Louis Spohr

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Self-portrait of Spohr as a young man.

Louis Spohr (April 5, 1784 – October 22, 1859) was a German composer, violinist and conductor. Born Ludwig Spohr, he is usually known by the French form of his name outside Germany.

1 Life
2 Works
3 Media
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Life

Spohr was born in Braunschweig in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg to Karl Heinrich Spohr and Juliane Ernestine Luise Henke and throughout his childhood showed talent for the violin. He joined the ducal orchestra at the age of 15. Three years later he was sent, with the Duke of Brunswick's support, on a year-long study tour to St Petersburg with the virtuoso violinist Franz Anton Eck. Spohr's first notable compositions, including his First Violin Concerto, date from this time. After his return home, the Duke granted him leave to make a concert tour of North Germany. A concert in Leipzig in December 1804 brought the influential music critic Friedrich Rochlitz "to his knees", not only because of Spohr's playing but also because of his compositions. This concert brought the young man overnight fame in the whole German-speaking world.

In 1805, Spohr got a job as concertmaster at the court of Gotha, where he stayed until 1812. There he met the 18-year-old harpist Dorette Scheidler, daughter of one of the court singers, and fell in love with her. They were married the next year. They performed successfully together as a violin and harp duo, touring in Italy (1816-1817), England (1820) and Paris (1821), but Dorette later abandoned her harpist's career and concentrated on raising their children. Her untimely death in 1834 brought him great sorrow.

Spohr later worked as conductor at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna (1813-1815), where he became friendly with Beethoven; subsequently he was opera director at Frankfurt (1817-1819) where he was able to stage his own operas — the first of which, Faust, had been rejected in Vienna. Spohr's longest post, from 1822 until his death in Kassel, was as the director of music at the court of Kassel, a position offered him on the suggestion of Carl Maria von Weber. In Kassel on January 3, 1836, he married his second wife, the 29-year-old Marianne Pfeiffer. She survived him by many years, living until 1892.

Like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and his own slightly older contemporary Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Spohr was an active Freemason.

Louis Spohr.

[edit] Works

A prolific composer, Spohr produced more than 150 works with opus numbers, in addition to a number of works without such numbers. He wrote music in all genres. His nine symphonies (a tenth was left unfinished, but was brought to completion by Eugene Minor and premiered by the Bergen Youth Orchestra) show a progress from the classical style of his predecessors to the programme music of the ninth symphony, Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons). Between 1803 and 1844 Spohr wrote more violin concertos than any other composer of the time, sixteen in all. Some of them are formally unconventional, such as the one-movement Concerto No. 8, which is in the style of an operatic aria, and which is still periodically revived (Jascha Heifetz championed it). There are two double-violin concertos as well. Better known today, however, are the four clarinet concertos, all written for the virtuoso Johann Simon Hermstedt, which have established a secure place in clarinettists' repertoire.

Among Spohr's chamber music is a series of no fewer than 36 string quartets, as well as four interesting double quartets for two string quartets. He also wrote an assortment of other quartets, duos, trios, quintets and sextets, an octet and a nonet, works for solo violin and for solo harp, and works for violin and harp to be played by him and his wife together.

Though obscure today, Spohr's best operas Faust (1816), Zemire und Azor (1819) and Jessonda (1823) remained in the popular repertoire through the 19th century and well into the 20th when Jessonda was banned by Nazis because it depicted a European hero in love with an Indian princess. Spohr also wrote dozens of songs, many of them collected as Deutsche Lieder (German Songs), as well as a mass and other choral works. His oratorios, particularly Die letzten Dinge (The Last Judgement) (1825—1826), were greatly admired during the 19th century. Spohr was so popular in the Victorian era that Gilbert and Sullivan mention him in the same breath as Bach and Beethoven in Act 2 of The Mikado in a song by the title character.

Spohr was a noted violinist, and invented the violin chin-rest, about 1820. He was also a significant conductor, being one of the first to use a baton and also inventing rehearsal letters, which are placed periodically throughout a piece of sheet music so that a conductor may save time by asking the orchestra or singers to start playing "from letter C", for example).

In addition to musical works, Spohr wrote an entertaining and informative autobiography, published posthumously in 1860. A museum is devoted to his memory in Kassel.