Louis Spohr
, April 5, 1784 in Braunschweig - October 22, 1859 in Kassel;
German composer, violinist, music director and
composer. Born Ludwig
Spohr, he is usually known by the French form of his name: Louis.
Maestro Dufour gave him his earliest instruction on the violin. His first attempts at composition date from the early 1790s. Dufour, recognizing the boy's musical talent, persuaded his parents to send him to Braunschweig for further instruction. Spohr's family lived at those times in the town of Seesen, Harz.
A successful concert at the court impressed the Duke (Herzog Ferdinand von Braunschweig) so much that he engaged the 15-year old Spohr as a chamber musician in 1799. Three years later, in 1802, through the good influences of the Duke, he became the pupil of Franz Eck and accompanied him on a concert tour which took him as far as St. Petersburg. Eck, who completely retrained Spohr in violin technique, was a product of the Mannheim school, and Spohr became its most prominent heir.
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.
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 am Main (1817-1819) where he was able to stage his own operas. The first of which, Faust, had been rejected in Vienna.
The
Opera House of Kassel
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.
He toured with great successes to Italy, Russia and Great Britain.
In 1857 he was pensioned off, much against his own wish, and in the winter of the same year he had the misfortune to break his arm, an accident which put an end to his violin playing. Nevertheless he conducted his opera Jessonda at the fiftieth anniversary of the Prague Conservatorium in the following year, with all his former energy. In 1859 he died at Kassel.
Spohr wrote music in all genres. His nine symphonies show a progress
from the classical style of his predecessors to the romantic program
music..
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), most recently in a 2006 recording by Hilary Hahn.
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 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 the Nazis because it depicted a European hero in love with
an Indian princess.
Louis Spohr's first wife Dorette (b. Dorothea Scheidler), a famous harp virtuoso, died in 1834.
Spohr wrote 105 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) 1825/26, were greatly admired during the 19th century.
Spohr was so popular in the Victorian era that Gilbert & Sullivan mentioned him in the same breath as Bach and Beethoven in Act 2 of The Mikado in a song by the title character.
