Conradin Kreutzer was a German conductor and composer, born in Messkirch on November 22, 1780. At his father’s urging, he entered the law faculty at the University of Freiburg in 1799. After his father died in 1800, he left the university to pursue music. He studied piano, organ, violin, oboe, and clarinet, and composed the one-act comic opera Die lächerliche Werbung with fellow students.
Kreutzer settled in Vienna in 1804 and studied composition with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. Influenced by Antonio Salieri’s operas, he focused chiefly on opera, writing one-act works including Aesop in Phrygia (1808) and Jery and Bätely (1810), based on an older libretto by Goethe. From 1812 to 1816 he worked at the Stuttgart Court Chapel, where his three-act tragic opera Conradin of Swabia was staged in 1812. He then worked in Donaueschingen from 1818 to 1822 before returning to Vienna, where his opera Libussa was staged in 1822.
His most productive period in Vienna came in the 1830s. His best-known operas from this time include Melusina (1833), with a libretto by Franz Grillparzer, and The Night Camp in Granada (1834). In the late 1830s, he toured with his daughters, singers Cecilia and Maria. From 1840 to 1842, he was music director in Cologne, leading the orchestra of the Cologne Concert Society.
Kreutzer also wrote chamber and choral music and songs. His pupils included Mischa Hauser. He died in Riga on December 14, 1849, and was buried by St. Francis Church.