Princess of Saxony Amalie

Amalia of Saxony, a princess of the Saxon royal house and sister of King John of Saxony, was a German composer and playwright whose life was spent almost entirely in Dresden. She was born in 1794 and died in the same city in 1870, and her work belongs to the courtly milieu of a capital where Italian opera carried great weight.

Her musical training included piano lessons with Joseph Schuster, singing lessons with Vincenzo Rastrelli and Johann Miksch, and theory lessons with F. A. Schubert and Weber, who regarded her as a composer of notable talent. She lived continuously at the Pillnitz palace. Inspired by the practice of Italian opera in Dresden, she composed several operas under the name Amalie Serena, which were premiered at family celebrations and within the court circle, some of them at the Pillnitz theatre. Her models were French opéra comique and opera buffa, and she excelled above all in the comic genre, where she characterised her figures with originality and humour, using simple orchestration closely tied to each situation. After 1835 she stopped composing and devoted herself to writing comedies under the pseudonym Amalie Heiter.