| Name | Friedrich (Fritz) Leopold CASSIRER  |
| Birth | 29 Mar 1871, Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland)160 |
| Death | 26 Nov 1926, Berlin, Germany160 |
| Occupation | Music scholar, conductor |
| Father | Julius CASSIRER (1841-1924) |
| Mother | Julcher (Julie) CASSIRER (1844-1924) |
| 1 | Lilly DISPECKER 295,7 |
| Birth | 19 Jan 1876296 |
| Death | 1962297 |
| Father | ? DISPECKER |
| Children | Eva Charlotte (1901-1921) |
Fritz Cassirer was a musician and trained to be a conductor. He was a conductor in Munich and then in an Opera House in London which Julius Cassirer acquired for him. He wrote what experts have said was the best book on Beethoven.
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Cassirer, Fritz298 (b Breslau, 29 March 1871; d Berlin, 26 Nov 1926). German conductor. After studying in Munich, and in Berlin with Pfitzner and Gustav Holländer, he was successively conductor at the opera houses of Lübeck, Posen, Saarbrücken and Elberfeld (1903–5). At the latter he became particularly interested in Delius, whose music had already been played there by Cassirer's predecessor, Hans Haym. According to Thomas Beecham (Frederick Delius, London, 1959, 2/1975, 125ff), Cassirer had naturally good if slightly fastidious taste, and he attached himself to Delius with great devotion; he conducted the première of Koanga at Elberfeld in 1904, helped Delius choose the Nietzsche text for A Mass of Life and organized the première of A Village Romeo and Juliet at the new Berlin Komische Oper in 1907. He accompanied the Komische Oper company to London (where it played only Offenbach) and stayed for a time. Having refused an offer from the Manhattan Opera House, New York, he retired to Munich, devoting himself to philosophical and literary studies.
http://users3.ev1.net/~wbthomp/massrevw.html
(Here are Eric Fenby's liner notes for the 1972 Angel/EMI recording
conducted by Sir Charles Groves.)
A MASS OF LIFE
dedicated to Fritz Cassirer
Text from "ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA" by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Music by FREDERICK DELIUS
for
Soprano, Contralto, Tenor and Baritone Soloists, Double Chorus and Orchestra: 3 flutes with piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, bass oboe; 3 clarinets, bass clarinet; 3 bassoons, double bassoon; 6 horns; 4 trumpets; 3 tenor trombones; bass tuba; 2 harps; percussion and strings.
"It would even be possible to consider all 'Zarathustra' as a musical composition", wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, pondering the great riddle-like prose-poem he had finished in 1885. Be that as it may: clearly no sound-board was more attuned to deepen the ring of Nietzsche's metaphors than the musical imagination of Frederick Delius. The suggestive power of its first response to poetic fragments from Zarathustra - The Midnight-Song given at the Delius concert in London in 1899 and later to become the spiritual axis of A Mass of Life - is so compelling that progression to the work in its present dimensions can now be seen to have been inevitable. Zarathustra is Nietzsche's conception of man at his highest as an individual. His sayings, biblical in style (and which in this recording are sung in German) affirm his doctrine of the man of the future; man as Superman; proud, energetic, strong, dominant, exceptional in his truthfulness, disdaining as weakness the old values of Christianity. Delius, though a man after Nietzsche's heart, had no place for preaching in his music. Through Fritz Cassirer's careful selection of passages suited peculiarly to Delius's musical temperament, a balanced sequence of eleven soliloquies was ultimately devised. Nevertheless, A Mass of Life - and I can imagine Delius's dry remarks on framing the title - is a choral celebration of the Will to say Yea! to life in the joy of the "Eternal Recurrence of all things" - Nietzsche's perennial theme - rather than in desistance from life, a slaying of self to gain the promise of "life-eternal". This is the music of Delius's full manhood - the music of a virile, healthy, fastidious man, a restless adventurer and climber of mountains: not yet the perpetual harper on transcience. The Mass is divided into Two Parts; the singers share the words of Zarathustra, personified in the baritone soloist, now declaiming, now meditating, now mingling dynamically as human instruments in the orchestral texture. The first complete performance was directed by Sir Thomas Beecham in London in June 1909.
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