Anton Schweitzer

Anton Schweitzer ( baptized June 6, 1735 in Coburg, † November 23, 1787 in Gotha ) was a German composer.

He was from about 1745 choirboy in Hildburghausen, where he was trained musically and later worked as a violist and a cellist in the court orchestra. 1758 sent him his Duke for further study at the Bayreuth court to Jakob Friedrich Kleinknecht. After the dissolution of the orchestra in Hildburghausen, he was the bandmaster of the 1769 theater company of Abel Seyler, with which he was eventually engaged in Weimar. After a theater fire in Weimar and subsequent cancellation of the theater in 1774, he moved on to Gotha in 1775, where he became the successor to Georg Anton Benda as Kapellmeister.

He was primarily known as an opera composer. The music composed to a libretto by Christoph Martin Wieland 's Alceste was one of the most successful works in the German music theater of late 18th century and inspired a number of other serious German-language operas, including Günther von Schwarzburg (1776 ) by Ignaz Wooden building with a libretto by Anton Klein.

Works (selection)

• Elysium ( Libretto: Johann Georg Jacobi, UA January 18, 1770, Hanover Court Theatre )
• Alceste ( libretto by Christoph Martin Wieland, UA May 28, 1773, Weimar Court Theatre, New Edition and reissue the Thüringen Philharmonie Gotha - Suhl in Gotha Ekhof Theatre 1999)
• The choice of Hercules ( libretto by Christoph Martin Wieland, UA September 3, 1773, Weimar court theater )
• Rosamunde ( libretto by Christoph Martin Wieland, UA January 20, 1780, the Mannheim National Theatre ) - Theatre of Schwetzingen Castle 20 May, 2012

Editions (selection)

• Anton Schweitzer: Rosamunde. His second German opera on a text by Christoph Martin Wieland. hg. by Jutta Stüber, 2 volumes, ISBN 3-922626-87-4.