Cornelis Dopper
Cornelis Dopper was a Dutch conductor and composer. He was born in Stadskanaal on 7 February 1870, the son of Lucas Dopper, a barge operator and lodging-house keeper, and Grietje Swarts. Orphaned as a child, he was taken in by his sister Grietje and her husband, the composer and music teacher Johannes Bernardus Kolkman. Kolkman taught him music for several years and advised him to study at the conservatory in Leipzig.
In 1888 Dopper went to Leipzig, where he studied for two years with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn at the Royal Conservatory of Music. After returning to the Netherlands, he worked as a musician in Groningen. His 1894 opera The Blind Girl of Castel-Cuillé achieved some success at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, where he subsequently worked as a violinist, choir rehearsal conductor and conductor until the company closed in 1903.
For the following two years, Dopper supported himself as a music critic for The Echo and Life. In 1906 he moved to the United States, undertaking two extensive tours through the United States, Canada and Mexico with Henry Savage's opera company. He was involved in the American premiere of Puccini's Madama Butterfly.
After his return to the Netherlands in 1908, Willem Mengelberg asked Dopper to conduct his own Third Symphony and promptly appointed him second conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Dopper held the post until 1931, when Eduard van Beinum succeeded him. He gave Dutch premieres of works by Claude Debussy, including The Sea; Maurice Ravel, including Mother Goose; Modest Mussorgsky, including Night on Bald Mountain; Isaac Albéniz; and Manuel de Falla. He also frequently conducted his own music. During the 1920s he began school concerts that became a tradition, and he taught composition and orchestration to Henriette Bosmans, Rudolf Mengelberg and Max Tak.
Dopper wrote about one hundred compositions, including four operas, seven symphonies, vocal music and chamber music. His music was conservative and German-oriented, while showing thorough knowledge of orchestral writing and, in its instrumentation, influences from Debussy and Ravel. He sought to express Dutch subjects in such works as the Rembrandt Symphony, the Amsterdam Symphony and the Zuiderzee Symphony. The finale of the Sixth Symphony depicts a Queen's Day celebration in Amsterdam, incorporating the Dutch national anthem, the song “Orange Above,” drunken speech and the bell of an Amsterdam tram.
His best-known work, Gothic Chaconne, was widely performed and conducted by Mengelberg, Richard Strauss, Karl Muck, Pierre Monteux, George Szell and Otto Klemperer. Strauss also conducted Dopper's Sixth Symphony, Amsterdam, in Berlin in 1918. In 1930 Queen Wilhelmina awarded Dopper the Silver Medal of Honour for Art and Science of the Order of the House of Orange. His name appears among the composers displayed on the cartouches around the balcony of the Concertgebouw's Great Hall.
A 1918 performance of Dopper's Seventh Symphony, conducted by the composer, prompted music critic Matthijs Vermeulen to shout “Long live Sousa!” from the audience, expressing his preference for the marches of John Philip Sousa. The episode contributed to criticism of Dopper's conducting and music. He subsequently conducted no more subscription concerts with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and was limited chiefly to popular and school concerts. After his death, most of his works ceased to be performed, with Gothic Chaconne a notable exception.
Dopper retired with declining health caused by angina pectoris. He died in Amsterdam on 18 September 1939, aged 69, a few months after his second marriage to his housekeeper Christina de Roos. His first marriage, to the singer Henriette Siedenburg, had ended in divorce in 1920 after nearly eleven years. Interest in his music revived late in the twentieth century: the Cornelis Dopper Foundation was established in 1991, a biography appeared in 2002 and several major works were released on CD. In 2005 the North Netherlands Orchestra gave the world premiere of his 1896 First Symphony, Diana, and his long-lost 1935 Requiem was reconstructed and premiered in 2010.