Albert Einstein hosts a gathering at his lakeside home to demonstrate his newest invention, a time machine. This scene opens the opera Chronoplan, begun in the late 1920s by composer Julia Kerr. She fled Nazi Germany with her family in early 1933, carrying the score after the planned premiere was stopped by Hitler’s rise. Her daughter Judith Kerr alluded to her mother’s piano playing in the autobiographical novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Julia Kerr’s promising career ended with the escape, and her reputation was largely forgotten. On a recent windy afternoon, descendants from London met in the garden of Einstein’s former summer house in Caputh near Berlin, the opera’s setting, to mark her life and music. Works rediscovered after being misfiled in archives were performed by singer Ruth Rosenfeld and pianist Norbert Biermann, who reconstructed them. Julia and her husband Alfred, a leading theater critic of Weimar Berlin, visited Einstein’s house with figures such as Richard Strauss, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Schnitzler, all depicted in the opera. The wooden house, built with Nobel Prize funds, hosted intellectual evenings and lake outings before Einstein and the Kerrs, who were Jewish, were forced into exile. Musicologist Christian Leitmeir began researching Julia Kerr after reading the novel to his son and found her scores wrongly catalogued under her husband’s name. Sonja Westerbeck rediscovered Chronoplan, which received its world premiere earlier this year. The family has been invited to a new Exile Museum opening in 2028. The revival coincides with growing interest in overlooked female composers. Great-grandson George Kerr expressed admiration for her talent, noting she set composing aside to support the family. Julia took the opera score when fleeing but worked as a secretary and translator in England. After Alfred’s death she returned to Berlin and served as an interpreter, including at the Nuremberg Trials. Chronoplan was recorded in 1952, the first opera to premiere on radio. Julia Kerr died in 1965.
