August Tombo was a German harpist and music teacher, born in Erfurt, Prussia, on January 13, 1842. From 1861, he was a soloist with the Bavarian Court Opera and taught at the Munich Conservatory.
Tombo wrote a harp method, School of Harp Technique, published many years after his death by Edmund Schuëcker. In 1868, he became Richard Strauss’s first music teacher, teaching him piano. He also wrote light pieces for harp and piano.
In 1876, Tombo played in the orchestra at the first Bayreuth Festival, during the premiere performance of the complete Ring of the Nibelung cycle. When he complained to Richard Wagner that the harp part in Das Rheingold could not be played, Wagner told him to revise it as he saw fit. The exchange was first printed in the 1905 German revised and expanded edition of Hector Berlioz’s orchestration treatise, edited by Strauss. Tombo died in Gries, now part of Bolzano, on May 14, 1878, and was buried in the Old Southern Cemetery.