Film score composer, writer of pop hits and musicals, bandleader and sound-tinkerer, experimenter, visionary, a purveyor of classic Berlin frankness and, in true Prussian style, a tireless devotee to his work
Peter Thomas was born on 1 December 1925 in Breslau, now known as Wroclaw. The ongoing domestic and foreign political uncertainties that plagued Poland after the First World War prompted his parents, a young couple named Eva and Friedrich-Wilhelm Thomas, to move to Berlin in 1927. Soon afterwards, little Peter was baptised with the water of the Spree in Berlin’s Erlöserkirche (Church of the Redeemer).
Peter’s grandfather Richard Rathke, military bandmaster of the ‘4. Garde-Regiment zu Fuß’ (4th Foot Guards) of the Royal Prussian Army, had a direct influence on little Peter’s musical development. Peter began receiving piano lessons from his grandfather aged six, and was required to practise twice a day. If he didn’t feel like practising, he was asked to wash dishes or fetch coal from the cellar. Since the cellar had no electric light – and the coal-fetcher had to make their way carefully with a candle – practising usually prevailed. Peter remained forever grateful to his mother for sparing him these chores!
To begin with, Peter’s passion for music was a relatively minor part of his life. He played the organ at the Erlöserkirche from time to time, but the political turbulence of the era put paid to any thoughts of a professional career in music. After the war broke out in 1939, it didn’t take long for the family to feel the consequences: Peter’s father was soon called up. Many years later, Peter reflected grimly on everyday life in Berlin at the start of the forties: “There was endless suffering among the relatives of the fallen. The death notices never stopped coming. The English soon began waking us at night; the Americans only ever came during the day. There were fires; houses were bombed; people were buried; the bombed-out people were sent to other quarters.”
Later, Peter was called up to the Reich Labour Service and became a recruit in the 8th Infantry Regiment. Though wounded during a mission in Aachen, he avoided sustaining permanent injuries. Peter was taken prisoner at the end of the war and forced to search for landmines in Denmark for the Allies: a suicide mission he did not remember fondly.
After the war ended, Peter performed in divided Berlin and had a busy schedule as a live musician, playing for all occupying powers in the various sectors. As a result, he became intimately acquainted with four very different mentalities and was able to familiarise himself with the musical preferences of diverse audiences. Over the next few years, these evening engagements in clubs and pubs were how Peter earned his living. It was there that he learned how to tap into an audience’s emotions – and to keep being invited back.
In the autumn of 1949, Peter enrolled at the Mohr’sches Konservatorium, a renowned music school in Berlin, where he studied under Professor Felix Husadel. He graduated with distinction in 1953, receiving praises from the professor for his versatility and outstanding aptitude as a musician and composer. Commissions as a musician and arranger soon followed, carrying him through a decade in which Germany was still preoccupied by the process of reconstruction. Despite a number of restrictions, it was a “wonderful time”, he later recalled. He told his children:
In the next phase of his career, Thomas established an impressive range of contacts and credentials in the film world. His first Edgar Wallace film score, for Die Seltsame Gräfin (The Strange Countess) in 1961, was followed by 17 more Wallace adaptations, laying the foundation for an outstanding career. In all, Peter wrote scores for around 100 feature films and close to 600 television films, including Melissa and (other successful Durbridge adaptations), the Jerry Cotton films, the 1979 war film Steiner – Das Eiserne Kreuz II (Cross of Iron II), the legendary German sci-fi series Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol), quiz show Der Große Preis, numerous episodes of German crime shows Derrick and Der Alte (The Old Fox), and many more. It is a record that repeatedly invites comparison with the all-time greatest film score composers.
In the 90s, Peter Thomas was discovered by the pop avant-garde movement. Peter had laid the foundations for their movement some 30 years ago, in the 1960s, when he elicited unprecedented and outlandish sounds from everything from big bands to obscure machines called synthesisers and vocoders. These musical moments had now become a treasure trove for musicians and bands of all stripes, including Pulp, Air, Stereolab, Coldcut, Yoshinori Sunahara, Röyksopp, Jason Frederick and Die Fantastischen Vier (Fanta 4). Today, there are more than 50 cover versions of the title song from Raumpatrouille alone. Peter was often actively involved in the creation of the new tracks.
Just as the makers of Raumpatrouille deployed their own eccentric brand of creativity, incorporating items like clothes irons or pencil sharpeners into the fittings of the spaceship, Peter, as the composer, incorporated hitherto unfamiliar snippets of sound into his soundtrack. Just as the explosion of a planetoid was simulated using a ball filled with rice, sand, icing sugar and coffee, Peter’s soundtrack appeared to literally burst with outlandish ideas.
