Gohr, Peter Emil

Preface

Gohr, Peter Emil – Paraphrase über ein altdeutsches Weihnachtslied for Piano, Violin and Cello (Piano performance score & 2 parts)

(Cologne, 25 January 1842 – Antwerp, 11 January 1928)

(1885?)

Presumably Peter Emil Gohr was a music teacher at Ernst Koch’s Gesang-Institut in Cologne before moving to Antwerp in 1869. In 1871, he married the German Theresia Rochels in Cologne, after which the couple settled in Antwerp. They had 14 children, only a few of whom reached adulthood. Gohr worked in Antwerp as a pianist, conductor of the Liedertafel, composer and music teacher, and frequented the circles around Peter Benoit. Like many Germans living in Antwerp at the time, they left the city at the outbreak of World War I and went to live in Cologne. They returned to Antwerp in 1916 but, according to later police reports, he was said to have been ‘rather German-minded’ and he was suspected of espionage and hostility. These allegations caused Gohr and his wife to leave Antwerp again in 1919, before returning without permission and the necessary papers in 1921. They then moved in with a son who did hold Belgian citizenship due to his birth in Antwerp. Given their age and the fact that they did not bother anyone, they were otherwise left alone by the police.
Peter Emil Gohr mainly composed songs (often set to German poems), folk song arrangements for various settings, (dance) music for piano solo, piano four hands and two pianos, and some chamber music works, including a Trio in F Dur für Piano, Violine und Violoncelle (Repertoire Explorer. The Flemish Music Collection 2533). For the same instruments, he wrote this Paraphrase über ein altdeutsches Weihnachtslied, probably in 1885. That Christmas song, introduced after two bars of introduction, is O du fröhliche, whose text for the first of the three stanzas was written by Johannes Daniel Falk (1768-1826). The melody goes back to the Marian hymn O Sanctissima sung in Sicily at the end of the eighteenth century.
Gohr dedicated the work to one Jacob F. Myhre. Presumably it concerns the Norwegian Jacob Fabricius Myhre (1860-1930) who, after working for ship brokers in Glasgow, London and Dunkirk, settled in Antwerp in 1899 where he founded his own company IF Myhre & Co. In 1905, he became the first director of the Baltic and White Sea Conference.

Jan Dewilde (translation: Jasmien Dewilde)

Reprint of a copy from the library of the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. This score was published in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Flemish Music (www.svm.be).

read German and Flemish preface … > HERE