Hans Richter
(Györ, 1843-Bayreuth, 1916) Conductor of Austro-Hungarian origin.Hans Richter was born into a family of professional musicians: his father was a chapelmaster at Raab Cathedral (now Györ) and his mother, Josephine Csazinsky, a renowned singer.Thus, from his early years, he made general education compatible with music practice and training, first as a member of the choir of the Vienna Hofkapelle and, later, attending violin and horn classes.which were taught at the Vienna Conservatory, where he would later take music theory lessons from Simon Sechter.
Following the most common path in the career of most orchestral conductors, he took his first steps in professional music as an instrumentalist, occupying one of the horn seats in the Kärntnertor Theater orchestra.It was the director of this small orchestra who recommended the young man to whom he was already for many and, of course, for himself, the greatest musical figure of the time: Richard Wagner.
Richter spent the year 1866-67 under the teaching of this composer and with him he would continue to collaborate throughout later times, sometimes serving as an assistant to the great master in the development and annotation of his operas.Following this experience, Hans G.von Bülow, another of the leading musicians of his day and a member in addition to Richard Wagner's circle, oversaw Richter's early performances as conductor of the Munich Opera House choir.
In the decade of the seventies the first truly representative events in Richter's career took place, who still maintained the collaboration with Wagner to the point that it was he who, in 1876, he would direct the first representation of the Ring of the Nibelung in the city of Bayreuth.The director had already consolidated his position as a teacher and, although he was still permeable to the composer's teachings, he revealed somewhat more his independence from the possessive influence of the composer.
Richter's career continued at this time, first as conductor of the orchestra of the National Theater of the city of Pest, since he held between 1871 and 1875 and, from this moment, as conductor of the Hofoper and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, a position that made compatible with the attention to the invitations of other orchestras, among them the one that accompanied the operas that were performed at the then recently instituted Bayreuth festival.
Despite the distance that existed between the two extremes of Europe, which, as is logical, was much more expensive to travel at the end of the 19th century than today, both for people and for In the news, the distant British musical circle was receptive to the musical demonstrations taking place on the other side of the European continent, as well as the comments that were slowly pouring in about the performances directed by Richter in Vienna and Germany.
On the other hand, the association of the director with Richard Wagner could not but enhance his image from the perspectives of critics and audiences on the other side of the English Channel.Responding to the invitations that various festivals and concert halls addressed to him, first thanks to his association with the already well-known Richard Wagner and, later, in response to his own prestige, from approximately 1875 the German director began to attend periodically to England.
At first, Hans Richter's role before the English public was that of introducing the works of the composer of Tannhäuser , whose merits had already reached the ears of the British critics and audiences.However, he quickly became a conductor widely appreciated for the quality of his performances, which increased the number of his appearances in English auditoriums to the point of having his own concert festival, composed of sessions that A short "musical season" was held every May in London, known to all as the Richter Concerts .
In addition to his orchestral performances, Hans Richter conducted various German operas in theaters such as the one in Covent Garden, including a production of the opera tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung ( Der Ring des Nibelungen ) performed for the first time in English, in a translation adapted from the original German script.The director thus affirmed his position of nexus between the continental traditions of symphonism and the serious opera of the Germanic tradition and the Anglo-Saxon musical taste, always independent and, in the final years of the 19th century, anchored in a conformism typically Victorian aesthetic.
The musical influences of the German tradition of which Richter became one of the main propagators in the British Isles contributed to allowing the emergence and development of truly innovative musical personalities or, at least, capable of resuscitating the rich British musical past to, on the other hand, try to recreate the operatic tradition of the islands from the paths proposed by German composers such as Wagner or Strauss.
Hans Richter presented his interpretations to these British musicians especially receptive to the German musical tradition, such as Ethel Smyth, Charles Villiers Stanford, Edward Elgar or Rutland Boughton, asserting a perspective that, in the case of the German director It turned out to be the closest to the original intentions of composers like Wagner that could be found in his time.In any case, the natural development field for a musical director with the antecedents of Hans Richter could not be other than Bayreuth and, in fact, his withdrawal from professional musical activity would take place when directing for the last time in his career the putting in scene from Wagner's opera The Master Singers ( Die Meistersingern ) at this German festival.
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