Frederick Woltmann

PVT in 603rd Engineer Camouflage Bn : Co B

ASN#12218784

Born 1908 in NY, Died 1965

Place of enlistment: New York, NY

Other residence(s): New York, NY; Hollywood, CA

United States Army, did not accompany the unit to Europe

College education before the war: Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute; Columbia University; Eastman School of Music

Source: 603rd Camouflage Engineer Roster provided by W. Anderson; photo courtesy Eastman School of Music 1937 yearbook

Frederick Woltmann was born on May 13, 1908 in Flushing, NY. He and his brother, Henry, two years older, were both adopted by an electrical engineer and his wife and raised by them in Manhattan. (The Woltmanns had no birth children.)

Frederick and Henry both had musical talent—as children they sang in a boys’ chorus at the Metropolitan Opera, and, after Frederick started studying piano at the age of 11, they played piano duets together. A program guide shows them playing on a New York City radio station in 1926.

Frederick graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, which was, at the time, a boys’ school in Lower Manhattan. Clearly a polymath, Frederick earned a degree in chemistry from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He then went on to Columbia to study architecture, thinking he might be interested in stage design. (A 1933 newspaper article describes him playing his own composition at a “musicale” in New York City, having also contributed to the event a replica of the Metropolitan Opera stage he had built, depicting the setting for a Strauss opera.)

In 1933 he won a four-year scholarship to study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and left the city and his architecture studies to turn to music for good.

Frederick Woltmann (in white sweater) with a group of Eastman School graduates in Rome, 1938

He earned a bachelor’s in music in composition at Eastman; there he was the first sophomore to have his work performed by a major symphony orchestra—the Philadelphia Orchestra under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy. Upon graduation in 1937 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome, which provided him a residence, a studio, and a substantial stipend to work and study in Europe for two years.

Right around the time he graduated from Eastman, he determined to turn Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome into an opera. He was working on getting Miss Wharton’s permission in the summer of 1937 (on a ship on his way to Europe) when he was informed of her death. He eventually got permission (after his two-year stint abroad) and by the end of 1939 was at work on a two-act libretto. (While working on the composition, he also designed some of the sets on his scale model of the Met stage!)

A 1939 interview describes part of his composing process, which is worth repeating here. “You might like to know how he works. Theat can be exemplified by telling what he did about the ancient Coliseum in Rome. He wanted to write a piece about it so he went there all by himself at midnight. . . . He stepped inside the huge ruins and stood there. He visualized the emperor in his box and the populace. He thought of them as real people, like an American baseball crowd with the President throwing out the first ball. He walked down into where the athletes got ready for their appearances. He roamed around the old lion pits. The music began to come to him. Snatches of phrases and harmonies, the flutes come in here, the violins pick it up there and the kettledrums start rolling. He stayed at the Coliseum for four hours. When he came away he had the rough outline of his composition filling his mind and emotions. Then all he had to do was go home and write it. It might take days or weeks or months, but he’d put the Coliseum into music.”

Frederick registered for the draft on October 16, 1940. His parents died in the early 1940s, and he must have been feeling at loose ends, despite being named “Outstanding American Composer of 1941” by the National Academy of Arts and Letters. So he volunteered for the army, enlisting on December 11, 1942. He was assigned to the 603^rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, and went to Fort Meade in Maryland to train with the unit.

But the world had other plans for Frederick, and in the spring of 1943 he was hospitalized (in an Army hospital) for a condition that had pre-existed his enlistment. While redacted from his hospital records, the condition was complicated by a diagnosis of myositis, a generally incurable disease involving chronic muscle inflammation. Frederick was discharged from the Army on June 19, 1943.

In 1945 he took a post as director of music and composer in residence at the Congregational Church of the Pelhams in Westchester, NY. He planned to divide his time between New York City and the Pelham area while he continued work on Ethan Frome.

Unfortunately he never finished that opera, and from this point on, his career is harder to trace. By 1950, he had started splitting his time between New York and Hollywood. Over the years, articles showed him performing as a pianist in various settings around the country. But he never matched the surge of compositions he created in the pre-war and wartime years. A 1958 Detroit Free Press article called him a “strange genius with a limited but striking” musical output. It is possible that his deteriorating health became a major obstacle to his creativity.

His best known works include “Songs from a Chinese Lute for Voice and 33 Instruments” in 1936, “Songs for Autumn” and “Concerto for Piano” in 1937, “Variations on an Old English Folk Song”, commissioned by an orchestra in Rome in 1938,“The Coliseum at Night” in 1939, “Suite for Judy for Piano and Orchestra” in 1944 (which musically described eight phases in the life of a small girl including a section entitled “Nose Blowing Time”), and “Symphony from Leaves of Grass” in 1945.

His works have been performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, the NY Philharmonic Symphony, the Minneapolis Symphony, and orchestras in Richmond, VA, Florida, Oklahoma City, Salzburg (Austria), and Rome (Italy).

Frederick died of heart disease and laryngeal cancer at the age of 57, on October 20, 1965 in Los Angeles, CA. Sadly, for the last few months of his life, he was living at a board and care home in LA, and collecting $70 a month in VA disability and Social Security payments.

He is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, CA; clearly he was proud of his brief service in the 603^rd since it’s called out on his gravestone.