Biography
Hans Pfitzner was born on 5 May 1869 in Moscow, the son of an orchestral musician, and grew up from 1872 in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied composition and piano at the Hoch Conservatory. From the 1890s he worked as a conductor in Mainz, Berlin and Strasbourg, among other cities, while composing operas, songs and orchestral works in a late-Romantic idiom indebted to Wagner; his principal work, the opera “Palestrina,” was premiered in 1917. Pfitzner saw himself as an opponent of musical modernism, held nationalist and antisemitic views, and moved closer to National Socialism after 1933, a legacy that still shadows his work today. Marked after the war by the loss of his home, illness and a denazification process, he died in Salzburg on 22 May 1949.
On Stagelog
Loading stats...