The Life of Eugen Engel and his Opera “Grete Minde”

“The performance of Grete Minde represents all of the creativity that was destroyed by the Nazis” – Jan Agee (Granddaughter of Eugen Engel)

In the California home of Janice Agee stands a beautiful, darkened wooden upright piano: a silent artefact steeped in sadness, love, and care. It had been purchased some years earlier by her mother who, having fled the Nazi occupied Netherlands, anticipated that her father Eugen would join her, and pursue his musical interests in safety. Tragically, Eugen would never get to play the piano, nor make it to freedom. In early 1943, Eugen Engel was deported to Westerbork transit camp. He then arrived in a mass transport to the Sobibór death camp where he was murdered three days later. Remarkably, his daughter Eva (Lowen nee Löwenberger), had managed to carry her father's compositions to the US, but it was only after her death in 2006 that her children took on revisiting this incredible body of work in detail, as set aside in a trunk in Jan’s basement.  In addition to documents, letters, and manuscripts of smaller compositions, they found a large-format score and a piano reduction - the sheet music of the opera "Grete Minde".

Following Jan Agee’s initiative to install a local Stolperstein for her relatives, Anna Skryleva, the music director of the Theatre Magdeburg in Berlin, discovered Engel’s unseen opera, and was able to look through the piano excerpt. As a result, "Grete Minde" was performed for the first time in February 2022, almost 90 years after its completion and almost 80 years after the death of its creator. The following article illuminates the amazing story of how this private, family archive has informed cultural memory through public performance, whilst commemorating the life and works of its creator Eugen Engel. It also includes a recorded discussion between Eugen’s granddaughter Jan Agee, Ulrike Schröder of Theatre Magdeburg, and Hannah Wilson (Content Director, Music & the Holocaust).

This article is inspired by the extensive research into the biography of Eugen Engel by Ulrike Schröder.

“I don't want to suffer injustice; I want justice and love!” – Grete, “Grete Minde” (Act I)

Life Before the War

Eugen Engel was born on 19th September 1875 in Widminnen (East Prussia, today Wydminy in the Warmia-Masuria Voivodship of Poland). He was the son of Jewish merchant and landowner Samuel Engel and his Jewish wife Berta, née Salinger, who both passed away before the outbreak of the war. He had 12 siblings who were born between 1857 and 1883. Widminnen was primarily a Protestant town, it housed a small number of Jewish families. In 1892, Eugen and many other members of the Engel family moved to Berlin; Eugen eventually became a merchant like his father, trading fabrics for women’s clothing.

On 18th June 1907 he married Lea Jacoby, a younger sister of his sister-in-law Ella, in Heilsberg, East Prussia. On 19th July 1910, their daughter Eva was born, and the family moved to Charlottenstraße in today's Mitte district, where Engel ran his business. Unfortunately, Lea died young at the age of 46, a loss that Eugen felt deeply. In addition to his business, Eugen was a lover of music. He enjoyed listening to it with his daughter and taking her to music stores and was friends with musicians and professionals such as Engelbert Humperdinck. Eugen began to compose his own music in his spare time, having had private lessons, some of which was performed in Berlin. His granddaughter Jan believes that he was primarily self-taught; he did not attend music school or study it academically. Inside the trunk, Jan also found written correspondence between Eugen and several highly regarded musicians, including conductors Bruno Walter and Leo Blech, as well as pianist Edwin Fischer. Eugen sought their advice on his musical endeavours and was considered by his peers to be musically cultured and technically skilled. It is believed that in 1914, he began to work almost solely on his opera, “Grete Minde” until around 1933.

“Grete Minde”

“Grete Minde” is based on a short novel with the same title by the influential 19th-century German writer Theodor Fontane, who had been compared to Charles Dickens. He wrote this particularly tragic love story following research into real events that took place in Tangermünde in the 17th century. In Fontane’s novel, Grete is belittled and rejected by her family, forcing her to leave the town with her friend Valin, with whom she later has a child. Valin unexpectedly passes and asks Grete to return to Tangermünde so the child can be taken care of. She is brutally refused aid by her family and her inheritance, and, unable to access her rights as a woman, proceeds to set the town aflame. She climbs to the top of the burning church tower with her child, who burn alive in front of everyone before the town is destroyed by the fire:

“The sun has gone out on the battlements, the day is dead, dead is the light, dead is the heat. Fire! The little hands are so stiff and cold you should warm them. Stars, come down. My child is freezing to death... Flame! Flame! Valtin, my Valtin, I come to you. Fire! Fire! Fire!

            (Act 3 of ‘Grete Minde’)

The story of Grete Minde is defined by the opera’s Director Olivia Fuchs as, “an opera about love in the first place. Grete was loved and can love as almost the only character in the opera”. Set across three acts, it also reflects issues of feminism and masculinity, injustice and revenge, and comments on the bigotry of bourgeois society at the time; these themes were of concern to Fontane. Through the opera, her voice as an outsider is heard. While Ulrike Schröder of Theatre Magdeburg is rightfully hesitant to draw symbolic parallels between Grete’s story and Eugen Engel’s ongoing status as a persecuted Jew in war-torn Europe, it is indeed possible to do so when watches the opera knowing the experiences and fate of its composer.  

(Original cover and pages from Eugen Engel’s Opera “Grete Minde”, Courtesy of Jan Agee)

Jan had always known there was an opera score hidden away, but was unaware of the impact it would later have. She began to show it to her contacts in the music department of the University of California in Davis, who assured her that the opera was of high quality and technique. It became clear to her that this music was worth preserving. In addition to the opera there were around twenty lieder (a German song that traditionally sets poetry to music performed by a single vocalist and piano accompaniment), some of which Jan had performed at a house party in 2013. Similarly, following a call for objects associated with pre-war Jewish life and the Holocaust from the Jewish Museum Berlin, Jan was contacted by the archival director, Aubrey Pomerance, who also recognised the significance of these items. Jan decided to keep the opera score of “Grete Minde” in the family for now but had large scale scans of it produced which could then be shared with interested parties.

In 2019, Jan and her family had a stolperstein, or “stumbling stone”, placed in the pavement outside of Eugen’s former home at Charlottenstrasse 74, his Berlin address, which was destroyed during the war. As part of this ceremony, Jan had contacted a local music school who agreed to perform some of Eugen’s music. Moreover, the family connected with Anna Skryleva, a conductor and general music director of the Theater Magdeburg who was sent Eugen’s music, which she played herself. In an interview for The Guardian, Anna stated: “I was immediately captured. It is replete with interesting harmonious expressions and stylistic phrases. I was struck by its touches of Wagner, Strauss, and Korngold, by the confidence of a layperson to write such an ambitious work.”

With a mission to bring Eugen Engel’s music to the stage, the theatre took on the challenge to prepare a live, operatic performance of “Grete Minde”. For the first time ever, this score was to be heard publicly, and by his own family. On 13th February 2022, following a delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic and almost 80 years after the death of its creator, the opera had its premiere at the Theater Magdeburg, featuring a costly ensemble of an organ, two harps, strings and brass, a full choir, and solo singers. The sold-out performance received rave reviews, with one critic describing it as being “superbly crafted, lush late romanticism…one sits in the semi-darkness of the Magdeburg Opera House and listens to sounds that – apart from the rehearsals – have never been heard live, not even by the composer himself. They are delicate, changing smoothly from exuberant strings to fragile cantilenas, with the great fire in the finale, the flames first lick the woodwinds before the fantastic choir takes over”.