Harry Goldschmidt

The classically educated parents came from non-practising, fully assimilated German-Jewish families and acquired Swiss citizenship on 8 August 1919 in the city of Basel, where father Siegfried had become the youngest bank director in Switzerland at the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (now Credit Suisse) in 1905.

After attending the Humanistische Gymnasium in his home town, Goldschmidt began studying musicology (Karl Nef and Jacques Handschin), ethnology at the University of Basel in 1928.

A doctoral thesis in music ethnology was begun after 1936, but remained unfinished due to active service in the Swiss Armed Forces (1939–1945) during the Second World War.

As part of this work, he founded and directed a mixed choir, the Singgruppe Basel, and played a major role in the organisation of the Volkssinfoniekonzerte.

Goldschmidt not only conceived the concerts from a music-historical point of view, but also prepared them in a popular-scientific manner by means of introductory evenings that illustrated the connection between music and society, and they were held at the highest level, according to the motto: "For the working class – the best!"

Goldschmidt had developed the concept of the Swiss Film Archive together with Georg Schmidt, who had been director of the Kunstmuseum Basel since 1939, and others with an academic interest in new media.

Goldschmidt, who had active contacts with the anti-fascist German emigration in Switzerland during the National Socialist era, received various requests from Germany in the post-war period to participate in the construction of a new, democratic cultural life.

But these were only pretexts to get rid of Goldschmidt, as were many other non-conformist "Western immigrants" – especially after the so-called field affair, whose Stalinist show trials and "purges" shook the entire Soviet sphere of power.

However, important cultural and political forces in the GDR, which was founded on 7 October 1949, were not at all of Soviet opinion: there, the anti-fascist attitude, the profound musicological knowledge, the experience in music education and the Marxist views of Goldschmidt were very much appreciated.

Goldschmidt owed this to a large extent to the determined efforts of friends such as Georg Knepler, Hanns Eisler, Erich Weinert, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Paul Dessau among others.

This subsequent standard work of Schubert's biography was accepted as a dissertation by the Humboldt University in Berlin and Goldschmidt was awarded a doctorate in philosophy on 29 April 1959.

The popular-scientific communication of the insights gained was not neglected: Goldschmidt conceived the Beethoven Complete Edition of the VEB Deutsche Schallplatten Berlin and wrote a large number of cover texts for it.