1784–1859 · Romantic
Louis Spohr (1784—1859) was a German violinist, composer and conductor, born in Brunswick. From 1822 he served as music director in Kassel. He wrote operas, symphonies, oratorios, violin and clarinet concertos, chamber music and songs, and invented the violin chinrest. The site has his choral piece Das Lied.
Louis Spohr was born in Brunswick on 5 April 1784. His father was a doctor and an amateur musician, and he tried to give his son a good education. Music was no stranger at home: his mother had a gift for singing and the piano, and his father played the flute. In 1786 the family moved to Seesen.
His musical gifts showed early. At the age of six the boy began to study music theory, and then moved on to the violin. His first attempts at composing date from the early 1790s.
In 1799 Spohr set out on his first concert tour, to Hamburg, but the trip was badly planned and failed. He then turned to Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, for financial help. A concert at the court made a strong impression on the duke, and the fifteen-year-old musician was taken on as a chamber musician.
In 1802, through the duke's good offices, Spohr became a pupil of the violinist Franz Eck. Eck belonged to the Mannheim school, and his father, the trumpeter Georg Eck, had worked with Mozart. The teacher completely retrained Spohr's playing technique and took him on a long concert tour that ended in Saint Petersburg.
In Saint Petersburg Spohr heard Muzio Clementi and John Field and admired their playing. The eighteen-year-old kept a detailed diary on the journey and later included large parts of it in his memoirs. Spohr's first notable compositions, among them his Violin Concerto No. 1, date from this period.
After his return home the duke allowed Spohr to tour northern Germany. In December 1804 his concert in Leipzig deeply impressed the influential critic Friedrich Rochlitz, who valued both the playing and the compositions of the young musician. After that evening Spohr's fame spread overnight across the whole German-speaking world.
In 1805 Spohr obtained a post as concertmaster at the court in Gotha and stayed there until 1812. In Gotha he got to know Dorette Scheidler, a harpist and pianist whose father was one of the court singers. They married on 2 February 1806 and lived happily together until Dorette's death in 1834. In 1807 he joined the Masonic lodge Ernst zum Compaß.
The couple appeared together with success as a duo of violin and harp, and Spohr composed a sonata in C minor for the two instruments for his wife. Dorette later gave up playing in public and turned to bringing up their children.
In 1808 Spohr played with Beethoven at the latter's home, going through the Piano Trio, Op. 70 No. 1. Spohr remarked that the instrument was badly tuned and that Beethoven played roughly or carelessly. In 1812 he conducted a concert in a church in Erfurt, given to celebrate Napoleon's birthday.
Spohr then went to Vienna, where he became a conductor at the opera house and stayed on friendly terms with Beethoven. He also travelled to Italy, where he competed with Niccolò Paganini himself.
In 1816 the premiere took place of Spohr's most important opera, Faust, based on the novel by Friedrich Klinger. The opera was rejected in Vienna, and it was first staged on the stage of the Estates Theatre in Prague with Carl Maria von Weber conducting. In Faust Spohr built on Mozart's operatic discoveries and was one of the first to unite the infernal and the religious in opera. He created a demonic character and used leitmotifs. In this way, together with other composers, Spohr stood at the origins of German Romantic opera.
From 1817 Spohr directed the musical side of the Frankfurt city theatre, where he staged his own operas. Together with Dorette he toured: in 1816–1817 they were in Italy, in 1820 in England, where they performed in London, and in 1821 in Paris.
In 1822, on the recommendation of Weber, Spohr obtained the post of court music director in Kassel, at the court of William II, Elector of Hesse. He served there until his death, his longest period of employment. In Kassel on 3 January 1836 Spohr married for the second time; his wife, Marianne Pfeiffer, was the daughter of a jurist, Burkhard Wilhelm Pfeiffer. She outlived her husband and died in 1892.
In 1851 the elector would not sign the permit for a two-month leave that Spohr's contract guaranteed him. Spohr went anyway, and some of his salary was withheld. In 1857 he was retired on a pension, much against his own wish. That winter he broke his arm, and his violin playing came to an end. Even so, the next year he conducted his opera Jessonda at the Prague Conservatorium's fiftieth anniversary.
Spohr died in Kassel on 22 October 1859. He was buried in the Hauptfriedhof in Kassel. Among his honours are the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art, received in 1853, and the Pour le Mérite.
Spohr taught a great deal: over his career he had about 200 pupils, and many of them became well-known musicians. His pupils include the violinists Henry Blagrove and Henry Holmes, as well as Ferdinand David, Hubert Ries, Moritz Hauptmann and Bernhard Molique. Like Haydn, Mozart and Hummel, he was an active Freemason.
Besides his music, Spohr is remembered for his Violinschule (Violin School), a treatise on violin playing that set down recent advances in technique, for example the spiccato stroke. The book became a standard teaching work. He also wrote an entertaining and informative autobiography, published after his death in 1860. A museum devoted to him stands in Kassel.
Spohr worked in every genre, from operas and oratorios to masses, cantatas, chamber pieces and songs. His music stands where the Classical style gives way to the Romantic. His symphonies trace a path from the classicism of his predecessors towards programme music. The seventh, Irdisches und Göttliches im Menschenleben, is written for two orchestras, and the ninth is called The Seasons. The operas Faust, Zemire und Azor and Jessonda stayed popular in the theatre throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The violin concertos are the most popular of his works, and he wrote more of them than any other composer of his day. The one-movement Concerto No. 8 is shaped like an operatic aria and is still revived from time to time. He wrote four clarinet concertos for the virtuoso Johann Simon Hermstedt, and they have won a secure place in the repertoire of clarinettists.
The list of Spohr's works is wide. Among his operas are Alruna, die Eulenkönigin (1808) and Der Zweikampf mit der Geliebten (1811). His oratorios include Das jüngste Gericht (1812), Des Heilands letzte Stunden (1835) and Der Fall Babylons (1842), and the staged cantata Das befreite Deutschland dates from 1814. The fourth symphony is titled Die Weihe der Töne (1832). He also wrote three overtures, one of them for Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, and a concerto for string quartet and orchestra (1845).
His chamber music includes at least 36 string quartets, and also four double quartets, each pairing two string quartets. He also wrote three piano quintets (of 1820, 1845 and 1853), a nonet of 1813, an octet and a septet. For voice and piano he wrote songs, among them Gretchen am Spinnrade (1809) and Mignon (1815), on texts by Goethe. Spohr's oratorios, Die letzten Dinge above all, enjoyed great admiration in nineteenth-century England and America.
Spohr's output includes piano pieces and two fantasies for harp, and the site's catalogue currently holds one of his works, the choral piece Das Lied, at the level Elementary+. After the composer's death his music was rarely heard, and in the late twentieth century interest in it modestly revived, primarily in Europe.