Early years Knappertsbusch was born in
Elberfeld, today's
Wuppertal, on 12 March 1888, the second son of a manufacturer, Gustav Knappertsbusch, and his wife Julie,
née Wiegand. He played the violin as a child, and later the cornet. By the age of 12 he was conducting his high school orchestra.
Elberfeld, Leipzig, Dessau and Munich Knappertsbusch began his career with a conducting post in Elberfeld. During the
First World War he served in the German army as a non-combatant musician based in Berlin. In May 1918 he married Ellen Selma Neuhaus, who also came from Elberfeld. They had one child, Anita (1919–1938). After conducting in
Leipzig (1918–1919), he succeeded in 1919 at
Dessau, becoming Germany's youngest general music director. and won high praise for his own conducting. After a 1931
Parsifal, one reviewer wrote, "Few conductors have the courage to take this opera slowly enough. Professor Knappertsbusch, however, gave a thoroughly well-balanced interpretation … full of life, full of philosophy and full of charm". The same reviewer observed that Knappertsbusch's experience at Bayreuth before the war had given him an advantage over rival conductors such as
Arturo Toscanini and
Wilhelm Furtwängler. He was musically conservative, but conducted the premieres of seven operas during his time at Munich:
Don Gil von den grünen Hosen by
Walter Braunfels,
Das Himmelskleid by
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari,
Samuel Pepys by
Albert Coates,
Die geliebte Stimme by
Jaromír Weinberger,
Lucedia by
Vittorio Giannini, and
Das Herz by
Hans Pfitzner. A visiting English conductor,
Adrian Boult, found Knappertsbusch's performances of Mozart lacking in rhythmic precision, but praised his conducting of Wagner, remarking that even
Arthur Nikisch could not have produced a more overwhelming performance of
Tristan und Isolde.
1936 to 1945 In 1936 the
Nazis, who had been in power in Germany since 1933, revoked Knappertsbusch's lifetime contract at the State Opera. There were evidently several reasons for this: he refused to join the Nazi Party and was frequently rude about the régime; budgetary constraints meant little to him; and
Adolf Hitler, who had strong ideas about music, did not like his slow tempi, calling him "that military bandleader". During the next nine years, Knappertsbusch worked mostly in Austria conducting at the
Staatsoper and the
Salzburg Festival, and continuing a long association with the
Vienna Philharmonic. He guest-conducted in Budapest, and at
Covent Garden, London. He was allowed to go on conducting under Nazi rule, although Munich remained closed to him. In Vienna, on 30 June 1944, he conducted the last performance at the old Staatsoper, which was destroyed by bombing hours later. The president of the Vienna Philharmonic recalled:
Post-war After the war there was a widespread desire in Munich for Knappertsbusch's return, but like the other leading musicians who had worked under the Nazi régime he was subject to a process of
denazification, and the occupying American forces appointed
Georg Solti as general music director of the State Opera. Solti, a young Jewish musician who had been in exile in Switzerland during the war, later recalled: After this Knappertsbusch mostly freelanced. but returned to the festival most years for the rest of his life. He returned to the Bavarian State Opera in 1954, and continued to conduct there for the rest of his life. In 1955 he returned to the Vienna State Opera, to conduct
Der Rosenkavalier as one of the productions given to mark the re-opening of the theatre. In 1964 Knappertsbusch had a bad fall, from which he never fully recovered. He died on 25 October the following year at the age of 77, and was buried in the
Bogenhausen cemetery in Munich. He was greatly mourned by his colleagues. In 1967, the record producer
John Culshaw wrote: ==Reputation and legacy==