Ferdinand Rauter and Engel Lund

This footage is presented with kind permission from Gudrun Ponzi and Andrea Rauter. It is presented as part of the Royal College of Music Oral History Project "Singing a Song in a Foreign Land", in connection with Andrea Rauter's oral history interview. It was filmed by Frank Ponzi and originally shown in Iceland.
The chosen excerpt includes interviews with Ferdinand Rauter, Engel Lund, Claire Rauter, Ursula Vaughan Williams, Martin Isepp and Eileen MacLeod
Ferdinand Rauter studied music and chemistry in Dresden from 1920. In 1929 he formed a partnership with the singer Engel Lund, who had grown up in Iceland and had a unique talent to perform folk songs from all over the world in their original languages. Rauter wrote the accompaniments for these, and they performed them in hundreds of concerts in Britain and on several tours of Europe and the United States before and after the war.
Rauter came to live in Britain in 1929. He was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man in 1940 and co founded the Refugee Musicians Committee (1941), the Austrian Musicians Group and the Anglo-Austrian Music Society.
Ferdinand Rauter gave frequent concerts at the National Gallery during the war and worked as music therapist in Scotland 1945-46. He made several recordings of songs with Engel Lund for BBC and for EMI. He was also a world expert on mushrooms and an excellent cook.
Rauter, Ferdinand
Pianist and teacher, born June 4, 1902 in Klagenfurt, died 1987 in London
This footage is presented as part of the ORAL HISTORY PROJECT "Singing a Song in a Foreign Land", which focuses on musicians who emigrated from Central Europe because of Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 40s.
Visit the SINGING A SONG IN A FOREIGN LAND - ONLINE RESOURCE for more interviews and further information:
www.rcm.ac.uk/s...
This project has been generously supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Rothschild Foundation