The son of chief cantor and composer Baruch Gutmann and his wife Eleonore, bass singer Julius Gutmann was born on June 18, 1889, in Andrichau, present-day Andrychów, a small Polish city near Kraków that at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After studying in Berlin, he was under contract from 1916 onward at the opera houses in Krefeld, Freiburg, and Duisburg before moving to the Hamburg Stadttheater for the 1923/24 season. His repertoire included Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Leporello in Don Giovanni, Rocco in Fidelio, Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier, Marke in Tristan und Isolde, and Alberich in Wagner’s Ring cycle. He also undertook guest engagements at theaters in Basel and Bremen as well as at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysees in Paris.
Gutmann was a favorite among audiences of the Hamburg ensemble, so much so that his contract had been renewed as late as January of 1933. For this reason, the theater’s directorate did not dismiss him immediately but rather sent him into retirement effective July 31, 1934, as a means of removing him from the ensemble. As a member of the Social Democratic Party in Hamburg, however, Gutmann had already left Germany by this time. After having been active in the Hamburg Jewish Cultural Federation in 1933 and 1934, he fled to Czechoslovakia with his wife on June 28, 1934, leaving all of their household belongings behind. There, he was engaged at the German Theater in Prague until 1938 and undertook guest engagements at the Vienna State Opera and the Zurich Stadttheater, as well as Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, under the direction of fellow émigré Erich Kleiber.
After the German Reich’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, Gutmann and his wife fled to Great Britain. His two children had already emigrated to the United States. In London, he made a living as a voice teacher and performed in productions organized by émigré organizations.
After the war, in 1947, the couple moved to New York, where Julius Gutmann gradually managed to establish a livelihood as a voice teacher. His stage career, however, was over. Moreover, his three brothers—Max, Simon, and Wilhelm—had been killed at concentration camps. Julius Gutmann died on October 22, 1960, in New York.
1889 Andrychów (Andrichau)
1960 New York