Pfitzner’s father, Robert, came from Saxony in Germany and was a violinist who was playing in the opera house orchestra in Moscow at the time of his son’s birth. His mother was also of German origin, hailing from Hamburg, and the family returned to Germany in 1872, settling in Frankfurt am Main. Between 1886 and 1890 Pfitzner studied at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where he was a pupil of James Kwast for piano and of Iwan Knorr for composition; in 1899 he married Kwast’s daughter Mimi. He began his professional career as a teacher of piano and music theory at the Koblenz Conservatory, working there during 1892 and 1893, and then accepted the unpaid post of conductor at Mainz’s municipal theatre: here he was able to mount a production of his opera Der arme Heinrich in 1895. While at Mainz Pfitzner continued to study with Hugo Riemann at Wiesbaden, but moved to Berlin in 1897 to teach composition and conducting at the Stern Conservatory. His next opera, Die Rose vom Liebesgarten was first performed in Berlin in 1901, and was also staged in Vienna by Mahler and Roller in 1905. In the same year Pfitzner’s incidental music to a production of Kleist’s play Käthchen von Heilbronn was first performed in Berlin. This was followed by further incidental music, to the play Christelflein, which Pfitzner later developed into an opera with the same title (1917).
Combining teaching and composing with performing, between 1903 and 1905 Pfitzner worked as first conductor at the Theater des Westens in Berlin; in 1906 he conducted Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Munich with great success; and during 1907 he led the newly-formed Kaim Orchestra in Munich. He was then appointed as head of the Strasbourg Conservatory and the city’s municipal orchestra: his period at Strasbourg, 1908 to 1918, marked his peak as both a composer and conductor. Between 1910 and 1916 he was director of the Strasbourg Opera House, where for some years his deputy was Otto Klemperer, whom he had taught in Berlin; and he composed his masterpiece, the opera Palestrina, between 1909 and 1915, writing the libretto himself. This major work received its first performance in Munich in 1917, conducted by Bruno Walter. Its success stimulated the formation of a Hans Pfitzner Verein für deutsche Tonkunst (Hans Pfitzner Association for German Musical Art), the purpose of which was to preserve traditional styles of musical composition.
Following the end of World War I and the redrawing of Europe’s political boundaries Pfitzner left Strasbourg. He conducted the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra during 1919, and from 1920 until 1929 taught composition once again in Berlin, at the Prussian Academy of Arts. He was appointed a life member of the Munich Academy of Music in 1925, and taught composition there from 1929 to 1934. However his gradual isolation from contemporary artistic currents and his espousal of a highly conservative and pessimistic outlook was reflected in his two cantatas Von deutscher Seele of 1921 and Das dunkle Reich of 1929; his final opera Das Herz was first performed in 1931, simultaneously in Berlin under Furtwängler and in Munich under Knappertsbusch.
Pfitzner was an ardent supporter of the Nazi party. He was visited in hospital by Hitler when ill in 1923, and for the rest of his life he wrote frequently to Hitler requesting further meetings, which were denied, as Pfitzner was seen by the Nazis as unreliable. This judgement proved to be correct: in 1934 he announced that he believed National Socialism to be stupid and as a result was relieved of his post at the Munich Academy of Music. However he also applied to be the party’s court composer and was denied this as well, although he was appointed a Reichskultursenator. He was in addition a confirmed anti-semite, but one who felt free to make certain exceptions, for instance refusing to write incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but on the grounds that he could never equal Mendelssohn’s achievement.
During the later part of his life Pfitzner worked as a freelance conductor, pianist and opera producer, and continued to compose. The death of his first wife in 1926 affected him deeply, and although he remarried, to Mali Stoll, in 1939, his final years were ones of considerable hardship. His house in Munich having been destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II, he then spent some time in an old persons’ home in Munich, before the intervention of the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra resulted in him being able to end his life in Salzburg; he was buried in a tomb of honour in the main cemetery in Vienna, leaving unfinished a setting of Goethe’s Urworte Orphisch for soloists and chorus.
Pfitzner’s recorded legacy as a conductor and accompanist is small, but significant in that it allows a glimpse into both the performing tradition of the early years of the twentieth century and the mind of a major, if flawed, creative artist. He conducted some of the earliest complete recordings of symphonies by Beethoven for the Polydor label (Nos 1, 3, 4, 6 ‘Pastoral’ and 8) as well as complete accounts of two of the Schumann Symphonies, Nos 2 and 4. In addition he conducted excerpts from his operas Die Rose vom Liebesgarten, Christelflein, Palestrina, and Das Herz, as well as some of the incidental music which he composed for Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn and Ibsen’s Das Fest auf Solhaug; his late Symphony in C major of 1940, and his Duo for Violin, Cello and Orchestra. Pfitzner’s love of German Romantic music and opera in particular was reflected in his conducting for the gramophone of the overtures to Der Freischütz, Jubel, Oberon and Preciosa by Weber, as well as Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides: his recording of Lanner’s now rarely heard Pesthe Waltz was one of the best-sellers of the 78rpm era. After World War II the American label Urania issued on LP a recording of Pfitzner conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the overture to Käthchen von Heilbronn, possibly taken from a 1944 tonbandkonzert (recording concert) of Austrian radio.
