RIP Martin Böttcher

He was one of the greats of German entertainment, television and film music. His compositional handwriting is unmistakable, his sound unmistakable: the melodies of his Winnetou film scores are legendary. Martin Böttcher has written the music for over 50 feature films and 300 television productions. On April 19th, the composer died at the age of 91 years, as BR-KLASSIK learned from a close family circle.

Everybody knows the melodies of the Winnetou film scores, and this also applies to many of his television music, which in a sense brought him to every German living room: "Sonderabteilung K1", "Forsthaus Falkenau", "Pfarrer Braun". Martin Böttcher received numerous prizes and awards for his work, including the Federal Cross of Merit on the band, the "Look & Listen - Telepool BR Music Award" and honorary membership in the US Max Steiner Society - alongside Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and others.

From the interceptor to the guitar

The musical home of the great-grandson of a Weimar Hofkapellmeister, born in Berlin in 1927, was jazz. Shortly before the end of the war, he was drafted into the Luftwaffe and trained on the rocket-propelled interceptor Messerschmidt Me 163 "Komet". He did not fly anymore, but aviation remained one of his passions. During his captivity, he began to play the guitar, practiced the 16 hours every day, and then began his professional musical career as a rhythm guitarist in the dance and entertainment orchestra of the then Northwest German Radio in Hamburg. Already in 1952 he wrote a first film music for a documentary.

    Role models? For me, Henry Mancini was a great composer and arranger.

Martin Böttcher

In 1954, Martin Böttcher said goodbye to his dance orchestra and gave up the guitarist activity to devote himself primarily to composing and arranging at the desk above the music paper. Unlike, for example, his colleagues Werner Müller and Bert Kaempfert, who also profiled themselves as composing and arranging as a big band leader, Martin Böttcher completed rather few live performances as an orchestra conductor.

In a constant flow he composed for the film. The first famous titles were "Die Halbstarken" and "Endstation Liebe", both with Horst Buchholz in the leading roles, later the Father Brown thrillers with Heinz Rühmann, a series of Edgar Wallace thrillers and of course the ten "Winnetou" - Films with Pierre Brice and Lex Barker in the lead roles, whose signature tunes Martin Böttcher international fame in the 1960s. The "Old Shatterhand" theme from 1962 topped the charts for 17 weeks and sold more than 100,000 times, a real sensation back then.

The series of Böttcher's television music is long: it still includes popular series such as "The Crime Museum", "Gertrud Stranitzki" with Inge Meysel, "It does not always caviar" with Siegfried Rauch, "Air Albatross" with Wolf Roth, "Happy holidays "with Claudia Rieschel, Simone Rethel and Sigmar Solbach as well as" Pfarrer Braun "with Ottfried Fischer.

The Böttcher sound

In all of these film and television music Martin Böttcher cultivated a sound that is characterized by great originality and independence. They are memorable diatonic melodies, paired with a harmonic harmony over powerful bass lines, embedded in a warm, soft, full-sounding overall sound. In fact, it would be difficult to find a Böttcher piece in which one would not recognize after 15 seconds the unmistakable signature of the composer.