Ludwig Thuille

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Ludwig Thuille (born 30 November 1861 in Bozen (Bolzano), South Tyrol, died 5 February 1907 in Munich) was a German composer and pedagogue who was for a short time numbered among the leading operatic composers of the 'Munich School' whose most famous representative was Richard Strauss. He lost both his parents in childhood, and moved to stay with an uncle in Austria. He studied in Innsbruck (where in 1877 he met the young Richard Strauss, who became a lifelong friend) and then with Josef Rheinberger, among others, in Munich. Thuille went on to become professor of theory and composition at the Akademie der Tonkunst in that city. His many pupils included Hermann Abendroth, Ernest Bloch, Ernst Boehe, Richard Wetz, Rudi Stephan, Walter Braunfels and Henry Kimball Hadley.

Thuille was a prolific composer who concentrated on chamber music - he is remembered principally for his Sextet for piano and wind instruments (1886-8), the only one of his works to have remained in the repertoire - and opera, though his early works include a Piano Concerto and a Symphony. In 1897 his opera Theuerdank gained the first prize and a prestigious staged premiere in an operatic competition sponsored by the Regent of Bavaria, in which Alexander von Zemlinsky was placed second. His second opera Lobetanz was premiered the following year in Karlsruhe and was a considerable success.

Despite his friendship with Strauss, which extended to making a 2-piano arrangement of the latter's tone poem Don Juan, and despite his devotion to music-drama, Thuille remained a fairly conservative composer. His posthumously-published Harmonielehre (written with Rudolf Louis) went through many editions and was highly influential.

While Thuille's Sextet has never entirely departed from the repertoire, several of his other compositions have become commercially available on CD in recent years -- his two Piano Quintets, the Piano Concerto in D and his Symphony in F (1885) chief among them.