On account of his early death from tuberculosis, and because the results of his work went unpublished or were published only without attribution in respect of the musical score, his contribution went unrecognised by mainstream Brecht scholarship till the mid 1970s.
He and his twin sister, Julie Anne Elisabeth "Anneliese" Bruinier, were the youngest of their parents six recorded children.
[3] Jan Berend Hendrik Bruinier (1863-1935) had been born in Amsterdam and come to Germany, having held a senior position with a Biebrich company since 1904 and then, in 1907, accepting appointment as Chief Executive Officer ("Geschaeftsführer") with a heavy engineering firm in Berlin-Steglitz.
Franz attended the prestigious Paulsen-Gymnasium (secondary school) in Steglitz until he was fifteen, while simultaneously receiving piano lessons at "Sandow's Music Academy".
During 1924 and 1925 he worked as an accompanist for Jean Moreau, a favourite singer who performed "chanson-style" songs at Rudolf Nelson's "Black Cat" cabaret in the Friedrichstraße.
He composed the music for Walter Mehring's radio play series, "Sahara" and worked extensively for various Berlin theatres.
Examples of his work included the music for a fairy-tale presentation at the Lustspielhaus (theatre), and for the stage presentation "Liebeswirren im Alkoven" (loosely, "Turbulent love in the alcoves"), the fifth episode of the revue "From the rhythm of the times" ("Aus dem Rhythmus der Zeiten"), which was staged at Luise Werckmeister's "Summer-night theatre at the zoo".
[1][5] In the Autumn/Fall of 1926 the Ullstein editor Reinhard R. Braun founded a new cabaret series, the so-called "MA" (Montag-Abends / Monday evenings).
[1] For instance, he wrote the music for "Paris Burns" ("Paris brennt"), a poem by Yvan Goll which the cabaret impresario Reinhard Braun had adapted to incorporate an "ecstatic scene with jazz", and which ended up incorporating a version of "The Great Gate of Kiev from Mussorgsky's popular suite, Pictures at an Exhibition.
[1] Bruinier spent the summer of 1927 in the Harz region where he served as music director for the festival at the open-air Bergtheater built into the hillside above Thale.
On the recommendation of Tilla Durieux he applied successfully for the post of Kapellmeister (loosely, "musical director") with the Netherlands Operetta Society in The Hague.
It was the librettist himself, Yvan Goll, writing to Nino Frank, who commended the "mimicry" in the production staged by the "MA" cabaret, "with the musical accompaniment by a twenty year old composer in which the Marseillaise, French bugle calls, the Funeral march and modernist blues harmonies make my verses resonate even more aggressively than in Royal Palace", referring to a Kurt Weill opera which also featured lyrics by Goll, and which had its Paris premier just two days after the "MA" cabaret in Berlin premiered "Paris Burns".
Evidently Bruinier used the French national anthem, generic horn signals, death marches and other traditional themes in his material, and distorted them using modern jazz and blues harmonies and rhythms.
Basing himself on these surviving fragments, the musicologist Fritz Hennenberg sums up Bruinier as an accomplished composer whose greatest strengths were in respect of effective textual support and interpretation.
From the state of the manuscripts in question it is clear that Bruiniers contributions ranged from simply writing out melodies that Brecht himself had produced to coming up with his own independent compositions.