Frieder Weissmann (23 January 1893 – 4 January 1984) was a German conductor and composer.
Life and career
Weissmann was born in Langen, Hesse. His civil name was Samuel, which he kept - in the form Semy or Semmy - until 1916. After that, he preferred the first name Friedrich or Frieder in combination with Samuel, which was soon shortened to S. before disappearing altogether. In the 1920s, Peter was added as a third first name. Other surviving stage names are Ping-Pong and Marco Ibanez.
Weissmann grew up in Frankfurt, where his father Ignatz Isidor Weissmann (1863-1939) was Hazzan of the Hauptsynagoge from 1894 to 1937. After graduating from the Goethe Grammar School, he studied law in Heidelberg for one semester in 1911, then philosophy, art history and music history at the Munich University until 1914. In Heidelberg, he received composition lessons from Philipp Wolfrum, in Munich from Walter Braunfels. At the outbreak of the First World War, he took the first step towards a conducting career and became répétiteur under Ludwig Rottenberg at the Frankfurt Opera (1914/16). In 1916/17, he was engaged as second Kapellmeister at the Stadttheater Stettin. From 1917 to 1921, he worked as a freelance concert kapellmeister and répétiteur in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich. In all three cities he also appeared as a composer.
In 1920, he was awarded a doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy at Munich University with a dissertation on the composer Georg Abraham Schneider (1770-1839). This was followed in 1921 by an engagement as répétiteur and conductor at the Berlin State Opera, where he worked under Max von Schillings and Erich Kleiber until 1924. At the same time, Weissmann started a years-long close collaboration with the Berlin record company Carl Lindström AG, for whose Parlophon and Odeon brands he musically directed some 2,000 recordings until 1933. In 1924, he moved to the opera house of Münster as first Kapellmeister (1924/25), then in the same capacity to the opera house in Königsberg (1926/27). From 1926 to 1932, he was permanent guest conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic. From 1930 onwards, there was increased collaboration with radio orchestras in Stuttgart and Hamburg. In 1931, alongside Ernst Kunwald, he became conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the former Blüthner Orchestra, which had merged with the Berlin Philharmonic in autumn 1932. With the Berlin Philharmonic he was only able to conduct four concerts and record one disc (Overture to Wagner's opera Rienzi) until January 1933.
In 1929, he married his long-time fiancée, the German soprano Meta Seinemeyer, who, seriously ill with leukaemia, died a few hours after the wedding ceremony. Weissmann had accompanied the singer on all her Parlophon recordings and numerous concerts in Dresden and Berlin.
As an artist of Jewish descent, Weissmann also saw his existence directly threatened by the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. He left Germany in June 1933 for the Netherlands, where he performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep orchestra. This was followed by six-month stays - alternating with the Netherlands - in Argentina from 1934 to 1937, where he gave concerts in Buenos Aires Radio Splendid and at the Teatro Colón. It was also in Buenos Aires that Weissmann, who had acquired Argentinian citizenship in 1935, married his second wife Rosita Chevallier-Boutell in 1937.
After making his U.S. debut in late 1937 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, he moved his primary residence to New York in 1938, where he caused a stir in the summer of 1939 with a series of open-air concerts with the New York Philharmonic at the Lewisohn Stadium. He now recorded first with Columbia Records (among others Risë Stevens), and from 1945 with RCA Victor - an association that lasted until around 1950. From 1939 to 1947, Weissmann, who became an American citizen in 1944, conducted the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and from 1942 to 1958, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Scranton, Pennsylvania. As successor to Artur Rodziński, he took over the direction of the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana in Havana, Cuba, from 1950 to 1953. In parallel to his permanent engagements, Weissmann was very active as a guest conductor in the US, Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver), Mexico and the Netherlands from 1945 onwards. After 1954, he concentrated on Europe and was celebrated there, especially in Italy, e.g. for a cycle of Mahler's symphonies, which he began as early as the late 1950s and concluded in March 1974 in Florence with a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony.