Manfred Gurlitt

[3] He studied composition for a time with Engelbert Humperdinck and music theory with Hans Hermann and Hugo Kaun.

From 1908 to 1910, he was a coach at the Berlin Court Opera and in 1911 acted as musical assistant to Karl Muck at Bayreuth.

He used an offstage choir of sopranos that, in addition to commenting on the action, began and ended the opera with the text "we poor people".

His mother Annarella tried to satisfy the Nazis of his non-Jewish heritage by certifying first that his Jewish paternal grandmother had converted to Protestantism and second that Gurlitt was not the son of Fritz Gurlitt, but of Willi Waldecker, the man Annarella married not long after Fritz died in 1893.

[2] German authorities frustrated his attempts to secure a teaching position in Japan for months, until he managed win readmission to the Reichsmusikkammer (State Music Institute) and proposed a trip abroad for "study, observation, and documentary" activities.

In these positions he presented the Japanese premieres of many works from the standard repertoire by Mozart, Wagner, and Richard Strauss.

Gurlitt's attitude to the Nazi regime remained equivocal, and he was a regular guest at the German Embassy in Tokyo.

[11] In 1952 he founded the Gurlitt Opera Company in Tokyo, which had for its official opening the Japan premier of Mozart's The Magic Flute in February 1953.

[13] Gurlitt conducted the world premiere of his Violin Concerto, written many years earlier, with the Tokyo Philharmonic on 1 February 1955.

On 28 February 1958 in Tokyo he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross of the German Federal Republic's order of merit.