held teaching positions in Bytom, Erfurt and Rotterdam, where he met his second wife, Diny Soetermeer. They formed a successful piano duo and performed his own arrangements of lighter music alongside the traditional repertoire. By the early 1930s he was a highly established artist, primarily known as an interpreter of Beethoven and the romantics as well as a champion of new music. He had often performed Debussy before the First World War and added Ravel, Prokofiev and De Falla to his repertoire and later Gershwin and Billy Mayerl through the 1920s.  When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, he remained on tour in Indonesia and was joined by his second wife Diny Soetermeer and their son, Hans. Although he was not Jewish, Schramm was later blacklisted due to his modern compositional style and especially his interest in jazz. He remained in Java for four years during which he founded and conducted an Orchestra.

 

Schramm spent most of 1937 on tour for the ABC in Australia and after a visit to New Zealand, they decided to settle in Wellington the following year. He immediately undertook an educational tour of New Zealand Schools. He was declared an enemy alien during the Second World War and became the target of unfounded suspicion of fifth-columnist activity. Banned from broadcasting, he made a living as a taxi driver which later became impossible due to restrictions on how far he could travel from home. Disheartened after his application for New Zealand citizenship was declined, he moved to Australia where he was naturalised in 1947 and became the most widely heard pianist there in the late 1940s, through ‘two bob’ lunch hour recitals, further work in schools, rural educational tours as well as a regular radio show on 2GB, where he chatted informally about the works that he played.

 

Schramm was a charming personality and enjoyed smoking, bridge and cars. He made it his mission to shock the establishment by doing away with formality on the concert platform and making music accessible to everybody, stating in 1946 that “My only object in life is to bring the beauty of music into the offices, the factories, and the penthouses.” Suspected rheumatism forced him to abandon music exploring other ventures, which includes running an unsuccessful ‘lamb and beef shop’ in Manly, and brief aspirations for a career as a greyhound racing bookie. He eventually led a solitary life as a travelling salesman and suffered heart failure, dying at the wheel of his caravan in Woolloomooloo, Queensland in 1953.

 

Schramm composed throughout his life, including 2 operas, 7 orchestral compositions, over 15 chamber works, over 50 songs, over 200 piano pieces and numerous works for 2 pianos, as well as many arrangements for both solo and piano duo. Much of Schramm’s early music is lost. Most of the surviving manuscripts are in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. His styles ranging fom early salon works influenced by his teacher Leschetizky, to Debussy and Prokofiev influenced modernism as well as Jazz, which had become popular in Berlin during the years of the Weimar Republic. Always attuned to current developments, he embraced Neue Sachlichkeit in the early 1930s writing a Zeitoper and suite for Neo-Bechstein - an early electric instrument - with orchestra. Exile in Indonesia provided an opportunity to explore the gamelan and compose film music. He also left a significant body of teaching pieces from the 1920s and 30s. His final compositions from the 1940s are well crafted for piano pieces, mostly for his own use in his own recitals, which combine previous influences often infused with Jazz.

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