The case of Bernhard Sekles is a bitter but insightful example.
Because the director of Dr.
Hoch's Conservatory, who wrote music history here in 1928 by founding Europe's first jazz class, felt very close to his hometown of Frankfurt.
One can imagine the composer, conductor and pianist, who was born 150 years ago on March 20, 1872 and trained at his long-term workplace, as a genuine Frankfurter.
Like the city on the Main, his nature was shaped by a “relaxed progressiveness”, his son testified.
"Day for Music"
Sekles was just as cosmopolitan as Frankfurt, interested in non-European musical cultures, but as a composer he was rather conservative, standing in the late romantic tradition of his teacher Engelbert Humperdinck.
The assessment is based on the fact that Sekles was a generation comrade of Arnold Schönberg.
Theodor W. Adorno, who studied composition with Sekles, later complained that his esteemed teacher "tried the atonal bugs out of him".
Paul Hindemith, the high-flyer among Sekles' illustrious students, soon found his own way.
In any case, Sekles made forward-looking decisions as a teacher and director.
Just think: As a seasoned man, he appointed the young Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber to head the very first jazz class.
The tender seedling only thrived for five years before the Nazis brutally trampled it in 1933.
Sekles and Seiber were dismissed as Jews, and the jazz class was dissolved.
Sekles died the following year of pulmonary tuberculosis.
The Nazis probably saw the whole thing as an act of salvation for Germanness.
In truth, they cut Frankfurt's growing musical tradition.
Sekles never found out that the city developed into a jazz stronghold after the war.
It was long overdue that a square in Frankfurt's Westend (at the corner of Niedenau and Rüsterstrasse) was named after Bernhard Sekles for the "Day for Music".