Rudolf Nelson

Rudolf Nelson was a leading composer of cabaret songs, film music, and vaudeville during the first three decades of the 20th century in Germany. Born into a poor Jewish family from Prussia in 1878 and brought up in Berlin, Nelson took up the piano as a young boy, and later worked as a clerk while pursuing music studies at the Stern Conservatory. His first taste of public recognition came while he was still a student, when he won first prize in a contest sponsored by the newspaper Die Woche for the best composition of a waltz. His real music career was launched when he first experienced the ambience and entertainment at the Überbrettl, the first cabaret in Berlin, founded just after the turn of the new century by Ernst von Wolzogens. He took to the music and the style he encountered, and started his cabaret career at the Potsdamer Straße cabaret Roland, playing accompaniment to his own compositions. In 1904, he teamed up with Paul Schneider-Duncker at the renowned Chat Noir in Berlin, which he soon took over as director for a seven-year period, from 1907 to 1914. These were enormously productive and profitable years for Nelson, during which he composed his most famous hit song, "Das Ladenmädel," in addition to moving into the field of operetta (starting in 1908) with works such as Miss Dudelsack, Der Damenkrieg, Incognito, and New York-Berlin. Nelson married singer Käthe Erlholz in 1920, and that same year opened the Nelson-Theater. The revues he staged became central to the artistic life and reputation of post-World War I Berlin, and featured such entertainers as Josephine Baker and Max Ehrlich. He also wrote revues for the Metropol-Theater. His songs saw huge popularity and were recorded extensively across the 1920s and into the early '30s. He also moved into the field of film composition at the start of that decade, with the dawn of the sound film as a creative medium. The rise of the Nazi Party to power in 1933, however, brought a halt to Nelson's work in Berlin, as Jews were driven from the fields of art, music, and entertainment. He left Germany that year, initially for Vienna and later Zurich, before founding a new theater company in Amsterdam. He was interned after the German conquest of Holland and spent five years in a concentration camp. Amazingly, Nelson, who was already in his sixties, survived this ordeal and returned to Berlin in 1949 to reopen the Nelson-Revue-Gastspiel. In 1953, he was admitted to the Ordre National du Mérite, and in 1959, Nelson received the Paul Lincke-Ring, an award for light music composition, in recognition of his songs, revues, and operettas. He died in Berlin in 1960, not quite two months short of what would have been his 82nd birthday.
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