Julia Kerr's Lost Opera Premieres Nearly a Century
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- Julia Kerr began composing the opera Chronoplan in the late 1920s, setting it at Albert Einstein's lakeside house in Caputh, but fled Nazi Germany with the unfinished score in early 1933 and abandoned composing to work as a secretary and translator to support her family in England.
- Oxford musicologist Christian Leitmeir discovered Julia Kerr's handwritten scores in the Academy of Arts in Berlin archives — wrongly catalogued under her husband Alfred Kerr's name — after reading her daughter Judith's novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit to his son and finding no reference to her in encyclopedias of female composers.
- Chronoplan received its world stage premiere earlier this year, nearly a century after it was written, after dramatic adviser Sonja Westerbeck rediscovered it; the opera had already been recorded by Bavarian Broadcasting in 1952 in what is described as the first radio premiere of an opera.
- Descendants including great-grandson George Kerr and grandson Tim Kerr gathered at Einstein's former summer house in Caputh on a blustery afternoon, where singer-actor Ruth Rosenfeld and pianist Norbert Biermann performed compositions reconstructed by Biermann from the misfiled archive material.
- The rediscovery fits a surge in scholarly and public interest in forgotten female composers, and the Kerr family has been invited to feature in Berlin's new Exile Museum due to open in early 2028, which will bring together Julia, Alfred and Judith Kerr's stories.
- Julia Kerr died in 1965 without seeing her works widely performed; her grandson recalled her as 'a powerful figure, very single-minded' whose life was overshadowed by her theatre-critic husband and her famous daughter Judith Kerr, author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
Why it matters: The recovery of Julia Kerr's work from wrongly catalogued archives — a fate shared by many female composers — gives her a standalone place in music history rather than remaining a footnote to her famous daughter; the 2028 Exile Museum will institutionalize that recovery for German audiences, where When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is already curriculum standard.
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