Gertrude Pitzinger (1904-c. 1996), contralto, was born in Mährisch-Schänberg (Krásná Hora), in what became Czechoslovakia. After teaching school, in 1926 she received a diploma from the Vienna Music Academy, in music teaching. She studied lieder with Julia Culp. Pitzinger sang her first concert in 1929, in Olmütz (Olomouc), Czechoslovakia. From 1935 until World War II she gave concerts in Austria, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Holland and Belgium. In 1937 she sang in Beethoven’s Ninth in London under Furtwängler, and she appeared in 1938 at Carnegie Hall and The Town Hall, New York. In 1937 and 1941 she performed in Prague; 1941 brought her to Holland. Until 1940 Pitzinger could be heard regularly in concerts and lieder recitals in Berlin. At the Salzburg Festival she sang, among other things, Dvorák’s Stabat Mater, 1934, Mozart’s Requiem, 1951-1959, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, 1955-1957, and Handel’s Judas Makkabäus, 1953. She particularly was known as a Bach interpreter.
The Czechs viewed her as a collaborator, so in 1945 she had to leave her homeland and lived at first in Landsitz, in the Black Forest. After 1959 she was a Professor at the Musikhochschule, in Frankfurt am Main, and continued to give concerts. She was married to the Danish concert singer Otto Dupont. Later in life she became a personal friend of the American right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche and his wife, the German Helga Zepp-LaRouche, heads of the German political party Patriotten für Deutschland.
Pitzinger’s recordings are on Amadeo, Quadrigafon, DGG (Mozart’s Requiem, Bruckner’s Te Deum, lieder) and on BASF (Brahms lieder).
–Stefan Zucker
The above essay was excerpted from the booklet to Great Conductors of the Third Reich: Art in the Service of Evil.