The soundtrack was not only intended to complement the futuristic nature of the plot, but to accentuate it; to be reminiscent of futuristic themes in its own right. “My thinking was: What more do I need to produce many, many times what I can achieve now?” Peter recalled. As a result, his regular line-up of musicians was supplemented with two organs, two basses, two organs, four trombones, four trumpets and voices.
“The normal sound of the piano was not entirely suitable for a science fiction series, so I took an amplifier and a microphone, threw the microphone into the piano, and turned the knobs. Suddenly, it sounded like an underwater piano, ‘I bet that’s how things sound in spaceship,’ I thought.”
When the restored Brandenburg Gate was unveiled in 2002, the Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra played the Raumpatrouille theme live to accompany it. 100 million viewers watched on from their living rooms. In the same year, Quentin Tarantino tipped off his friend George Clooney, who included several of Peter’s songs in his film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. For the EU’s eastward expansion in 2004, Peter composed the European Children’s Anthem, whose premiere at the Eurovision Gala in Berlin’s Konzerthaus was broadcast in over 30 countries by German public broadcaster ZDF.
Peter knew the music industry like no other and was unfailingly original in everything he did. He carried out all of his own PR – and there was no doubt that he was the best person for the job. He went to everyone from broadcasters to CEOs; he bowed down before great conductors. His openness to all kinds of partners and people was one of the foundations on which his creativity was built.
Peter was a tireless creator. When he sat down at the piano to compose, he never made it look like work. He was constantly on the lookout for new sounds and melodies, recording music until late at night and getting up early to continue in the morning. This tireless rhythm was maintained until the end. Many of his acquaintances hold fond memories of the letters they received, initially as ‘Ballettbriefe’ (literally ‘ballet letters’, affectionately nicknamed for the way they sprung around the page like dancers) and later as emails in the same style. It wasn’t possible to read them quickly – the reader had to take their time – but each one was a work of art in its own right.
This website can only represent a small part of Peter’s immense body of creative work; to do it full justice would exceed the scope of any platform. As such, this section will restrict itself to the most important awards that Peter received. After being hired by Will Tremper in 1960 for Tremper’s directorial debut Flucht nach Berlin (Escape to Berlin), Peter received a Gold German Film Award for ‘Best Film Score’ in 1961. He received the same award several years later for the film Die endlose Nacht (The Endless Night), also directed by Tremper. Later, Peter received a ‘Prize of Honour’ at the 2009 SoundTrack_Cologne musical congress, a German Record Critics‘ Award for his soundtrack to the TV series Café Wernicke (1980), and the German Music Authors’ Prize – awarded by GEMA, Gemany’s national performance rights society – for his lifetime achievement (2009). He used his unforgettable acceptance speech at GEMA to champion musical copyright and the protection of intellectual property, a cause he had advocated steadfastly and fearlessly throughout his entire career. To the end, Peter not only kept pace with technical advancements, but engaged in a characteristically belligerent fashion with all aspects of the music industry – most notably by declaring war on ‘Klau-Loaden’ (literally ‘steal-loading’), arguing that listeners should pay artists a fair price to access music. The documentary Swinging Soundtracks by German culture channel arte placed him alongside other musical greats such as Morricone, Legrand, Schifrin, Quincy Jones and John Barry.
Peter Thomas is one of Germany’s greatest ever composers of popular music: the example par excellence of an artist’s life unapologetically lived. He is a role model for every German artist with a desire to forge an existence beyond German borders, yet without abandoning it for the bright lights of foreign shores. The immortality of Peter’s most outstanding melodies teaches a lesson that can scarcely be embraced often enough: that what is truly visionary and enduring is often not the result of torturous effort, grandiose artistry and dogged attention to authorship, but of simple routine, elegant craftsmanship and the unique, spontaneous madness that only consecutive deadlines can induce – when the last erotic movie has scarcely been set to music before the score for the next Edgar Wallace film is due.
Tobias Kniebe in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19 May 2020
Peter Thomas
Awards
German Film Award
Filmband in Gold in the ‘Best film score’ category for Flucht nach Berlin (Escape to Berlin)
1961
German Film Award
Filmband in Gold in the ‘Best Film Score’ category for Die endlose Nacht (The Endless Night)
1963
German Record Critics‘ Award
‘Best film score’ for Café Wernicke
1980
SoundTrack Cologne Prize of Honour
Lifetime achievement
2008
German Music Authors’ Prize
Lifetime achievement
2009
Thank you
Thanks go here to Gerd Naumann for his in-depth biography of Peter Thomas. Parts of it have been incorporated into the biography that appears here.
See Gerd Naumann, The film composer Peter Thomas. From Edgar Wallace and Jerry Cotton to Raumpatrouille Orion, ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2009.
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