Michael Mann (scholar)

Michael Thomas Mann (April 21, 1919 – January 1, 1977) was a German-born musician and professor of German literature.

Life

Born in Munich, Michael Mann was the youngest child of writer Thomas Mann and Katia Mann. He was of Jewish descent from his mother's side.[1] Due to his being the grandson of Júlia da Silva Bruhns, he was also of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian partial descent.[2]

He studied viola and violin in Zürich, Paris and New York City. On March 6, 1939, he married the Swiss-born Gret Moser (1916–2007) in New York. With her he had two sons, Fridolin ("Frido") and Anthony ("Toni"), as well as an adopted daughter, Raju.

Mann's grave at the cemetery of Kilchberg in the canton of Zurich, where he is buried in the family grave with his parents and his sisters.

Between 1942 and 1947 he was a violinist in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. In 1949 he made appearances as a viola soloist in the United States and Europe. Accompanied by pianist Yaltah Menuhin, he made a concert tour in 1951 and recorded the 1948 Viola Sonata by Ernst Krenek.[3] He was forced to give up professional music due to a neuropathy.

Mann then studied German literature at Harvard, and later worked as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael, like several of his siblings and at least two of his aunts, suffered from depression and died of a combined consumption of alcohol and barbiturates in Orinda, California; it is considered likely that he committed suicide. There is a stone with his name on it on his parents' grave in Kilchberg, Switzerland.

Discography

Deutsche Grammophon. Recorded in Hanover, Germany

Reissue: Johanna Martzy/Michael Mann: Complete Deutsche Grammophon recordings. Deutsche Grammophon/eloquence 484 3299 (2021)

See also

References
  1. "Katia Mann (1883-1980) | The National Library of Israel". www.nli.org.il. Retrieved July 15, 2023.
  2. Kontje, Todd (2015), Castle, Gregory (ed.), "Mann's Modernism", A History of the Modernist Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 311–326, ISBN 978-1-107-03495-2, retrieved August 25, 2023
  3. New York Viola Society list of recordings
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