Hans-Martin Majewski Film-Jazz

Hans Martin Majewski

Hans-Martin Majewski, born on 14 January 1911 in Schlawe in Pomerania and died in 1997, was a composer and conductor and ranks among the most versatile and prolific musicians of post-war Germany. From 1948 on, the multiple winner of critics' prizes and of the German Film Award wrote the music for some 200 feature films as well as for countless cultural, documentary and television films, radio plays, cabaret and theatre.

After breaking off his medical studies, he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, where his teachers included Kurt Thomas, Robert Teichmüller and Bruno Walter. In 1935 he moved to Berlin and found work as a répétiteur and conductor at the Theater des Volkes. There the director Arthur Maria Rabenalt discovered him and engaged him in 1939 for his film Flucht ins Dunkel. His first operetta, Insel der Träume, had already been composed in 1938.

Majewski survived the war as a soldier on the eastern front; afterwards he settled as a composer in Hamburg, worked for literary cabarets and wrote radio plays for the NWDR. In 1948 he returned to film with Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Liebe 47, the screen version of Wolfgang Borchert's Draußen vor der Tür. For Postlagernd Turteltaube in 1952 he composed, together with Professor Oskar Sala, the first wholly electronic film score in Germany — long before the synthesizer, the Trautonium produced sounds never heard before.

Alongside his film work, Majewski created the music for around 100 radio plays, among them Faust I (1947) and Gestatten — mein Name ist Cox (1955). For the theatre he composed some 80 stage scores; among his greatest successes is the music for Peter Weiss's internationally acclaimed play on the murder of Marat, premiered in 1964/65 at Berlin's Schiller-Theater.

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