Eduard Künneke

Der Vetter aus Dingsda, staged in Berlin in 1921, brought Künneke international success; Strahlender Mond is among its numbers. He was born in Emmerich on the Lower Rhine in 1885 and went to Berlin in 1903 to read musicology and literary history before studying composition with Max Bruch at the Royal Academy of Arts. From 1907 he worked as repetiteur and chorus master at the Neues Operettentheater, directed recordings for Odeon between 1908 and 1910, and in 1910–11 worked at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, including incidental music for Goethe's Faust. Robins Ende (1909) reached some thirty-eight German houses; Coeur-As followed in 1913. He subsequently wrote more than a dozen operettas. His daughter Evelyn Künneke became a singer and actress. He died in Berlin in 1953. He had become a master pupil of Bruch in 1906. Lady Hamilton and Glückliche Reise followed among the stage works, and he wrote the score for Ernst Lubitsch's silent film Das Weib des Pharao; the Tänzerische Suite sets a jazz band beside symphonic forces. He also worked on a German translation of Beowulf.