Franz Servatius Bruinier

Franz Servatius Bruinier (13 May 1905 – 31 July 1928) was a pianist and composer. He was the first professional composer to collaborate with Bertolt Brecht. On account of his early death from tuberculosis, and because the results of his work went unpublished or were published only without attribution in respect of the musical score, his contribution went unrecognised by mainstream Brecht scholarship till the mid 1970s.

Life Franz Servatius Bruinier was born at Biebrich, across the river from Mainz. He and his twin sister, Julie Anne Elisabeth "Anneliese" Bruinier, were the youngest of their parents' six recorded children. Bruinier's father, Jan Berend Hendrik Bruinier (1863-1935), had been born in Amsterdam and came to Germany, having held a senior position with a Biebrich company since 1904 and then, in 1907, accepting appointment as Chief Executive Officer ("Geschaeftsführer") with a heavy engineering firm in Berlin-Steglitz. Despite being resident and "economically active" in Germany "from the age of nine", he remained Dutch. He applied for German citizenship in 1914 but without success, and seems never to have repeated the application. Probably his children also retained their inherited Dutch citizenships: that was certainly the case with Ansco Bruinier, Franz's elder brother. Franz Bruinier's mother, born Sophie Christiane Henriette Wagner, was from a Biebrich family. Both parents were music and theatre enthusiasts.

Franz attended the prestigious Paulsen-Gymnasium (secondary school) in Steglitz until he was fifteen, while simultaneously receiving piano lessons at "Sandow's Music Academy". On 1 March 1923 he left the school "on account of poor [academic] performance" ("wegen schlechter Leistungen"). The school register recording pupil departures refers to the recommendation that he should study music.

In the Autumn/Fall of 1926 the Ullstein editor Reinhard R. Braun founded a new cabaret series, the so-called "MA" (Montag-Abends / Monday evenings). Franz and his brother August were closely involved in the conception and implementation of the project. The other two Bruinier brothers, the singer Karl Bruinier and the instrumentalist Ansco Bruinier who is described in this context, as a jazz trumpeter, also performed regularly. The programmes were unusually diverse. They included pieces by contemporary composers (Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek) and readings from contemporary authors. There were scenes of melodrama, parodies of well-known theatre productions, revues written by members of the cabaret, and more. Franz Bruinier played an important role both as composer and as pianist. Kurt Pinthus was similarly enthusiastic in the review he wrote for the news magazine "8 Uhr Abendblatt", praising the "Jazz music which blends together the lyrics with rhythmic and lyrical clarity".

What survives, whether in print or as hand-written manuscripts, consists principally of individual songs and related minor arrangements. Basing himself on these surviving fragments, the musicologist Fritz Hennenberg sums up Bruinier as an accomplished composer whose greatest strengths were in respect of effective textual support and interpretation. Lyricists whose work he set to music included not just Brecht, but also Goll, Mehring, Klabund and Wedekind. Hennenberg highlights Bruinier's powers in respect of declamation, parody and punch lines, but he does not see Bruinier as a great original. "A personal voice is not much in evidence, which leaves you with a more or less skilful montage of musical cliches" ("Ein eigener Ton bleibt meist aus, und es kommt nur zur mehr oder weniger geschickten Montage von Klischees").

Bruinier's work with Brecht was completely forgotten for decades: Brecht never mentioned it in his "Hauspostille" compilation or anywhere else. That began to change only in 1973, when the fourth volume of the inventory of Brecht's literary estate was published. It included Bruinier signatures on a succession of Brecht songs from 1925 and 1927, which Brecht had kept hold of. The collaboration seems to have resulted, in the first instance, from Brecht being required to complete melodies for his "Hauspostille" to which his own "notation skills" were unequal. From the state of the manuscripts in question it is clear that Bruinier's contributions ranged from simply writing out melodies that Brecht himself had produced to coming up with his own independent compositions. The music for "Alabama Song" was clearly one of the Bruinier originals. The subsequent setting of the same song produced by Kurt Weill for "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" ("Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny") certainly owes the basics of its rhythmic dynamic to the Bruinier original as well as some of the elements in the tune.