From Australia’s Jewish past

Werner Felix Baer – musician, composer, and broadcaster

Werner was born on 29 April 1914 in Berlin, the second son of Jewish parents Robert,  a merchant, and his wife Lucie.

His family was prosperous and well-off, his father being the proprietor of a menswear business.

Werner gravitated to music, was playing the piano at three years of age, composing at six, playing concertos at ten, and commenced organ lessons at thirteen. Werner completed his secondary schooling in Berlin and then attended the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and the Stern’sches Konservatorium, where he studied for performance and teaching diplomas. His subjects included theory, piano, organ, composition, and conducting.  He claimed to have been a piano student of Artur Schnabel, an Austrian classical pianist and composer who has been referred to as “the man who invented Beethoven”.  Later, he studied organ with Professor Straube, Cantor of the historic St Thomas’ Church in Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian Bach had played in earlier years.

Werner’s education ended abruptly when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and his wish to be an operatic conductor would not work for him at that time. He was, however, able to do some work at the Städtische Oper (under an assumed name), and became the Kleimkunstbühne Musical Director from 1935 to 1938.  Werner’s Jewish background limited his musical activities, which were mostly within the community.  This included becoming the youngest organist at the age of twenty-one, at the Prinzregentenstraße Synagogue from 1935 to 1938 and then choirmaster and organist at the synagogue in Levetzowstraße.  His other love was jazz, and he played piano in ‘Sid Kay’s Fellows’ band and taught organ and modern dance music at the Jewish Hollaender Private Music School between 1937 and 1938.  On 31 May 1938, he married Ilse in Berlin.

After Kristallnacht on 9 and 10 November 1938, Werner was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp but was released on 27 November under unknown circumstances (though it has been suggested that a financial inducement was paid to Nazi officials).  Having been released, he had to leave the country within three days, and with 54 Reichsmark, he left Berlin with his wife, crossing the Brenner Pass into Italy, and then sailed aboard the Potsdam, bound for Siam, now Thailand.   At Colombo, he learned that a musical position was available in Singapore, and he disembarked there on 23 December. He worked as the municipal organist in the Victoria Memorial Hall, as a performer on the radio, and as a teacher at the Far Eastern Music School and Raffles College.

Following a day’s internment in Singapore as an enemy alien, Werner travelled to Australia with his wife and, by then, a daughter aboard the Queen Mary.  They reached Sydney on 25 September 1940 and were interned at No. 3 Camp, Tatura, Victoria, where he actively participated in musical and theatrical activities. Freed on 31 January 1942, he worked as a fruit picker at Shepparton, enlisted in the Citizen Military Forces on 8 April, and served with the 8th Employment Company. Promoted to acting sergeant in November 1944, he was then discharged in November 1945.  He became an Australian citizen on 14 May 1946.

Werner and his family settled in Sydney, and he worked at a variety of freelance jobs, including film-score writing, as an Eisteddfod adjudicator, musical director for the radio program ‘Australia’s Amateur Hour’, choirmaster at the Great Synagogue from 1946 to 1950 and again in 1961 to 1964, and then at the Emanuel Synagogue for many years.  The choir under Werner was considered one of the finest in Australia, and this commitment to world-class music remains part of Emanuel’s identity.  He also found time to conduct the Hurlstone Choral Society, tour as an accompanist. He occasionally made appearances as a conductor for the ABC Military Band and as a recitalist on the organ in the Sydney Town Hall.

In 1951, Werner was appointed by the ABC as the NSW State Supervisor of Music and later, Music Development Officer, a position that allowed him to continue his diverse concert activities. He took the security of that position in preference to an offer of a teaching position at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. During his time at the ABC, he held several positions, including federal director of music and music editor.

Werner became a prominent figure in Sydney’s musical life, notably as a painstaking coach of singers – the great Australian tenor Ronald Dowd said of him that ‘he made a Lieder singer out of me’ (a German art song form for a solo voice and piano). His involvements were many, including conductor of the Sydney Male Choir, musical director of the Sydney Jewish Choral Society, vice-president of the Federated Music Clubs of Australia, office bearer of the National Lieder Society, and life member of the NSW Wagner Society.  He also supported Musica Viva, the Sydney Schubert Society Inc., the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, the National Music Camps Association, the Fellowship of Australian Composers, and the Workers’ Educational Association. According to the Australian conductor Eric Clapham, he was ‘a good judge of musicians and had an immense knowledge of the repertoire’.

As a composer, Werner wrote in an essentially conservative, tonal idiom: his heart was in the German concert and operatic tradition, and he had little sympathy with early music or modernist movements. Given this background, it was inevitable that many of his compositions were for singers; Joan Sutherland and bass-baritone Peter Dawson recorded pieces by him.

He was honoured with an MBE in 1977 and retired from the ABC in 1979. He died on 28 January 1992. He was survived by his second wife, having divorced Ilse, his daughter Miriam, son Peter, and another son who had predeceased him from his second marriage.

While the ABC State Manager for Western Australia reported to head office, after a musical tour in 1949, that Werner was ‘a pleasant fellow’ and ‘most helpful’ in dealings with the soloist, others considered him ‘severe’.  Werner once told an ABC colleague, ‘I am not an administrator; I am a musician’.    His name graced prizes and awards with the Royal South Street Eisteddfod, the Sydney Eisteddfod Opera, the Werner and Sibilla Baer Memorial Award, and the NSW Council of the Federated Music Clubs of Australia holds an annual piano competition named after him.  A photographic portrait by Max Dupain is part of the National Portrait Gallery collection.

His compositions include numerous songs, choral and liturgical works, ballet suites, piano works, and film music. Of his many songs and compositions, the most frequently played are: Test of Strength, Life of the Insects, Harvester’s Song and Psalm 8.

His settings for the prayers Adon Olam and Mah Tovu are the more frequently used of his liturgical compositions.  Werner composed several ‘art songs’ and some music for children, including Under the Coolibah Tree: Songs for Young Australians.

 

The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:

Australian Dictionary of Biography – John Carmody; Research by Karen Fox; Stories from the Dunera and Queen Mary; ABC; NSW Conservatorium of Music; Interview from the Sophie Caplan Collection; National Portrait Gallery.

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