Friedrich “Fritz” Otto Reuter
Inducted 2024
Friedrich “Fritz” Otto Reuter was born on October 11, 1863 in Jahnsbach, Saxony, Germany. He had shown a talent for music in his early childhood. In his music education, Retuer studied with well-known teachers of his day, including Bernhard Reichart in Waldenburg, Theodor Schneider and Gustav Schreck in Leipzig, Joseph Rheinberger in Munich, and Karl Thiel in Berlin. Reuter completed his formal training in music at The Akademische Institut für Kirchenmusik in Berlin where his studies emphasized composition. Reuter’s teachers could boast a rather impressive lineage. Reichart’s teacher was Johann Toepfer, who was taught by August Mueller, whose teacher was Johann Christoph Bach, whose teacher (and father) was J.S. Bach, the Lutheran church musician who many still regard as the world’s greatest composer. As a result, any student of Reuter and any student of a Reuter student has a direct link in their music education to Old Bach. Although Reuter had held some rather prestigious positions as teacher and church musician in his home country, he had at times found himself out of fellowship with his state church. His continuing concern over theological controversies in Germany led him to seek positions in North America.
Through connections of his brother, Karl, he was able to make contact with a church and school in Winnipeg, Canada. Clara Tekla Sonntag Reuter, spouse to Fritz and mother to their eight children, fulfilled the immeasurable and often silent and less-than-fully-appreciated role of women in that era. Leaving Germany with her husband, she totally left her family of origin behind, never to see them again. As they boarded the ship for America with five little girls under nine years of age, she was also carrying their next soon-to-be-born child. Upon landing in Canada, Fritz Otto contracted typhoid fever and recovered. Tragically, Ida Hanna (age 7) and baby Katherine (6 months) also contracted the disease and were buried in Winnipeg. The new baby, Fritz Gustav, was born in July of ’06. All those events would be more than enough to bear, if one were surrounded by loving and supportive family and friends; however, such family and friends being totally absent, here she was in a strange land, with no knowledge whatsoever, much less fluency, of the English language and her husband fully occupied as the family bread-winner. After serving in Canada a few years, Reuter accepted a position with the Missouri Synod in Chicago in 1907. Reuter became known to the Dr. Martin Luther College faculty through joint teacher’s conferences of the Wisconsin and Missouri Synod. Reuter’s assignment as the first full-time music teacher of the college was to chair the music department and to develop the music curriculum. He was forty-four years old when he came to New Ulm, Minnesota. Reuter came to DMLC highly qualified in keyboard, choral conducting, music history, stringed instruments, music theory, composition, and pedagogy. He arrived in April of 1908 and began his work right away. Reuter even presented a concert in New Ulm’s Turner Hall before the end of the school year.
Fritz Reuter gave music “a place and a dignity hitherto unknown at the college” (Morton Schroeder, Gifted Musician, The Northwestern Lutheran, June 1997). He began singing classes, started mixed and male choirs, taught a 32-hour course load per week, gave keyboard and violin lessons, and, when he could, he composed his own music. During his first years at DMLC, Reuter’s choirs sang music from Elgar, Händel, Mendelssohn, Schütz, and J.S. Bach. Two of Reuter’s works that were sung early on were “Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt, und Siehe, das ist Gottes Lamm”. Reuter himself spoke of the work of his choirs: “The men’s choir as well as the mixed choir works diligently in the area of tone and voice formation and intonation, and in the area of melodic, rhythmic and harmonic assuredness” (The Messenger, vol. II, no. 3, 57). Over the years many Reuter compositions were sung and played on the DMLC campus. Organ students worked out of Reuter chorale prelude books, and his choral piece, “Weihnachtsgeschichte”, or “The Christmas Story,” written for mixed choir, organ, and narrator was performed almost every year at the DMLC Christmas Concert from the late 1920’s to the late 1950’s, several times between the 50’s and 90’s, and again at the final Christmas concert of Dr. Martin Luther College in December of 1994.
Reuter wrote much secular music in addition to his great body of sacred works. Locally, the Reuters lived at 126 N. Washington Street in New Ulm. He was an active member at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and served in music there, too. There were eight children: Two, Ida Hanna (age 7) and baby Katherine (6 months) died from typhoid fever in Canada, three daughters, Magdalena, Marie, and Elizabeth, and one son, Friedrich, also called “Fritz.” His granddaughter, Margo Reuter Martens, has been actively involved in preserving Reuter’s personal history and music.
Confined to bed with illness, Reuter had been given a leave of absence from Christmas to the end of the 1922-1923 school year. Emil Backer, a New Ulm native, mentee of Reuter, graduate of DMLC, and also a highly skilled musician and teacher, was asked to take over Reuter’s work on a temporary basis with the hope that Reuter would recover. But he did not, and died on June 9, 1924 of a brain tumor. The baton was passed to Backer, who remained in the position of Music Professor and Choir Director at DMLC until his passing in 1957. Fritz Reuter and his wife are buried in the St. Paul Lutheran cemetery in New Ulm. There is a stained glass window in St John’s Lutheran Church in Frankenmuth, one of the panes contains Fritz Reuter, picture and name. One of his students was stationed there and was responsible for that being displayed in the church window.
