About Hans Pfitzner
Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina (1917), very loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli. In 1895, Richard Bruno Heydrich sang the title role in the premiere of people like Hans Pfitzner's first opera, Der arme Heinrich, based on the poem of the same name by Hartmann von Aue. Increasingly nationalistic in his middle and old age, Pfitzner was at first regarded sympathetically by important figures in Nazi Germany, in particular by Hans Frank, with whom he remained on good terms. At that time, the Pfitzner concerto was considered the most important addition to the violin concerto repertoire since the first concerto of Max Bruch (1866), although it is not played by most violinists these days. For a Nazi party rally in 1934, Pfitzner had hopes of being allowed to conduct; but he was rejected for the role, and at the rally himself he learned for the first time that Hitler considered him to be half-Jewish.
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