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Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849)
Biography
Kreutzer's upright Swabian parents saw to it that he received a monastic education (from 1789 in the Benedictine abbey of Zwiefalten and from 1796, because of the disturbances of war, in the more remote Premonstrate abbey of Schussenried) before sending him against his will to study law at the University of Freiburg in 1799. However, upon his father's death in 1800, Kreutzer was free to pursue his musical bent.
During his school years he had already learned to play the piano and the organ besides clarinet and oboe (later, violin), and already in Freiburg he performed with friends his small one-act opera, Die lächerliche Werbung. Between 1801 and 1804 he is to be found in various places in Switzerland and in Constance. In 1804 he settled in Vienna, where he was probably a composition pupil of Albrechtsberger and made his living by giving music lessons.
From 1810 to 1812 he traveled all through Europe as piano accompanist to one Franz Leppich, who demonstrated the panmelodicon, a semi- mechanical musical instrument of his own invention. The last stage of this journey was Stuttgart, where Kreutzer accepted the position of court conductor vacated by Danzi, remaining until 1816. Between 1818 and 1822 he occupied a similar position in Donaueschingen, but since he felt himself to be geographically isolated there, even during this tenure he sought out other musical centers in the hope of finding a stable position.
After the success of his opera Libussa at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna in December 1822, he accepted a conductor's position there. He kept it until 1827, returning from 1829 to 1832 after a two-year sojourn in Paris.Then he changed over to the Theater in der Josefstadt, where he remained until 1840. The Variations in G for the Chromatic Trumpet were probably written during this period, between 1828 and 1832. In 1840 Kreutzer left Vienna, in order to accompany his elder daughter Cäcilie, a singer, on a concert tour. In 1840-1841 he had his last fixed position, that of Municipal Music Director in Cologne.
After various other concert tours, during which he unsuccessfully tried to obtain positions in Belgium and in Paris, from 1845 onwards he travelled with his younger daughter Marie, also a singer, to her engagements in Frankfurt an der Oder, Graz, and Detmold. In 1848 he followed her to Riga. There he died after a stroke, which he had suffered only a few days after learning that she had been released from her engagement because of breaking down during a performance