1950 - 1959

Largest music academy in the Federal Republic of Germany

In the 1950s, the university was still housed in several rented rooms spread throughout the city. For examination concerts and other events, the small music hall also had to be rented. Despite this unsatisfactory situation, the first director, Philipp Jarnach, proudly points out in a memorandum from 1955 that the Hamburg University of Music had a total of 512 students enrolled in the winter semester of 1954/55, making it the largest university of music in the Federal Republic of Germany, including West Berlin. This development is all the more remarkable as Hamburg had the highest tuition fees in the Federal Republic. In the following years, the university was to maintain this position, also with regard to the number of lecturers, which amounted to around 100 at the end of the 1950s.

Lively concert activity

More important than this statistical success, however, were the university's artistic achievements. In addition to the weekly "studio evenings" held within the university, the university's public concert activities intensified from the winter semester of 1951/52 onwards. At the end of the decade, the university had a total of 108 prestigious concerts, 12 drama performances and 17 opera performances to its name, apart from the studio evenings. The exchange concerts with its partner institutes also brought the university great renown. Initially, these only took place within Germany, for example with the Cologne University in 1954. Increasingly, however, the focus shifted abroad, as the aim was to establish an international presence. In the academic year 1957/58, for example, the Hamburg University gave concerts in Antwerp, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and Vienna.

Many awards

The success of the graduates also proved Jarnach's management and his concept right. In the 1950s, the Hamburg University received the largest number of music scholarships awarded by the "Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes". The list of awards and professional successes achieved by Hamburg students up to 1960 fills seven pages of a commemorative publication distributed to the university's friends to mark its tenth anniversary. The talents that Hamburg produced at that time were diverse and very different: Norbert Linke, Hermann Rauhe and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, for example, studied in the school music departments, Ursula Boese and Iwan Rebroff (then still known as Hans Rippert) received their training in the singing classes, and the young Walter Giller earned his first spurs in the acting class.

More internationality demanded

In particular, however, the demand for internationality is met. Philipp Jarnach is determined not only to make his university one of the most important artistic educational institutions in Germany, but also to develop an artistic appeal beyond Germany's borders. At the opening ceremony for the 1956/57 winter semester, he had the Mendelssohn Hall of the Budge-Palais decorated with small flags symbolizing the 15 countries from which his students came, including, according to Jarnach in today's not entirely politically correct diction, "even Negroes and Chinese". When the university organized its first international masterclasses in autumn 1957, 57 selected musicians from nine nations took part. And by the end of Philipp Jarnach's term of office at the end of 1959, 64 foreigners were already among the 650 students enrolled, including a particularly large number from the USA. When Philipp Jarnach retired in October 1959, in less than ten years he had really raised the Hamburg University of Music from almost nothing to a world-class level.