Leon Jessel, or Léon Jessel (1871 – 1942) was a German composer of composer and light classical music pieces. Jessel was a prolific composer who wrote hundreds of light orchestral pieces, piano pieces, songs, waltzes, mazurkas, marches, choruses, and other salon music. Because Jessel was a Jew by birth (he converted to Christianity at the age of 23), with the rise of Nazism in the late 1920s, his composing virtually came to an end, and his musical works, which had been very popular, were suppressed and nearly forgotten.
Although his musical parents wanted him to become a merchant or businessman, Jessel was instead drawn to becoming a musician, and left school at the age of 17 to pursue music and musical theater. After studying with various teachers between 1888 and 1891, Jessel became a conductor, music director, chorus master, bandmaster, and theater conductor working in many German cities. While in Lübeck, Jessel composed numerous choral works, operettas, and character pieces.
In 1911, Jessel moved to Berlin, where he came into his own and made a name for himself — his 1913 operetta Die beiden Husaren (The Two Hussars) garnered much attention. He continued to compose many operettas and Singspiel operas, most of which premiered in Berlin. In 1915, Jessel also co-founded and co-launched the early GEMA, a German performance rights organization. Jessel's biggest success was the operetta Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl), which premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin in August 1917. The opera's touching libretto, appealing melodies, and elegant instrumentation proved immensely popular, and it ran in Berlin for 900 performances, and within the next 10 years was performed approximately 6,000 times in Germany and abroad. Jessel also had a major success with his 1921 operetta Die Postmeisterin (The Postmistress), and in total he wrote nearly two dozen operettas.
Jessel's operettas were popular, nationalistic, and very German: Schwarzwaldmädel was a favorite of Hitler and Himmler. Because of this, and because of his own conservative nationalistic ideology, and because his second wife Anna joined the Nazi party in 1932, Jessel expected acceptance in Germany even during and after the Nazi rise to power. Instead, he was rejected by the Nazi leadership because of his Jewish descent, even though he had converted to Christianity in 1894, and performances of his works were banned in 1933. Jessel's last major work was his 1933 operetta Junger Wein (Young Wine), and his biographer Albrecht Dümling believes that he was a victim of targeted boycott measures as early as 1927.
In 1937, he was forced out of the Reichsmusikkammer (the State Music Institute), and recordings and distribution of his works were prohibited. In 1941, a house search turned up a 1939 letter to his librettist William Sterk in Vienna, in which Jessel had written: “I cannot work in a time when hatred of Jews threatens my people with destruction, where I do not know when that gruesome fate will likewise be knocking at my door.” On December 15, 1941 Jessel was arrested and delivered to the Gestapo in Berlin. He was tortured by the Gestapo and subsequently died on January 4, 1942 in the Berlin Jewish Hospital. He was 70.
