Julius knees

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Julius Kniese (1901)

Julius Kniese (born December 21, 1848 in Roda , † April 22, 1905 in Dresden ) was a German choir director and conductor as well as city music director in Aachen and director of the Bayreuth Festival .

Live and act

The son of a tailor grew up in simple circumstances. His maternal uncle, who was an elementary school and music teacher by profession, recognized Julius Kniese's musical talent early on and practiced singing and piano with him. At the age of nine he was already singing in the Kurrende in his hometown and at eleven the soprano part in Haydn's creation mass . After he had lost his uncle and his father at the age of 14, Kniese was forced to contribute to the family's livelihood by taking piano lessons. For this he received free singing and piano lessons from the local cantor , replacing him more and more often on the organ and at the age of 17 already headed a men's choir. In addition, after graduating from school, he attended the teachers' seminar in Altenburg for three years , among others with Hofkapellmeister Wilhelm Stade .

Julius Kniese's grave in the Bayreuth city cemetery

On his recommendation, he switched to Carl Riedel and Franz Brendel in Leipzig in 1866 , where he received the musical fine-tuning from both of them for his further career. It was there in 1869 that he met Franz Liszt , whose works he particularly valued and with whom he would in future be connected to a lively exchange of opinions and experiences. In 1871 Kniese was appointed to Glogau , where he met his wife Olga, née. Mathies, married and until 1879 was the conductor of the Singakademie zu Glogau . This was followed by a move to Frankfurt am Main , where he directed the Rühl'schen Gesangsverein and celebrated great success with this choir, especially in the performances of works by Johann Sebastian Bach . There he became a member of the Masonic Lodge Zur Einigkeit. Again it was Liszt who gave him excellent reviews and whose oratorio Christ he first performed with great success despite popular resentment towards “newfangled music”. He ended his activity in Frankfurt when he received an offer from Aachen in 1884 to take over the position of music director and conductor at the Aachen theater there . A year later he led the Niederrheinische Musikfest together with Carl Reinecke . Despite great performance successes with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra , there were upheavals with the board of directors there, so that he moved to Breslau in 1887 , where he only gave private lessons for two years without a permanent job.

Since his time in Glogau, Kniese had received offers from Franz Liszt's son-in-law, Richard Wagner , to take part in the performances in Bayreuth . In 1871 he was initially a member of the choir, attended the laying of the foundation stone in Bayreuth in 1872, belonged to the staff of music experts for the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, worked as a volunteer with the festival choir in 1882 at the premiere of Parsifal under the direction of Hermann Levi , gave singing lessons to the daughters from the Wahnfried house , independently led the choir for Meistersinger as early as 1888/89 and was finally taken over as choir director and festival organizer in 1889. In addition to this activity, in the same year he founded a voice training school and the Bayreuth Choir Association, which later became the Bayreuth Philharmonic Choir. His most famous students at that time included his future successor as festival director, Siegfried Wagner , as well as the opera singers Hans Breuer , Alois Burgstaller and Richard Mayr . Until his death in 1905 as a result of a heart attack on a trip to Dresden, Kniese mastered his tasks in Bayreuth with great success and after Wagner's death was regarded as the “savior and innovator” of the Bayreuth Festival.

In memory of Julius Kniese, a street in Bayreuth was named after him and a memorial plaque was placed on the house where he was born in Roda.

Works (selection)

  • The beautiful eyes of spring night , op.10 (six songs) no.8 (text: Heinrich Heine )

Literature and Sources

  • Julius Kniese, Reinhold Freiherr von Lichtenberg and Julie Kniese: The battle of two worlds for the Bayreuth legacy. Julius Kniese's diary pages from 1883 . Leipzig 1931
  • Norbert Jers: A Wagnerian in Aachen. Julius Kniese as city music director . In: Hans Jochem Münstermann (Ed.): Contributions to the music history of the city of Aachen II . Arno Volk, Cologne 1979.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kniese, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German choir director, conductor, music director in Aachen and festival director in Bayreuth
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Stadtroda
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 1905
Place of death Dresden