Otto-Werner Mueller

Otto -Werner Mueller ( born June 23, 1926 in Bensheim ) is a German - American conductor and music educator.

Mueller studied at the Arts High School in Frankfurt (Main) conducting and composing, piano, trumpet and violin. In 1945 he became director of the chamber music department of Radio Stuttgart and founded the chamber choir of Radio Stuttgart, which he also conducted. In 1949 he became conductor of opera and operetta at the Heidelberg Theatre.

In 1951 he emigrated to Canada. There he worked first as a coach, and later as a conductor for the CBC, where he worked in particular on the consignments CBC Wednesday Night and L' Heure du concert. Later, Mueller took lessons with Igor Markevitch in Mexico in 1958 and won second prize at the Pan-American Conductors Competition.

In the same year he became the choirmaster of the opera class at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. In 1963 he founded the Victoria School of Music, which he headed until 1965. At the same time he was also conductor of the Victoria Symphony Orchestra. As a guest professor at the Moscow Conservatory, he taught, among other things Maxim Shostakovich and Rudolf Barshai. His performance of the Barber of Seville for the CBC television won in 1965 in the U.S., an Emmy Award as best foreign production.

1967 moved Otto -Werner Mueller in the United States. In the following year, and in 1970 he toured the Soviet Union, where he among other things, occurred in Moscow, Leningrad and Riga. He worked then as a conductor in North America and worked as a guest conductor, inter alia, with the Scottish National Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic. Mueller conducted the premieres of several works of Canadian composers, including André Prévost Pyknon (1966) and Diallèle, Sophie -Carmen Eckhardt - Gramatté Symphony - Concerto and Malcolm Forsyth's Symphony No. 2.

As a longtime educator and orchestra conducting teacher he built, among others, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the School of Music at Yale University in New Haven, the Juilliard School of Music in New York and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, a widely respected reputation. Its graduates include, inter alia, the music director of the New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert, the Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi and the German conductor Jens Georg Bachmann.