24 Facts About Hans Pfitzner

Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist.

Hans Pfitzner's best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina, loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli.

Hans Pfitzner was born in Moscow where his father played cello in a theater orchestra.

The family returned to his father's native town Frankfurt in 1872, when Hans Pfitzner was two years old, he always considered Frankfurt his home town.

Hans Pfitzner received early instruction in violin from his father, and his earliest compositions were composed at age 11.

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In Strasbourg, Hans Pfitzner finally had some professional stability, and it was there he gained significant power to direct his own operas.

Hans Pfitzner viewed control over the stage direction to be his particular domain, and this view was to cause him particular difficulty for the rest of his career.

The central event of Pfitzner's life was the annexation of Imperial Alsace—and with it Strasbourg—by France in the aftermath of World War I Pfitzner lost his livelihood and was left destitute at age 50.

At that time, the Hans Pfitzner concerto was considered the most important addition to the violin concerto repertoire since the first concerto of Max Bruch, although it is not played by most violinists these days.

Hans Pfitzner incurred extra wrath from the Nazis by refusing to obey the regime's request to provide incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that could be used in place of the famous setting by Felix Mendelssohn, unacceptable to the Nazis because of his Jewish origin.

Hans Pfitzner maintained that Mendelssohn's original was far better than anything he himself could offer as a substitute.

Hitler did most of the talking, but Hans Pfitzner dared to contradict him regarding the homosexual and antisemitic thinker Otto Weininger, causing Hitler to leave in a huff.

In 1934 Hans Pfitzner was forced into retirement and lost his positions as opera conductor, stage director and academy professor.

Hans Pfitzner was given a minimal pension of a few hundred marks a month, which he contested until 1937 when Goebbels resolved the issue.

Hans Pfitzner was forced to prove that he had, in fact, totally Gentile ancestry.

Hans Pfitzner viewed Jewishness as a cultural trait rather than a racial one.

Hans Pfitzner was willing to make exceptions to a general policy of antisemitism.

Attempts which Hans Pfitzner made on behalf of Cossman might have caused Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, incidentally the son of the heldentenor who premiered Hans Pfitzner's first opera, to investigate him.

Still, Hans Pfitzner maintained close contact with virulent antisemites like music critics Walter Abendroth and Victor Junk, and did not scruple to use antisemitic invective to pursue certain aims.

Hans Pfitzner's home having been destroyed in the war by Allied bombing, and his membership in the Munich Academy of Music having been revoked for his speaking out against Nazism, the composer in 1945 found himself homeless and mentally ill.

Hans Pfitzner's works combine Romantic and Late Romantic elements with extended thematic development, atmospheric music drama, and the intimacy of chamber music.

Hans Pfitzner's first symphony—the Symphony in C-sharp minor—underwent a strange genesis: it was not conceived in orchestral terms at all, but was a reworking of a string quartet.

Hans Pfitzner co-founded the Hans Pfitzner Association for German Music in 1918.

Hans Pfitzner is too progressive, not simply, the way Korngold can be taken to be; he is too conservative, if that means to be influenced by someone like Schoenberg.