Hermann Scherchen was a German conductor, music educator, and violist. Born in Berlin on 21 June 1891, he taught himself to play the viola. From 1907 to 1910 he played in the Blüthner Orchestra in Berlin, then joined the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1911 Scherchen met Arnold Schoenberg and took part in the premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He conducted in Riga from 1914 to 1916, spent 1916–1918 in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, and returned to Berlin in 1918. There he founded the New Music Society and, in 1919, established Melos, a journal devoted to contemporary music.
He left Germany in 1933 and led orchestras in Brussels and Vienna. In 1958 he toured Russia; his recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory was not published. His students included Pierre Boulez and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Scherchen was one of the librettists of Hartmann's opera Simplicissimus, based on the novel by Grimmelshausen.
Scherchen was one of the most active and authoritative interpreters of 20th-century contemporary music. He performed works by Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Ernst Krenek, Alois Hába, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Dallapiccola, Edgard Varèse, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze, Iannis Xenakis, and Mark Lavry. He was also known for performances of Bach's The Art of Fugue and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.
His writings included the Manual of Conducting (1929), translated into many languages and still reprinted, The Nature of Music (1946), Music for Everyone (1950), and Make Everything Audible: Letters of a Conductor, 1920–1939, published in 1976. His memoirs, From My Life: Russia in Those Years; Recollections, appeared in 1984.