Louis Schindelmeisser

Louis Alexander Balthasar Schindelmeisser (Königsberg, 1811 – Darmstadt, 1864) was a German conductor, composer and clarinettist who held kapellmeister posts at several German-speaking theatres during the first half of the nineteenth century. His name is today associated above all with his early friendship with Richard Wagner and with his role as an interpreter and promoter of some of Wagner's operas, rather than with any work of his own that achieved wide circulation.

He studied in Berlin with Gährich and Marx, and continued his training in Leipzig with his half-brother Heinrich Dorn in 1831. In Leipzig he struck up a friendship with Wagner. In 1832 he was appointed kapellmeister at the theatre in Salzburg, and he subsequently held similar posts in Innsbruck, Graz and at the Königstädtisches Theater in Berlin, where he was active in 1837. In 1838 he moved to the German theatre in Pest and, from 1847, worked successively in Hamburg, Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. From 1853 until his death he was court kapellmeister in Darmstadt. Alongside this he was a virtuoso clarinettist, very active in the 1830s.

He is regarded as one of Wagner's first admirers. It was probably on his recommendation that Wagner was appointed musical director in Riga in 1837. In 1852–1853 he oversaw the first productions of Tannhäuser in Wiesbaden and Darmstadt, and the first staging of Rienzi and Lohengrin in Darmstadt, the latter having until then been performed only in Weimar under Liszt.

His own music shows little trace of Wagner's influence; perhaps it can be detected in the chromaticism of his last opera, Melusine (1861). His operas follow instead the earlier Romantic tradition of Weber and Spohr, while his songs and short piano pieces reveal a taste for small forms, often with a sentimental Biedermeier tone. His legacy is therefore more significant for its link with Wagner and for the musical life of German theatres of his time than for his catalogue.