• Year 1887.
  • Riedel Gesangverein.
  • Mixed choir.

1887 Concert Leipzig 30-11-1887.

Carl Riedel (born 06-10-1827, died 03-06-1888) was a German conductor and composer. Born in Cronenberg, Wuppertal, he initially worked as a dyer of silk before conductor Karl Wilhelm discovered his musical talent and encouraged him to pursue a music career. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and after graduating from the school joined the conservatory’s faculty as a professor of piano and music theory, teaching there for several decades. He was notably one of Julius Reubke’s teachers, and Reubke dedicated his Sonata on the 94th Psalm to him. He was a highly respected choral conductor in his native country and was one of the founders of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein. He died in Leipzig in 1888 at the age of 60.

Riedel was originally a silk dye. Karl Wilhelm discovered his musical talents in the Krefelder Liedertafel and encouraged him. From 1849 to 1852, Riedel studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, now the Academy of Music and Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig. Afterwards he stayed here as a teacher of the piano playing and the theory.

His contemporaries saw his main ministry in the foundation (1854) and the direction of the singing association for spiritual music (Riedel-Verein) named after him, who performed pioneering performances in his regular performances not only by works by Johann Sebastian Bach (18 Minor Mass 1859) , George Frideric Handel, and Ludwig van Beethoven (Missa solemnis, 1860), but also the ecclesiastical works of the pre-Bach period, as well as the present, and thus gained a certain fame. In 1859 the choir sang the premiere of the Graner Festmesse by Franz Liszt, and the Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in the foundation of the Bayreuth Festival Hall under Richard Wagner’s direction.

Year 1887Gesangverein Riedel.

For the literature of choral singing, Riedel has created works that have been enduring in significance, such as the publication of his Bergisch Christmas legends. But also his very individual adaptation of the Passion-Songs by Heinrich Schiitz, which anticipated the Schutz-Renaissance, the publication of the Christmas songs by Michael Praetorius, the old Bohemian Hussite songs, and the Eccardian Prussian festivals Importance. To this day, much of the old Bohemian songs are sung to the Christmas songs, their shepherds, which can be found both in the Evangelical Hymnbook (EG 48) and in some diocesan appendices of the blessing of God, and joy, earth and stars tent.

Riedel was co-founder of the General German Music Society and took over his presidency of Franz Brendel in 1869. In 1871 he became chairman of the Leipzig Wagner Association. A memorial plaque was erected at his Geburtshaus Hütterstraße No. 4, Leipzig.

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