Edvard Moritz

Moritz was the son of Ernst Moritz, a merchant and shopkeeper and his wife Fanny Moritz. As a child, he received music and violin lessons from Heinrich Bandler, then concertmaster of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1909 he studied in Paris with Martin Marsick (violin) and with Louis-Joseph Diémer (piano). According to Erich H. Müller[1] he also studied with Claude Debussy, although the latter did not give composition lessons. In Berlin he studied violin with Carl Flesch, piano with Ferruccio Busoni and composition with Paul Juon; he also studied conducting in Leipzig with Arthur Nikisch.

Moritz lived in Berlin and from there he went on concert tours as a violinist and later mainly as a guest conductor in other cities and abroad (England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy). He gradually also began to compose. In 1919 his Burleske op. 9 was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Arthur Nikisch.

After the takeover of political power by the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1933, Moritz was persecuted because of his Jewish origins and forced to restrict his activities at events of the Jewish Cultural Association. In 1934 he gave house concerts with chamber music in Hamburg as a violist; in 1934/1935 he was conductor of the newly founded Jewish chamber orchestra in Hamburg, in which well-known Jewish professional musicians and soloists participated, such as Ilse Urias, Jakob Sakom and Hertha Kahn. This orchestra financed itself mainly by performances with the Jewish Society for Art and Science. It also played works by Moritz during these concerts, for example Streicher Scherzo on 10 November 1934. In 1936 a new string orchestra was founded, conducted by Moritz. He was also conductor of the Jewish Chamber Orchestra Berlin in 1936–1937. Although he was first admitted as a "non-Aryan member", he was expelled from this professional organization on 19 August 1935, which was equivalent to a professional ban. In 1935 he was included in the so-called Goebbels List[1], which served as a form of censorship.

In September 1937 he travelled with a visa from Gothenburg on the ship S.S. Königstein (Arnold Bernstein Line) from Antwerp to New York. His New York debut was st Town Hall on 2 May 1938 with the Edvard Moritz Chamber Orchestra.

In 1940 he became a teacher of piano and composition at the La Follette School of Music in New York. One of his students there was the pop singer Bobby "Chain Gang" Scott. In 1943 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.