Vienna, 1897 – 1989, Portland
Gerty Felice Wohlmuth was born Gertrud Natalia Stefania Felicia Landesberger in Vienna in 1897 and took the name von Antburg after her father was ennobled in 1916. Raised in a strict Catholic household and unaware of her Jewish family history, she grew up in a wealthy environment and received a comprehensive education, which would form the basis for her intellectual musical personality throughout her life. Even at a young age, she was an excellent pianist and sought-after accompanist. She wrote her first compositions, which led to her briefly studying with Arnold Schönberg in 1917. After graduating from the girls’ high school in Rahlgasse, she studied musicology at the University of Vienna for a few semesters and singing at the Vienna Academy of Music (today’s mdw). She later completed her vocal training in Italy after a serious illness. Her father left her without financial security, so she had to earn her own living from an early age. During a brief marriage to the writer Emil Alphons Rheinhardt in the early 1920s, she lived in Munich as Gerty Rheinhardt, translating numerous texts from French, English, and Italian for him and writing for the Dreimaskenverlag publishing house. From the late 1920s onwards, she performed as an opera singer, with occasional forays into jazz and improvisation, first under the name Gerty Stoerk, later under the name Felice d’Antburg, mainly in Germany, Luxembourg, and Austria. Shortly after the Anschluss in 1938, she fled to the US while heavily pregnant with her second husband, the Jewish opera director Hans Wohlmuth, where she spent the second half of her life as Felice Wolmut. There she worked primarily as a singing teacher and, after his death, also took over his work in directing various opera studios. She lived in New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Amarillo, and Portland. In the mid-1960s, she completed another degree in psychology and sociology, became a pioneer in music therapy, and worked in the field well into the 1980s. Her talent for improvisation and composition was particularly evident in her work with children. In the 1970s, she occasionally returned to Vienna as a music therapist, but remigration was never an option. She died at the age of 92, still giving singing lessons, in Portland, USA.
(written by Marie-Anne Kohl)
