Chapter 10 - Meiningen and Weimar

Summary

Germany’s musical heritage is remarkably rich, but much of German music history is associated with smaller towns rather than Berlin and other large cities. Meiningen and Weimar are but two examples. Meiningen’s Court Orchestra boasts an illustrious history. In 1867, the town hosted the first meeting of the General German Music Society (ADMV or Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein), founded a few years earlier by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel to promote the cause of “new music.” It was in Meiningen that Hans von Bülow introduced the young Richard Strauss to orchestral conducting. Between 1889 and 1894, and in Weimar, Strauss consolidated his growing reputation as an orchestral leader and a controversial composer of “new music.”Until illness forced him to resign his position, Strauss conducted works by Cherubini, Haydn, Robert Schumann, and Smetana as well as portions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and his own symphonic poem Don Juan.