Walther Gruner b. 25 September 1905 Blumenstrasse 13, Frankfurt am Main of Jewish parents, d. 5 January 1980 London was a singing teacher and baritone singer who taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He arrived in England in 1933, having left Germany because the Nazis were in power. He became a naturalised British citizen in 1946, and married English mezzo-soprano Mercia Glossop in 1951. They later divorced; she married Rex Harrison in 1979. Biographical note: He attended the Hoch Conservatory, Frankfurt, the Music Conservatory, Leipzig, and the Vienna Conservatory of Music. He studied with Swedish baritone :Sv:Hjalmar Arlberg|Hjalmar Arlberg in Leipzig, and in Vienna with Lothar Wallerstein. Other musical studies were with Paul Bekker and Arthur Seidl. He had conducted a choir while a student, and became Assistant to Paul Bekker, who was then Intendant of Wiesbaden State Opera. He took the surname Gruner in 1928. From 1935-1939 he lectured at the City Literary Institute, London, and in 1940 was interned on the Isle of Man for 5 months. From 1945 to 1979 he was professor of singing and German Lieder at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. He was a jury member on a number of international music festivals, including Bayreuth in 1974, lectured extensively in the US and Australia, and was the London Correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He sang as baritone soloist on the BBC in the 1950s and recorded German Lieder and folksongs for Linguaphone under the listing German Songs, Series A. Titles are as follows:
These recordings can be heard at the British Library with the following shelf mark numbers: 1SE0048311, 1SE0048312, 1SE0048313, 1SE0048314, 1SE0048315 Some are also held in the historical sound archives of the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf. His students included baritones Geraint Evans and Benjamin Luxon, and sopranos Jill Gomez and Patricia Rozario. After his death, an annual song prize was founded in his name - The Walther Gruner International Lieder Competition. The first winner was Olaf Bär. This competition is no longer held.
He was a contributor to the book Tensions in the Performance of Music: A Symposium Note: Gruner usually spelled with no on the u. References: Date of birth and other birth details: 1. Birth Certificate held by the Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2. Compensation record held by the Hessian State Archives. This Information is available in the online Encyclopedia of NS-persecuted musicians Date of British Naturalisation - London Gazette 26 Nov 1946.
Marriage - Ancestry.com Biographical note - Information taken from Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933–1945 ed. Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, New York ; and BBC Genome website. Date of death - Index of Wills in the UK National Probate Calendar.
