Raabe, Peter
Raabe, Peter
Raabe, Peter , German conductor and writer on music; b. Frankfurt an der Oder, Nov. 27, 1872; d. Weimar, April 12, 1945. He studied with Bargiel at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and later continued his training at the Univ. of Jena (Ph.D., 1916). In 1894 he began a career as a theater conductor. From 1899 to 1903 he conducted the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, and from 1903 to 1907, the Volks-Symphonie-Konzerte in Munich. In 1907 he became court conductor in Weimar, and in 1910 he was appointed curator of the Liszt Museum in Weimar. From 1920 to 1934 he was Generalmusikdirektor in Aachen. In 1935 he became head of the Reichsmusikkammer and the Deutscher Tonkünstlerverein; in these offices he was called upon to perform administrative tasks for the Nazi regime, including the racial restrictions of musicians. His co-workers presented him with Von deutscher Tonkünst: Festschrift zu Peter Raubes 70. Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1942; 2nd ed., rev., 1944). Raabe died just before the total collapse of the Third Reich, which he tried to serve so well. He left some scholarly and valuable Writings, among them Grossherzog Carl Alexander und Liszt (Leipzig, 1918), Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1931; rev. ed. 1968 by his son Felix), Die Musik im dritten Reich (Regensburg, 1935), Kulturwille im deutschen Musikleben (Regensburg, 1936), Deutsche Meister (Berlin, 1937), Wege zu Weber (Regensburg, 1942), Wege zu Liszt (Regensburg, 1943), and Wege zu Bruckner (Regensburg, 1944).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire