Berlin Woman of My Choice: Lisa Gregor

We had a really moving day on Sunday and I wanted to take about the story of Louisa Gregor! She was born in 1862 and started taking piano lessons at age 6. She was a highly gifted pianist and even played for the zar of Russia four years later when she was ten! When she reached twelve, she started composing and one of her teaches said that she was the real thing. Her music life slowed down when she got married and proceeded to have three sons, however, she still continued to teach and preform on the side. After a rough divorce, she used music to wholly support herself! She was well liked and managed to get by and write some beautiful pieces. The sad part is that right across the street from where she lived, a Nazi organization Aktion T4 at Tiergartenstrasse was becoming highly involved with the idea of eugenics and creating an elite race. This meant killing or sterilizing all those who were intellectually disabled, autistic, gay, deaf, depressed, elderly, and more. When Louisa got put in a nursing home in her eighties, she was one of the elderly who got euthanized.

The end to her beautify life story is so utterly wrong it makes me sick. She was a person who brought light and culture into the world, and the Nazis snuffed her out in the name of progress. They not only were taking steps backward in regard to their humanity and ethics, but also were blind to recognizing the contributions that every person brings to this world. Learning about this woman’s story makes me so sad because my educational goals in life are literally to help the individuals on the Nazis’s list. They have so much to contribute as did she. She wrote this beautiful lullaby song with a moving melody that really drove that point home to me

This woman’s story wasn’t told for a long time until two BYU students went searching for the works of women composers. They knocked on the descendants’ door and they let the students make record of her works from a trunk in the attic. As time went on, her family started to get more involved and worked to publish her things At BYU they later put one a concert of all her music! 500 people came, and they recorded it and it was put online and started to gain popularity. I love this idea of making women’s works from the past accessible. I feel like this has been a great way to commemorate her.







Comments

  1. Kaia HathawayJune 12, 2024 at 9:50 PM

    Super great post, Anna! I’m also not sure if I would say that Greger has been commemorated well or not. At least not yet. She was a talented and remarkable woman, but it hasn’t been until recently that we have rediscovered her work. I also think it's so difficult to learn about what happened to her at the end of her life. Even though she was one of the greatest female composers, because of her age she was considered "useless." As if she didn't already face other challenges, this had to happen.

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