Peter von Winter

Peter von Winter was a German opera composer whose work forms an important link between Mozart and Weber. Born in Mannheim on 28 August 1754, he was a child prodigy who began performing in the court orchestra at the age of ten, playing both violin and double bass, and studied with Georg Vogler as well as Wilhelm Cramer and Thaddäus Hampel. His father worked as a constable at the city court.

From 1778 he lived in Munich, where he advanced from vice-kapellmeister to kapellmeister of the court chapel. That same year he married Marianne Grosser, the daughter of a tailor. He later travelled to Vienna to study with Antonio Salieri and encountered Mozart during his visits. Winter wrote more than thirty operas, many of which enjoyed significant success, and he also served as director of the court theatre, where he began composing ballets and melodramas.

Among his most celebrated works were the singspiel Das unterbrochene Opferfest (1796) and the opera Das Labyrinth (1798), created as a continuation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute with a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. Beethoven used a vocal quartet from Das unterbrochene Opferfest as the basis for his Seven Variations for piano, WoO 75, and it has been suggested that themes by Winter also appear in Beethoven’s 32 Variations, WoO 80.

Winter was active across Europe, visiting London in the early 1800s, where he produced La grotta di Calipso (1803), Il ratto di Proserpina (1804) and Zaira (1805). His opera Maometto, premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1817, became one of his most recognized later works, and his final opera, Der Sänger und der Schneider, appeared in Munich in 1820. His operas were staged in major cities including Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Moscow.

He held memberships in the Paris Conservatory and the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, and on 23 March 1814 he was knighted with the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown on the fiftieth anniversary of his service as a court musician. In 1811 he founded the Musikalische Akademie in Munich, the precursor to the Akademiekonzerte of the Bavarian State Orchestra. Alongside his dramatic works, he composed symphonies, concertos, chamber music and sacred works, including twenty-six masses, and later in life he gave voice lessons and published a Complete School of Singing in 1825.

Winter died in Munich on 17 October 1825. After his death, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published an extensive obituary praising him as one of the most significant German composers of his era.

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