Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (5 May 190028 May 1973) was a German conductor and composer. After studying at several music academies, he worked in German opera houses between 1923 and 1945, first as a répétiteur and then in increasingly senior conducting posts, ending as Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

After the Second World War, Schmidt-Isserstedt was invited by the occupying British forces to form the Northwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which he was musical director and chief conductor from 1945 to 1971. He was a frequent guest conductor for leading symphony orchestras around the world, and returned to opera from time to time, including appearances at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden as well as the Hamburg State Opera.

Schmidt-Isserstedt was known for his transparent orchestral textures, strict rhythmic precision, and rejection of superfluous gestures and mannerisms on the rostrum. His extensive recorded legacy features the Austro-German classics with which he was widely associated, but also includes works by Czech, English, French, Italian and Russian composers.

Life and career Early years Schmidt-Isserstedt was born in Berlin on 5 May 1900. He studied composition with Franz Schreker at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, and was also a student at the universities of Heidelberg and Münster and Berlin. At the last of these he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the Italian influences on the instrumentation of Mozart's early operas. and having a Jewish wife, whom he sent to England for safety, with their two sons, in 1936.

Post-war In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, the occupying British forces set up a new radio station, the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, based in Hamburg. The director-general, Hugh Greene, appointed Schmidt-Isserstedt as director of music, and tasked him with assembling and training a symphony orchestra for the station. The conductor's biographer Hubert Rübsaat writes that he formed an orchestra "out of nowhere" ("aus dem Nichts"). He took as his models the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London and the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York – orchestras formed primarily for broadcasting, with the highest standards of playing. It took him six months to bring the new Northwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra (NWDR SO) to the standard he required, and in November 1945 he conducted its first public concert. In a survey of radio orchestras in 1955, The Musical Times commented that the NWDR SO had quickly been recognised as "fit to challenge even the Berlin Philharmonic".

For the next 26 years, Schmidt-Isserstedt remained musical director of the NWDR SO. He invited many guest conductors to work with the orchestra, but its regular studio broadcasts were mostly under his direction. He introduced a public concert season, giving ten programmes a year. For Glyndebourne Festival Opera, both at its base in Sussex and at the Edinburgh Festival, he conducted Così fan tutte, Le Comte Ory, Ariadne auf Naxos and The Soldier's Tale, and a celebrated series of performances of The Marriage of Figaro (1958), with a cast he considered near ideal, including Geraint Evans, Pilar Lorengar, Graziella Sciutti and Teresa Berganza.

Among Schmidt-Isserstedt's own compositions were songs, the opera Hassan gewinnt (Rostock, 1928), and works for orchestra.

After the war, Schmidt-Isserstedt recorded for many companies, including Decca. The Times describes Schmidt-Isserstedt's 1953 recording of Dvořák's Seventh Symphony with the NWDR SO as "a classic". That recording was produced by John Culshaw. The Times said of them, "they are typically sane, searching interpretations, quite free from personal mannerisms, and so highly recommendable for long acquaintance".

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