Count Ferdinánd Pálffy de Erdőd (Vienna, 1 February 1774 — Vienna, 4 February 1840) was a mining engineer and civil servant of the Austrian Empire who is better remembered for his role in managing the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, in pursuit of which he lost his not inconsiderable fortune and retired from his creditors in Vienna.[1]
The son of Count Lipót Pálffy de Erdőd (1739–1799), he attended the mining institute at Schemnitz, now Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia, in 1794-96, where he remained in government service before returning to Vienna in 1806 to work in the ministry of mines. He was among the association of court nobles that acquired the Theater an der Wien in 1807, as well as the leases of the other two theatres patronised by the court, the Burgtheater and the Theater am Kärntnertor. By degrees he became solely responsible for the court theaters, and in 1813 he acquired outright the Theater an der Wien, inducing Louis Spohr to come from his court appointment at Gotha to conduct its orchestra. During the period of his proprietorship, which lasted until 1826, he offered opera and ballet and, to appeal to a wider Viennese audience, popular pantomime and variety acts, losing money in elaborate spectacles until he was forced to sell the theater at auction in 1826, and to disperse his library and collection of mineral specimens. Fearing arrest for his outstanding debts, he fled Vienna for Pressburg (Bratislava) where he remained for several years.
Under Count Pálffy, the Theater an der Wien saw the premiere of Helmina von Chézy's Rosamunda, which sank without a trace, save for its incidental music by Franz Schubert, whose Die Zauberharfe found eight performances at the Theater, for which Schubert dedicated to Palffy his Sonata in B flat (D617).[2] He found fault with Louis Spohr's opera, Faust (1813), so that it found its premiere in Prague.