Conradin Kreutzer

Conradin Kreutzer (b Messkirch, Baden, 22 Nov 1780; d Riga, 14 Dec 1849). German composer and conductor.

The son of a Swabian burgher, he received his earliest musical training from the local choirmaster, J.B. Rieger. From 1789 he studied theory and the organ with Ernst Weinrauch and learnt to play a number of instruments at the Benedictine monastery of Zwiefalten. In 1798 or 1799 he became a student of law at the University of Freiburg, but after his father’s death in 1800 he turned entirely to music. While still students he and friends performed his one-act Singspiel Die lächerliche Werbung. For the next three or four years he was probably in Switzerland; in 1804 he went to Vienna, where he met Haydn and was probably a pupil of Albrechtsberger. He gave music lessons and concerts in order to maintain himself, and continued to compose, though was unable to secure performances of his stage works in Vienna until 1810. From 1810 he toured Germany and elsewhere demonstrating Franz Leppich’s semi-mechanical ‘panmelodicon’. He spent the winter of 1811–12 in Stuttgart, where the operas Konradin von Schwaben and Feodora were successfully staged. Following Danzi’s resignation Kreutzer was appointed Hofkapellmeister with effect from 10 July 1812. That autumn he married for the first time; his daughters Cäcilie and Marie (the latter from his second marriage) became singers. Although he gave up his Stuttgart post in 1816 owing to intrigues, his friendship there with the Swabian poet Johann Ludwig Uhland, one of Germany’s foremost lyricists and ballad writers, was of far-reaching importance for his later development. The work from this period on which he based his highest hopes was the through-composed ‘heroic opera’ Orestes, with which he intended to bridge the gap between Gluck’s two Iphigenia operas; after fruitless attempts to have it staged in Berlin, and then in Vienna, it was finally produced in Prague in 1818, but was a failure.

After he left Stuttgart Kreutzer spent some time at Schaffhausen before becoming Kapellmeister (1818–22) to Prince Carl Egon of Fürstenberg at Donaueschingen. He made several tours while still nominally engaged there, and the lyric-tragic monodrama Adele von Budoy dates from this period. It was commissioned for Anna Milder Hauptmann, but enjoyed success only when revised for Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient at Vienna in 1823 under the title Cordelia; she also performed the role in Paris. Following the successful production of his opera Libussa in Vienna in 1822, Kreutzer was appointed Kapellmeister at the Kärntnertortheater; he held the post until 1827 and from 1829 to 1832. Between these spells at the Vienna court opera he was in Paris. In 1833 he moved to the suburban Theater in der Josefstadt, in response to an invitation from the ambitious director, Stöger. He was Kapellmeister there from 1833 to 1835, the period that saw the first performances of his two greatest successes, Das Nachtlager in Granada and Der Verschwender. 1833 saw the première in Berlin of Kreutzer’s settling of Grillparzer’s Melusina, which the poet had originally written for Beethoven in 1823. Although Kreutzer was back at the Kärntnertortheater from 1835, it was at the Josefstadt that the opera Die Höhle bei Waverley was given in 1837. In the 1840s he accompanied his daughters on concert tours and was city music director at Cologne, 1840–42, as well as working in Mainz, 1844–5. He was mentioned in 1846 as Nicolai’s likely successor at the Vienna Hofoper, but the negotiations came to nothing and in 1848 he moved to Riga.

During the 1840s a number of German theatres staged Kreutzer’s operas, though these were more succès d’estime than triumphs: Brunswick, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Hamburg and (posthumously) Kassel each staged one of his new operas in the years following his final departure from Vienna, but none of these houses seems to have invited him back to mount another. Tastes were changing; the esteemed master of Das Nachtlager and Der Verschwender had nothing original to offer a public that was experiencing the early operas of Wagner.

Kreutzer’s music has never been entirely forgotten. His Uhland settings for male-voice chorus long remained popular. Das Nachtlager used to be revived occasionally in Germany and a few of the solo songs are still sometimes heard; above all, his score for Raimund’s ‘romantic magic tale’ Der Verschwender continues to be performed regularly in Austria. Despite the power of some of the big numbers in Das Nachtlager and the sure sense of dramatic timing and instrumental colour in Der Verschwender (the beggar’s song ‘O hört des armen Mannes Bitte’ is, with its haunting, melancholy beauty, not unworthy of Schubert; its insertion within a roistering chorus is a touch that Weber would have admired), Kreutzer is at his most characteristic in simple, expressive songs, such as the beggar’s ‘Habt Dank, ihr guten Leute’ and Valentin’s ‘Da streiten sich die Leut herum’ from Der Verschwender, and the once-famous romance ‘Ein Schütz bin ich’ from Das Nachtlager, or some of the atmospheric Uhland settings. His effective instrumentation and lively feeling for rhythm and local colour are shown in many of his works, probably nowhere to more telling effect than in the charming (and briefly poignant) Septet in E op.62 for wind and strings. Several of his chamber works and songs have now been republished and many of his works have been recorded.