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Helmut Kallmann: A Brief Biography The Faculty of Music representative on the editorial committee of Torontonensis 1949, the yearbook published by the Students’ Administrative Council of the University of Toronto, is listed as “Helmut Kallman,” an early example of a misspelling of his surname that later became widespread . Kallmann’s photo is fifteenth in alphabetical order in the Faculty of Music’s 1949 graduating class of twenty-eight. The group is historically significant as the first graduating class of the Bachelor of Music program in School Music (later, Music Education), inaugurated in 1946. Each photo carries a name and two lines of identification—the student’s special undergraduate activity or function, followed by his/her future plans. Kallmann ’s entry reads: “Music Reviewer for The Varsity; To Study More Music and Be Useful.” In Montreal, years later, Kallmann recalled this last phrase when he accepted the 2007 Friends of Canadian Music Award. Writing about music, constantly studying music, and being in myriad ways a useful member of society: it reads like an advance description of his long career. Most of his fellow students enrolled to qualify as public-school music specialists. Such was not Kallmann’s ambition, but he was steered to the then-new program because it promised a full range of instruction and its staff was young and eager, compared to the established “General Music” degree program of the Faculty. Richard Johnston, one of his professors, recalled years later: “He was quiet. He was shy … He was also very bright … If I ever dared to ask him a question … he always had the answer and he was always correct.… [W]henever he opened his mouth to say anything he had something worth listening to.”1 He was already a competent pianist (while at the University of Toronto he completed the Grade X examination of the Royal Conservatory of Music in piano), and the course offered him a wider knowledge of music, including other instruments. A program of Mapping Canada’s Music 2 the student concert band, conducted by another professor, Robert Rosevear , lists Kallmann as percussionist and librarian,2 and by graduation he became a reliable performer on the French horn. But his favourite subject was music history. An assessment of his experience, his professors, and his fellow students, written at the end of his program, is reproduced here for the first time (see page 27). This frank account of the state of postsecondary studies in music in Canada at the time might appear arrogant except that he prepared it only for himself. He was not quite twenty-seven when he graduated, but by no means the oldest member of his class: many had enrolled in 1946 on veterans’ grants, having interrupted their studies to serve in the Second World War. Few even of those who saw battle action overseas had had their young lives disrupted to the same extent as Kallmann. Helmut Max Kallmann was born on 7 August 1922 in Berlin. His father, Arthur, was a lawyer and keen amateur musician; his mother, Fanny, a social worker. He had one sister, Eva, who was one year older (b. 20 March 1921). In a major essay of his retirement years, also given its first publication here (see page 223), Kallmann describes his family and school life in 1930s Berlin, noting his fondness for his piano studies with his father and his childhood habit of making lists (for example, cataloguing the city’s public transit system, or compiling, with a school friend, his own “Köchel” of Mozart compositions)—presaging perhaps the adult librarian and historian. Jewish and leftist, the Kallmanns were unusually vulnerable to the increasingly cruel persecutions imposed by the Nazis after 1933. Arthur Kallmann gradually lost his professional standing and his livelihood. Towards the end of Helmut’s high-school studies, and only a couple of months before the outbreak of war, he was chosen to join the Kindertransport, set up by a refugee committee in London to take younger members of Jewish families to safety in England. In London, deprived of contact with his family, quarantined at first with other rescued children because of a suspected illness, and having only the consolation of a limited opportunity to continue music study, in May of 1940 Kallmann found himself rounded up with other German citizens during a national panic over the apparent likelihood of invasion by Hitler’s forces. They were labelled “enemy aliens” and first imprisoned at Huyton Alien Internment Camp in the Liverpool suburbs...

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