Leo Spies (4 June 1899 – 1 May 1965) was a German composer and conductor of Russian origin, active chiefly in the musical and theatrical life of Berlin. Born in Moscow to a German diplomat and his wife, he was educated there with his siblings before the family returned to Germany and settled in Dresden. He died in Ahrenshoop, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, shortly before his sixty-sixth birthday, and was buried at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin.
Spies trained in Dresden with Johannes Schreyer and Oskar von Riesemann, then studied at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik from 1916 to 1917 with Engelbert Humperdinck and Robert Kahn. Early in his career, he worked as a répétiteur at various German theatres and at the Universum Film AG studio. From 1928 to 1935, he was conductor and musical director of the ballet at the Berlin State Opera. He held a comparable post at the German Opera from 1935 to 1944, and subsequently served as director of studies and conductor at the Komische Oper from 1947 to 1954. He was elected a member of the Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic in 1952, received the Berlin Goethe Prize in 1953, and was awarded the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic in 1956.
His brother Walter was an artist and musicologist who later lived and worked principally in Bali, while his sister Daisy was a ballet dancer. As a composer, Spies was influenced by Russian Romanticism and the music of Leoš Janáček. He worked in nearly all major classical genres, including ballets, concertos, symphonies, chamber music, piano sonatas, songs, and choral works.
His stage works include the ballets “Apollo and Daphne” (1936, Berlin), “The Stralau Fishing Haul” (1936), “Sea Voyage” (1937), “The Sun Laughs” (1942), “Pastoral” (1943), “Don Quixote” (1944), and “The Lovers of Verona” (1944, Leipzig). His vocal-orchestral output includes the cantatas “Turksib” (1932) and “Red Square” (1957), alongside two symphonies, concertos for instruments and orchestra, and chamber ensembles. He also wrote incidental music for plays, including the 1946 Berlin production of “At the Golden Anchor,” a German adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy.