Ignaz Walter

Johann Ignaz Walter was a Bohemian-born composer and tenor, born in Radonitz, today Radonice, in 1755, and died in Regensburg in 1822. He belongs to the world of German opera of the late eighteenth century, a field in which the Viennese heritage and the model of Mozart shaped many of the composers working in German-language theatres.

His training began with the organist Ignaz Neudörffl. From 1773, while studying at the University of Vienna, he refined his singing and composition with Joseph Starzer. Between 1780 and 1786 he built a considerable reputation as a tenor and as a composer of comic operas with German companies in Augsburg, Prague, Riga, Frankfurt and Mainz. It should be noted that the identification with the Joseph Walter who sang at the Nationalsingspiel in Vienna between 1780 and 1782 is, it seems, highly doubtful.

In 1792 he joined the company of G. F. W. Grossmann in Lower Saxony as musical director. The operas he wrote for this troupe reveal his Viennese training: a predilection for wind instruments, a cheerful and popular melodic style, and a notable sense of musical architecture, with tonal plans that seem closely to follow Mozart's practice, in whose operas he used to sing. His version of Doktor Faust, to a libretto by H. G. Schmieder that combined Goethe's fragment of 1790 with other German sources, was premiered in Bremen in 1787 and had a second version in Hanover in 1798. According to some accounts, his music moves entirely within Mozart's orbit. Walter himself performed the role of Faust, and his wife, Juliane Browne Roberts, whom he had married in Riga, sang the Queen of Aragon.

In 1804 he took over the direction of the court theatre in Regensburg, where he remained until his death. His output includes operas, singspiels, ballets, incidental music, masses, motets and cantatas, although much of his stage work has been lost. His half-brother, Johann Nepomuk Walter, was a tenor in Frankfurt, Vienna and Mannheim before turning to pharmacy.