Carl Emil Theodor Ehrenberg

Carl Emil Theodor Ehrenberg was born in Dresden on 6 April 1878 and died in Munich on 26 February 1962. He was a German composer, conductor and teacher whose career unfolded almost entirely within the opera houses and symphonic societies of his country, without his name achieving much wider renown beyond them.

After training at the Dresden Conservatory, he began his professional life as a Kapellmeister in Dortmund (1898) and Würzburg (1899–1900). Between 1900 and 1904 he was assistant Kapellmeister at the Hofoper in Munich, and he then held similar posts in Posen, Augsburg and Metz. Between 1909 and 1914 he conducted the symphony orchestra in Lausanne, returned to Augsburg as first Kapellmeister of the opera, and gave symphonic concerts in Bad Homburg. In 1922 he moved to Berlin, where he worked at the Staatsoper and taught conducting at the Stern Conservatory. From 1925 he lived in Cologne as a professor at the Hochschule für Musik, and in 1935 he returned to Munich to teach at the Akademie der Tonkunst. He lived in retirement in that city from 1945 until his death.

His music is fully tonal in idiom. His chamber works approach neoclassicism in their balanced phrasing, symmetrical design and intimate tone, while the Romantic song tradition survives in his devotion to the lied, a genre to which almost half of his published works belong. The greater part of his output remains unpublished, which accounts for the limited present-day circulation of his catalogue.