Movement
Melian_movement-2020_Kunsthaus_14 -2-web
Movement, 2020
Installation, 16 light bulbs, soundtrack
Violin: Ruth May
Media technology: Jürgen Galli
With her installation, Michaela Melián sheds light on the almost forgotten biography of the Hamburg-based musician Susanne Lachmann. For this, she has translated the stages of the violinist’s life, who fled from the Nazis into British exile, into a notation for violin. Synchronised with the lighting up of the light bulbs, the stretched sound traces a course of life that found no place in history for the career of the gifted musician. The sound stretches, jumps unexpectedly and stretches out again; this is how Melián composes a musical movement for Susanne Lachmann, of whose concerts not a single recording has survived, but who nevertheless nevertheless left her mark on numerous pupils in Scotland with her passion for music.
Susanne Lachmann, born on 11 April 1888 in Frankfurt am Main, studied violin in Frankfurt, Leipzig and Vienna. She then worked as a violinist in the Alberdingk String Quartet in Vienna and then moved to Hamburg to take up the 2nd violin in the Bandler Quartet in 1925. In 1931 she made her debut with the Schneider Quartet in a concert at the Kleine Musikhalle in Hamburg which was highly praised by the press. She also appeared as a soloist in concert and on the radio and was concertmaster of an early music orchestra in Hamburg. She teaches privately and at the Pädagogische Akademie in Altona. In 1925 she marries Jeremias Waschitz in Hamburg. Their daughter Ruth is born in Braunschweig in 1926. They divorced in 1928.
After the Nazis came to power, the Schneider Quartet became a trio, as the first violinist, Alexander Schneider, had to leave Germany. In 1935, Lachmann is expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer on account of her Jewish origins and banned from performing. From then on, she was only allowed to perform as part of the Jewish Cultural Association, for example on 21 March 1935 in the Kleine Musikhalle with works by Georg Philipp Telemann, Georg Friedrich Händel, Johann Sebastian Bach and Benedetto Marcello. In October 1935 she decides to dissolve her flat in Goernestraße in Hamburg and emigrate to England with her daughter. However, as a foreign musician she was unable to obtain a work permit in London and therefore had to turn down offers of public concerts, so in 1936 she moved to the north of Scotland.
north of Scotland. At the Gordonstoun School in Elgin, which the Kurt Hahn, who had also fled Germany because of his Jewish origins, founded the school in 1934, she is able to teach as a music teacher for free board and lodging. She lives with her daughter in a small room; her Steinway grand piano is set up in the school’s auditorium.It is not until 1940 that the school pays her a regular salary, but even this is not to be enough for pension rights in England. Gradually she becomes active in music and music education at Gordonstoun School in a comprehensive way. She learns various wind instruments for this purpose, so that she can better guide the pupils. She founded a school orchestra and directed the choir. With both ensembles she develops a diverse repertoire and gives countless concerts.
After the end of the Second World War, Susanne Lachmann remained at Gordonstoun School and made no attempt to return to musical life as a performer. In the mid-1950s she applied for compensation in Hamburg. This was gradually approved, so that she could draw a pension from the end of 1957 and retire at the age of just under 70. On 25 June 1967, Susanne Lachmann died in Elgin at the age of seventy-eight.
Sources: Sophie Fetthauer: Susanne Lachmann, in: Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit, Claudia Maurer Zenck, Peter Petersen (eds.), Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2010.
(https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00004243).