Adolf Waterman

Adolf Waterman (Dolf to friends and family) was born in Rotterdam on 19 May 1886 and received his first piano lessons from Johan Sikemeier and Bernard Diamant at the local 'Toonkunst' music school. His parents wanted him to join the family accountancy business and Dolf was sent to Budapest to start a branch there. The business never took off but Waterman learnt to speak Hungarian fluently and continued his piano studies with Aladar Berényi and István Thomán. Upon returning to the Netherlands in 1907, he started his career as a concert pianist. He performed throughout the Netherlands and also in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and London. In addition to standard repertoire (Brahms, Chopin, Bach) he performed contemporary music (Debussy, Chevillard, Scott and Sauer).

Career in Berlin

His marriage to Henriëtte Hartog (1910) didn't work out and when he received an invitation to teach in Berlin, Waterman left the Netherlands again. In 1913, he married singer Annie van den Bergh and joined the teaching staff of the Sternsche Conservatoire. Two years later, Waterman started composition classes with Hugo Kaun. Besides teaching, his career mainly focused on performing chamber music, with cellist Felix Robert Mendelssohn as his first duo partner. In 1918, three weeks after the First World War had ended, Waterman presented himself as composer and pianist in a concert with the Berliner Philharmoniker led by Camillo Hildebrandt. The programme not only included solo concertos by Franck, Chopin/Nicodé and Beethoven but also his own piano concerto. The Berlin-based critic of the Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad wrote about Waterman’s concerto: ‘Honesty makes this an endearing work. Waterman does not pretend to be a modernist, speaking a language that doesn’t emanate from the heart. He dreams behind the piano, with his tender, sensitive toucher, and one cannot deny that his dreams often lead him to familiar ground and the “Reminiscenzejäger” has a fairly easy job. […] Yet all in all, this is a captivating and sympathetic work, because what it has to offer comes straight from the composer’s soul and it is melodious and pleasing to the ear.’

This was the start of a modest career in the German capital, where, a year later, Waterman joined the Holland Trio. Various Berlin-based musicians started performing his music, including Felix Robert Mendelssohn (a cello concerto), Heinz Jolles (works for piano solo), Joseph Wolfsthal (a violin sonata) and the Rotterdam-born soprano Joy MacArden (songs). Waterman started a society to organise concerts with contemporary chamber music, including music from the Netherlands. In a city exploding with cultural activity, where critics dashed from one concert to the next, Waterman was able to attract a stable following, performing his own works with a growing number of musical partners. However, when Hitler came to power in 1933, Dolf Waterman and his wife Annie left Germany and settled in Paris.

Fleeing from the Nazis

As Annie came from a very wealthy family, the couple had no financial worries. According to his grandsons, Dolf would travel to the south of France with a grand piano and two large suitcases, where he prepared for his concerts in Paris. In these concerts, Annie and Dolf sometimes performed together. However, in 1938, Annie died of cancer. Just before the Nazis started the war, Waterman left Paris and travelled south to Portugal, where he embarked for the Dutch East-Indies. Not long after his arrival, he decided to board a plane to Sydney and stayed in Australia for the remainder of the war. He there married his third wife Dorothy and continued to perform. In 1944, Waterman telegraphed his “Prinses Margriet-song” to London, where Joy McArden first performed it for Queen Wilhelmina. In 1949, Russian-born pianist Vera Benenson performed some of Waterman’s compositions in Sydney. Not long after that, the Waterman couple moved to the United States.

After the war, Waterman never really settled anywhere and lived mostly in hotels in the US. He visited the Netherlands regularly. There is no indication that he continued to perform as a pianist. In the end, he settled in Monaco, where he died on 3 August 1966.

'Defected to the atonal camp'

Although Waterman’s own compositions of the early 1920s were written in a rather romantic style, his interest in contemporary music would soon influence his writing. Although opinions diverged, reviewing two concerts with violinist Joseph Wolfsthal in 1926 in The Hague and Rotterdam, most critics agreed that between the Violin Sonata op. 11 and the Preludes op. 24, the composer developed a more modern style. The anonymous critic of the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad wrote: ‘These preludes give rise to the suspicion, that the urge to write as concisely as possible, in the Sonata as well, but not as consistently, remarkably develops along the principles of Arnold Schönberg, whose aesthetics seem to have found a convert in Waterman, also in the harmonies of the last prelude, Maestoso.’ The Berlin correspondent of the Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad is even somewhat disappointed in Waterman’s progress as a composer: ‘Later works, including the Variations (op. 14) and the Seven Preludes (op. 25) performed by Jolles, show that Waterman defected to the atonal camp with beating drums and now struggles with those wry disharmonies and eccentricities, leaving us ice cold and untouched, giving the impression that while writing them down, the composer must have worn spectacles with one convex glass and one concave glass. In Berlin, however, — with a hall full of followers — this toil of the brain, lacking input from the heart, still evokes applause.’