Biography
Peter Cornelius was born in Mainz in 1824, the son of actors, and worked as an actor and violinist at the Mainz theatre before studying composition with Siegfried Dehn in Berlin from 1845 to 1849. In 1852 he moved to Weimar, joined the circle around Franz Liszt, and championed the New German School as a writer for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. With the comic opera 'Der Barbier von Bagdad' (1858), whose premiere under Liszt turned into a scandal, he created his best-known work for the stage. After the break with Weimar he lived in Vienna from 1859, where he met Friedrich Hebbel and Richard Wagner, and later moved to Munich, teaching from 1867 at the newly founded Royal School of Music. Cornelius died in his native Mainz in 1874; alongside his operas, his songs are considered a significant contribution to German Romanticism.
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