Hans Pfitzner
Hans Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor, music educator, opera director, and professor. He was born into a musical family in Moscow on 5 May 1869. His father worked as a violinist at the Moscow opera theatre and, from 1872, as first violinist at the municipal theatre in Frankfurt am Main.
From 1886 to 1890, Pfitzner studied piano with James Kwast and composition with Iwan Knorr at Dr. Hoch's Conservatory in Frankfurt. He held his first post from 1892 to 1893, teaching piano and music theory at the Koblenz Conservatory, while serving without pay as a conductor at the Mainz Municipal Theatre. His first opera, Poor Heinrich, was premiered there in 1895. In 1897 he moved to Berlin to teach composition and conducting at the Stern Conservatory, and in 1903 became first Kapellmeister at Berlin's Theatre of the West.
Gustav Mahler conducted the 1905 Vienna Court Opera premiere of Pfitzner's second opera, The Rose from the Garden of Love. In 1908 Pfitzner became director of the Municipal Conservatory and Symphony Orchestra in Strasbourg, and from 1910 also held the musical directorship of the Strasbourg Opera. Between 1909 and 1915 he composed his principal work, the musical drama Palestrina, to his own libretto. Bruno Walter conducted its premiere at the Munich Court Opera in 1917.
Pfitzner later taught a composition masterclass at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin from 1920 to 1929, and taught in Munich from 1930 to 1934. For the remainder of his life he held no permanent appointment, working as a conductor, opera producer, and pianist. His pupils included Sem Dresden, Otto Klemperer, Charles Münch, and Carl Orff.
His compositions include concertos for piano, violin, and cello; symphonies in C-sharp minor, G major, and C major; the Romantic cantata Of the German Soul; chamber works including four string quartets and a sextet; and the cantata Primal Words: Orphic. He married Mimi Kwast in 1899, and they had three children. After Mimi's death in 1926, he married Mali Stoll in 1939. Following a stroke in October 1948, he attended rehearsals for the first postwar performance of Palestrina in Vienna in February 1949. He died in Salzburg on 22 May 1949 and was buried in an honorary grave at Vienna Central Cemetery.