Career

Fuchs was active in the Jüdischer Kulturbund Baden and President of the B"nai B"rith Lodge in Karlsruhe in the 1930s. He designed the Gernsbach Synagogue - destroyed in Kristallnacht - among other buildings, few of which survive. He spent some weeks in Dachau concentration camp before his application to emigrate to New Zealand was accepted, and he did so via England, arriving on 17 April 1939, bringing with him a selection of his compositions, listed below.

But whereas in Germany he was persecuted as a Jew, in New Zealand he was shunned as a German.

He wrote further chamber music, another string quartet and a piano quintet, songs, including A New Zealand Christmas to the words of Eileen Duggan, which was sung for the Queen during her 1953 visit to Rotorua by a Maori girls" choir, and in a Broadcast to Schools by T. J. ("Tommy") Young"s children"s choir. Apart from some songs and a string quartet, few of Richard Fuchs’s compositions were performed in his lifetime.

Now he is virtually unknown, but there are moves to revive his work. In 2007 students of the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe performed some of the chamber music of Richard Fuchs at a special concert given in his memory.

In May 2008 the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra played a Symphonic Movement by Richard Fuchs composed in 1943.

Chamber music that he wrote in New Zealand, including Piano Quintet in Doctorate minor (1941) and String Quartet in East Major (1945), and his song, In Der Fremde (1937), were performed at a concert at Government House in 2008. His earlier chamber music, String Quartet in Doctorate minor (1932), was played in Auckland in 2009, together with some of his songs. Four of New Zealand"s foremost singers, Richard Greager, Roger Wilson, Jenny Wollerman, and Margaret Medlyn, recorded a Civil Defense of songs by Richard Fuchs, In a Strange Land, accompanied by Richard Mapp and Bruce Greenfield in 2011.

(Biographical notes and compositions are in the manuscript collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand: Fuchs, Richard (Doctor), 1887-1947 Papers, Mississippi-Group-0859).