Wolfgang Wijdeveld
Wolfgang Wijdeveld (9 May 1910 – 12 December 1985) was a Dutch pianist and composer. He was born in The Hague and died in Laren.
He was the son of the architect and graphic artist Hendrik Wijdeveld and the cellist Ellen Philippine Kohn. His maternal grandmother was the German-Jewish pianist Ruscha Schönfeld, who had known Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Cosima Wagner, and Max Reger, and who founded a conservatory in 1850 in her hometown of Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia.
Wijdeveld initially studied piano with Cornelius Berkhout and harmony with Willem van Warmelo. At the Amsterdam Conservatory, he studied piano with Willem Andriessen, music theory with Sem Dresden and Anton Tierie, and violin with Cor Kint. He later took singing lessons with Saar van Alphen and studied composition for two years with Willem Pijper.
From 1930 to 1954, he worked as pianist and composer for the ballets of Yvonne Georgi and Estelle Reed and for the Ballet of the Low Countries. He toured the United States with Yvonne Georgi's ballet company in 1939, and returned there in 1962 and 1963 as a pianist, accompanying his father, who gave lectures.
Wijdeveld contributed for many years to school concerts and gave lectures for adult education institutes. He was director of the Municipal Music School in Zwolle from 1940 to 1946. He subsequently taught piano at the Utrecht Conservatory until 1976, becoming head piano teacher and, from 1962, also a teacher of methodology. Between 1966 and 1970, he taught the same subjects at the Arnhem Conservatory. He was music critic for the daily newspaper Het Vrije Volk from 1956 to 1968 and held leadership positions in professional teaching and musicians' associations.
His compositions include extensive chamber music, including piano and violin sonatas and works for accordion. His guitar works include the Concerto for Guitar, for guitar, violin, viola, and cello. He also wrote ballets for one or two pianos and orchestra, the Symphonic Overture for orchestra, Freedom Awakens a Song for alto soloist, reciter, mixed choir, and orchestra, Ten Songs on South African Texts, and Three Songs for medium voice, violin, viola, clarinet, and piano, based on poems by Walt Whitman.