Ferdinand Löwe (conductor)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ferdinand Löwe, ca.1898

Ferdinand Löwe (born February 19, 1865 in Vienna ; † January 6, 1925 there ) was an Austrian conductor .

Life

Löwe was a student at the Conservatory of Musikfreunde Wien a. a. with Anton Bruckner and taught there as a teacher for piano from 1884 and for choral singing from 1894 to 96. He then went to Munich for a year, where he led the Kaimorchester alongside Felix Weingartner and a. a. Bruckner's 5th Symphony for the first performance there. In 1898 he was appointed Kapellmeister at the Vienna Court Opera. In 1900 he founded the Vienna Concert Club Orchestra (since 1933 the Vienna Symphony Orchestra ), which he headed as chief conductor until 1925. In addition, from 1908 to 1916 he again directed the Kaim Orchestra (now the Konzertvereinsorchester in Munich ) and was employed as a teacher at the Conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna , conducted the workers' concerts from 1905 to 1919 and directed the Vienna Music Academy from 1918 to 1922 .

As a pupil of Anton Bruckner , he made a special contribution to the performances of his symphonies , which he arranged for two pianos with Franz Schalk as early as the 1980s. Together with the brothers Franz and Joseph Schalk , Löwe also edited the orchestral versions of Bruckner's works in order to make them more accessible to the public of the time, a method that was widespread and well-accepted at the time to enable performances at all. The fact that the content of the compositions was changed somewhat was accepted. As is well known, Bruckner himself worked on his own works with infinite effort. Only some time later did people become aware of the original version of a work and the arrangements by Löwe were criticized and even rejected.

Löwe, for example, completely re- orchestrated Bruckner's 9th Symphony and even intervened in the musical text. Löwe's work was premiered in this version on February 11, 1903 and published in the same year. It was not until 29 years later, on April 2, 1932, that the first performance of Bruckner's original version took place under Siegmund von Hausegger . The conductor had put the lion version in front of Bruckner's composition. The vote of the audience and musicology decided clearly against the processing. Very few conductors, like Hans Knappertsbusch , still clung to Löwe's version.

Grave of Ferdinand Löwe

Löwe's honorary grave is in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 31B, row 13, number 9). In 1936, Ferdinand-Löwe-Strasse in Vienna- Favoriten (10th district) was named after him.

literature

Web links