German book illustrator, graphic artist, and collector of South and East Asian works of art.

Career Summary

After studies in Munich, Berlin, and Giessen, and briefly at the Munich School of Applied Arts, Emil Preetorius self-trained as a painter and draftsman. In 1909 he co-founded a school for illustration in Munich, and taught at the University of Fine Arts in Munich from 1926, becoming a professor there in 1928. He provided illustrations for many works of fiction, including three by Thomas Mann. In the late 1920s he began designing sets for productions of Wagner’s stage works at Bayreuth, including Meistersinger and the Ring, in conjunction with Wilhelm Furtwängler, and his work was highly praised by Hitler. From 1944 he designed opera sets for Salzburg.

He was also a collector of artworks of China, Japan, Persia, and India. His large collection is now owned by the Preetorius Foundation.

He is not to be confused with Ernst Praetorius [Preetorius].

Emil Preetorius and Heinrich Schenker

Preetorius wrote an article for the Rotary Club journal Der Rotarier für Deutschland und Österreich in January 1931, to which Reinhard Oppel drew Schenker's attention as making favorable comment on Schenker’s work. On February 9, 1931 Preetorius gave a lecture in Vienna, which was attended by Schenker and his pupils Robert Brünauer and Hans Weisse. Weisse identifed deficiencies in the lecture, while Schenker was disappointed that it failed to consider music. Nonetheless, Schenker approached Preetorius after the lecture, and subsequently arranged for a copy of Meisterwerk III to be sent to him, and followed that with a letter (a draft of which survives as OJ 5/30, [1], February 12–13, 1931), asserting that his theory of cohesiveness (Zusammenhang) in music addressed a question raised in Preetorius's article and could become a model for exploration of unity in other arts.

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