Louise Reichardt

Louise Reichardt was born in Berlin in 1779. Her father, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, was a composer and the head of music at the court of the King of Prussia. Her mother, a singer and composer, died when Louise was four. Her father married again, and Louise grew up in a big family. At 14 she was already looking after the younger children. She had no regular teacher. After a few first lessons with her father, she taught herself the piano, the harp and singing.

In the early 1790s her father lost his post at court, and the family moved to a country house near Halle, in eastern Germany. It became a meeting place for writers, among them Goethe and the Grimm brothers, who collected fairy tales. They admired her singing and her songs. It is said that money was always short. The daughters got up at four or five in the morning to do the housework, and Louise often had to feed many guests with almost no money. She had a beautiful soprano voice, but her father never let her sing at public concerts. In 1800, at 21, four of her songs were printed in a book together with songs by her father. She was engaged twice, but both men died before the wedding, and she never married.

In 1806 soldiers of Napoleon’s army took almost everything from the family’s house, and the family became poor. So Louise decided to earn her own living with music. For a long time her father said no, but at last he agreed. In 1809, at 30, she moved alone to Hamburg. She lived with a family there and taught singing, and later the piano. An Maria (To Mary) is dedicated to one of her pupils, a daughter of that family.

In Hamburg she started one of the city’s first music schools and a choir. She loved Handel’s music. She translated the words of his works into German and trained the choirs to sing them. In 1818 Handel’s Messiah was performed at a big festival in Hamburg’s main church. She trained the choir, but a man conducted the concert, because at that time women did not conduct in public. She could have become rich from her lessons, but she gave much of her money to people in need and to performances of Handel’s music. She died in Hamburg in 1826, at 47. At her funeral, her pupils sang hymns that she had written shortly before.

Louise Reichardt’s songs were so simple that servants and farm girls sang them in the street. Almost a hundred years after her death, one of them, When the Roses Bloom, was still being recorded by famous singers in America.