Members of the Kerr family travelled to Caputh, south-west of Berlin, where Julia Kerr once socialized with Einstein and other cultural luminaries of the day.
Lost for years, the music of The Tiger Who Came to Tea author’s mother is heard again
Descendants of Julia Kerr gather for a recital at Einstein’s summer house near Berlin, where the revived opera was set.
Albert Einstein throws a party at his lakeside house, presenting his guests with his latest invention: a time machine. So opens the opera Chronoplan, started in the late 1920s by composer Julia Kerr. She took the score with her when she fled Nazi Germany with her family in early 1933, its planned premiere halted after Hitler’s takeover.
The wider family story was chronicled in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, an autobiographical novel by Kerr’s late daughter, Judith, which mentions her mother playing the piano. But Kerr’s reputation as one of the most gifted musicians of her time was widely forgotten after the family’s dramatic escape, ending her composing career.
On a recent blustery afternoon, descendants from London gathered in the garden of Einstein’s former summer house in Caputh, where Chronoplan was set, to celebrate Julia Kerr’s life and works. Compositions found wrongly catalogued in archives were performed by singer-actor Ruth Rosenfeld and pianist Norbert Biermann, who reconstructed them.
Julia and her husband Alfred, the leading theatre critic in Weimar-era Berlin, were occasional guests at Einstein’s house, along with cultural figures like Richard Strauss, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Schnitzler, who appear in the opera. The wooden house, financed by Einstein’s Nobel prize money, hosted intellectual soirees and boat trips before Einstein and the Kerrs were forced into exile.
Christian Leitmeir, a historical musicologist from Oxford University, conceived the idea of exploring Julia Kerr’s musical life after reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit to his son. “There were fleeting descriptions of her playing the piano and composing. I was intrigued, but I could find no reference to her in the encyclopedia of female composers,” he said. Searching the Academy of Arts in Berlin, he discovered her handwritten scores, incorrectly catalogued under her husband’s name.
Meanwhile, Sonja Westerbeck, dramatic adviser to the State theatre in Mainz, rediscovered Chronoplan, which received its world stage premiere earlier this year, almost a century after it was written. “Julia Kerr has spent too long as the sub-clause in the story – it’s time to bring her back to the fore,” she said.
The Kerr family was invited to Berlin by curators of a new Exile Museum, due to open in early 2028, which will combine Julia, Alfred, and Judith’s stories with those of other exiles. The rediscovery of Kerr’s work comes amid growing interest in forgotten female composers, many unjustly erased from classical music history.
George Kerr, a civil servant and Julia’s great-grandson, said he only recently learned of her artistic life. “I’m very inspired to learn of how immensely talented and creative she was. Yet she was compelled by circumstances to put the composing aside to provide for her family. She’d have been delighted that such keen interest is now shown in her work when she was so overlooked in life.”
As readers of Judith’s novel know, her stuffed pink rabbit was left in Berlin, but Julia managed to take her incomplete opera score across Europe. On arriving in England, she became the family’s breadwinner, working as a secretary and translator, as Alfred spoke no English. After his death in 1948, she returned to Berlin and worked as an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials and for President John F. Kennedy during his 1963 visit.
In 1952, Chronoplan was recorded by Bavarian Broadcasting, becoming the first opera to have a radio premiere. Leitmeir noted, “Her music was very eclectic. She was like a magpie absorbing all influences from different genres.” Corresponding with her family, Julia called the six recording days “the most wonderful of my life. Darlings, practically everything sounded exactly as I have heard it in my head for 20 years. Nobody can take that away from me ever and I know now that I can write music.” Julia Kerr died in 1965.
Her grandson Tim Kerr, a retired high court judge, remembered her as a “powerful figure, very single-minded. She’d play lovely little tunes she had written on the piano and I’d play the same melodies on the recorder. But I really knew nothing about her music, or that she had been or would be taken seriously as a composer. As is often the case, her life has been filtered through that of her husband, and perhaps overshadowed by that of her daughter, Aunt Judy, who was more famous than all of them put together.”
Best known in the UK for The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Judith Kerr, who died aged 95 in 2019, is most famous in Germany for When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a staple in the school curriculum. In a 1952 letter to her mother, Judith recalled how unhappy Julia had been at not having her works performed.
