Remembering Trude Rittmann

Joan Holtzman —

It happens, sometimes, that we do not fully appreciate the people who were part of our young lives; sometimes the larger world does not adequately recognize them either.  Such was the case with Trude R, who was affectionately known in my family circle as “Putzi.”

She was not actually a relative but she was definitely a family insider, a frequent visitor who, like my father and his family, was born in Mannheim, Germany and came to live in New York City in the late 1930s. Trude was, in fact, born in the same year as my dad and perhaps for this reason (and also because she was not married and had no children) was present at most of our family gatherings. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, she was usually there. When she was not,  I was told that it was because she was away “on business,” working on some Broadway musical.  

I remember that she was small and soft-spoken, that she smiled often and occasionally tried to engage with me one-on-one at the dinner table.  When was I was old enough, she took me to a couple of her productions —”Peter Pan” for one;  also “Wish you Were Here” where, after a performance, she took me backstage. I liked her, of course, but I was also shy of her, intimidated by her musical gifts and the amazing world she inhabited when she was not visiting our family.  

I saw her last sometime in the mid 90’s at my uncle’s home in upstate New York.  By then she had moved to Massachusetts, my uncle had fallen victim to Alzheimers and we had come together for another family gathering.  We talked a bit about the old days, the intervening years and about all the moving about we had done.  We acknowledged, too, that music had been and remained important in our lives. We listened to a little Mozart — maybe The Magic Flute. My uncle visibly enjoyed the moment.

Trude lived a long life.  She died at 96 and the New York Times gave her a nice obit. They failed to mention, however, that she had been involved with more than 60 musicals in the U.S and that before she was forced to flee the Nazis, she was on her way to becoming one of Germany’s most promising composers.

Here is a photo: 

and a copy of the Times obit:

Trude Rittmann, an arranger of Broadway favorites dies at 96

By Wolfgang Saxon 

March 10, 2005

Trude Rittmann, a choral and dance-music arranger for Broadway favorites from “Carousel” in 1945 to a “Sound of Music” revival half a century later, died on Feb. 22 in Lexington, Mass. She was 96 and had been living in Waltham, Mass., in retirement.

The death was announced by the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization in Manhattan.A pianist and composer, Ms. Rittmann was first hired by Lincoln Kirstein in 1937, played piano for George Balanchine’s American Ballet Caravan — a forerunner of the New York City Ballet — and was a concert pianist for the choreographer Agnes de Mille. Ms. de Mille then took her on as dance arranger in 1943 when she choreographed the Kurt Weill musical “One Touch of Venus.”

Ms. Rittmann’s was an unsung art, performed mostly behind the scenes, with no Tonys and little public notice until fairly recent years. It was her forte to take a composer’s theme or melody and mold it into ballet or the incidental music woven in for dramatic effect.

Among the other luminaries who entrusted their work to her were Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin and Jerome Robbins. In her years with the City Ballet, she adapted and shaped compositions by Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein.

On Broadway, in 1954, she provided incidental music for Tinker Bell and Captain Hook’s crew of pirates in “Peter Pan,” for which she had already been musical arranger and coordinator in a 1950 production. She arranged the dances for “Finian’s Rainbow” (1947), and assisted Miss de Mille in “Brigadoon” (1947), and Richard Rodgers in “South Pacific” (1949), which ran for 1,925 performances.

She was the ballet or dance arranger, or otherwise musically engaged, for other long-running productions, like “The King and I” (1951), “Wish You Were Here” (1952), “Fanny” (1954), “My Fair Lady” (1956) and its 1976 revival, the original “Sound of Music” (1959), “Camelot” (1960), “Gigi” (1973) and “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1989), a revue to which she contributed as a dance arranger.

Trude Rittmann was born in Mannheim, Germany. She started piano lessons at 6, graduated from the Conservatory in Cologne and had made a name for herself as an avant-garde composer by the time she arrived in New York in 1937. She continued to compose music for ballet and television while making her career on Broadway.

She left no immediate survivors.