Born on June 30, 1887, in Vienna into a family of Jewish merchants, Paul Schwarz received his musical training at the local conservatory and made his debut during the 1909/10 season at the theater in Bielitz, present-day Bielsko-Biała in Poland. He went to the Vienna Volksoper in 1910 before moving to the Hamburg Stadttheater in 1912, which would be his artistic home for the next 21 years. By 1933, the tenor and buffo had given around 4,000 performances in more than 140 roles, including Manrico in Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore and Pedrillo in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, as well as Turiddu in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Mime, Loge, and Erik in Richard Wagner’s music dramas. Guest engagements took him not only to Berlin and Vienna, but also Amsterdam, The Hague, Paris, and New York. He also performed in operettas, for example with Fritzi Massary at the Hamburg Volksoper, in the city’s St. Pauli district. Despite being a favorite among audiences, Hamburg Nazis saw only a Jew. After a performance as David in a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the local Nazi newspaper published a malicious review in December of 1931: “A Jew could never understand this cheeky, upright German boy.”
On February 21, 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Paul Schwarz was given a contract with considerably worse conditions. He was let go three months later. “In May,” he later recalled, “I was called into the office during a Rheingold performance and was informed that as a result of the new National Socialist laws, the theater was to be purged of Jews, and I was to be forced into retirement.” He gave his final performance at the Stadttheater on June 14, 1933, as Gaston in La Traviata.
Because Paul Schwarz was married to a non-Jewish woman, he enjoyed the relative protection of a so-called “mixed marriage”. The singer was active in the Jewish Cultural Federation from the start and continued giving guest performances internationally. However, as a result of the annexation of Austria in 1938, he was stripped of his passport. Without the possibility to travel abroad, he was subject to forced labor at the Hamburg company Rasch und Jung, though he remained active in the Jewish Cultural Federation. After his apartment in Hamburg was bombed, he relocated to Berlin, where he was once again subject to physically demanding forced labor in a carpentry workshop.
Paul Schwarz returned to Hamburg after the war, in 1948. He gave his final performance at the State Opera on April 6, 1949, in the role of Basilio in Gioachino Rossini’s The Marriage of Figaro. The City of Hamburg awarded him with the Johannes Brahms Medal on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Paul Schwarz died on December 24, 1980, in Hamburg.
1887 Vienna
1980 Hamburg