Schindelmeißer, Louis Alexander Balthasar

Conductor, Composer

born: 08.12.1811 in Königsberg

died: 30.03.1864 in Darmstadt

Schindelmeißer met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1831, with whom he soon became friends. From 1832, he was Kapellmeister in Salzburg, Graz and Innsbruck. In 1837 he came to the Königstädtisches Theater in Berlin. In 1838 he went to the Deutsches Theater in Budapest, in 1847 to the Hamburg Stadttheater and in 1848 to Frankfurt am Main.

From 1851-53 he worked as a theater conductor in Wiesbaden. It was here that he made a lasting commitment to his childhood friend Wagner, with whom he began an intensive correspondence. With the performance of Tannhäuser on November 13, 1852, for which Wagner himself provided staging and musical direction, Wiesbaden experienced its first nationally significant theatrical event. By June 1853, the opera had been repeated twelve times with great success, and Schindelmeißer was able to add "Lohengrin" to the repertoire the following year. Wiesbaden thus became the second city after Weimar (1850) to dare to stage this work. The Wiesbaden theater's reception of Wagner, which continued unabated thereafter, was established. On September 1, 1853, Schindelmeißer went to Darmstadt as the Grand Ducal Hessian Court Kapellmeister and also performed "Tannhäuser" there on October 23.

He emerged as a composer with songs and smaller character pieces for piano. In his operas "Der Rächer" (1846) and "Melusine" (1861), which he performed in Budapest and Darmstadt, he remained true to the older Romantic operatic tradition. His Sinfonia Concertante op. 2 for four clarinets and orchestra, composed in 1833, is noteworthy.