Fritz Berend
German English Conductor, Music Director
Fritz Berend (10 March 1889 – 29 December 1955) was a German, later an English conductor, theater and music director as well as Kapellmeister, composer and musicologist.
Life
Early life and education
Born in Hanover during the Gründerzeit of the German Empire as scion of a Jewish scholarly family, son of a lawyer and notary and later Privy Councillor of Justice Emil Berend (1846–1920) and his second wife Leonore, née Cohen, Behren grew up in Hanover with three half siblings, including the later literary scholar Eduard Berend (1883–1972). He took his Abitur at the Schillergymnasium there, studied law from 1907, initially for two semesters, but then moved to Munich to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he studied musicology, philosophy and art history under Heinrich Wölfflin, Theodor Lipps and Theodor Kroyer. Under Adolf Sandberger, Berend completed his doctorate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1913. The title was Nicolaus Adam Strungk 1640–1700. Sein Leben und seine Werke mit Beiträgen zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters in Celle, Hannover, Leipzig.
Meanwhile Berend had already received practical music lessons from Emil Blume for violoncello and Heinrich Lutter for piano, and had taken further practical lessons at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München with August Schmidt-Lindner, Friedrich Klose and Felix Mottl.
Career in Germany
In 1913, Berend got the position as assistant of Bruno Walter at the National Theatre Munich. In the following year 1914, Berend took up his first position as a theatre Kapellmeister in Freiburg im Breisgau, but this was already interrupted the following year by the war effort in World War I. Berend served from 1915 in the 4th Baden Field Artillery Regiment No. 66, became an officer and was awarded the Iron Cross second and first class as well as the "Baden Order of Merit", before he returned to Freiburg in 1918 and was able to work as a theatre Kapellmeister again until 1920.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fritz Berend” is german English Conductor, Music Director. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fritz, Berend and German, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23062688. VIAF identifies the subject as 15511943. The Library of Congress control number is no2013039331. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1889, 1955, 1846 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fritz Berend” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.