![]() So Biebl served his time until 1946, when he returned to Germany and took up the post of choral director in the aforementioned town with the hard-to-pronounce name. This was not forced slave labor they were paid. The prisoners were treated well and put to work, mainly on farms, thus helping to fill the labor gap caused by so many American soldiers leaving the workforce. Apparently as the war went on the prison facilities in Europe and Britain became too crowded, so as many a half a million captured soldiers were shipped to America. I never had the slightest idea about this, and I used to teach American history. The US had prison camps for captured German soldiers during WWII. ![]() Let me see if I can untangle things a bit.īiebl was a WWII veteran, having been drafted into the German army in 1943, captured in 1944, and imprisoned in a POW camp at Fort Custer, near Battle Creek, Michigan. ![]() Yes, that’s what our old friend Wikipedia says. The “Ave Maria,” his best-known piece, was composed sometime prior to May 1956 when it was first performed in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany by. Let’s get the piece’s timeline straight first, shall we? Biebl was by no means a Classical or Romantic composer: he died in 2001. Perhaps he lived in the 1600’s or 1700’s? And it certainly would never have occurred to me that:ġ) the piece has become a favorite of brass bands, particularly marching bands, and 2) the piece was the subject of a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.īut I’ll get to the info on these two fascinating facts in a minute. You just never know what you’re going to find out when you google something! I assumed (a common action for me) that Franz Biebl was someone who lived several hundred years ago, as the music has a very old-ish feel to me.
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