German male conductors (music)

Günther Werner Hans Ramin (15 October 1898 – 27 February 1956) was an influential German organist, conductor, composer and pedagogue in the first half of the 20th century.

Peter Paul Kreuder (18 August 1905 – 28 June 1981) was a German-Austrian pianist, composer and conductor.

Karl Münchinger (29 May 1915 – 13 March 1990) was a German conductor of European classical music. He helped to revive the now-ubiquitous Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel, through recording it with his Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in 1960. (Jean-François Paillard made a rival, and also very popular, recording of the same piece at around the same time.) Münchinger is also noted for restoring baroque traditions to the interpretation of Bach's oeuvre, his greatest musical love — moderate-sized forces, judicious ornamentation, and rhythmic sprightliness, though not on "period instruments".
Born in Stuttgart, Münchinger studied at the Hochschule für Musik in his home city. At first, he guest-conducted often, supporting himself also with other duties as an organist and church choir director. In 1941, he became principal conductor of the Hanover Symphony, a post he held for the next two years. He held no other conducting position until the end of World War II.
The year that the war ended, he founded the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester (Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra), which he built into an impressive touring ensemble; it made its Paris debut in 1949 and its American debut in San Francisco in 1953. Under his leadership the orchestra issued (for the Decca label) numerous recordings, mostly during the 1950s and 1960s, and mostly of Bach's output; these included the Brandenburg Concertos (three times), the orchestral suites, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, The Musical Offering, and the Christmas Oratorio. Of his and the ensemble's non-Bach releases, probably the best — and certainly the most famous, other than the Pachelbel performance mentioned earlier — is that of Haydn's The Creation.
In 1977, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra became the first German ensemble to visit the People's Republic of China. Münchinger retired in 1988, two years before his death.
Stylistically, Münchinger's approach with his orchestra was rather similar to those of his somewhat younger contemporaries Raymond Leppard, Sir Neville Marriner, Claudio Scimone, and the above-mentioned Paillard, though displaying an extra element of tonal solidity — not to mention a fierce rigor during rehearsals as well as performances — which might be considered Teutonic. With the increased fashionability of 18th-century instruments, from the 1970s onward, Münchinger's interpretations fell dramatically from critical favor and were often dismissed as "passé", though he always showed himself to be a fine, tough, disciplined, and sensitive musician. There have been more profoundly imaginative German conductors than Münchinger, but there have been very few who matched his consistently high standards.

Hans von Benda (22 November 1888, in Strasbourg – 13 August 1972, in Berlin) was a German conductor.
A direct descendant of the eighteenth-century composer Franz Benda, he operated in the shadow of better-known German maestri of his generation, notably Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, and Hans Knappertsbusch. After serving as musical director of Berlin Radio from 1926 to 1934, Benda became (1935) artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, during Furtwängler's tenure as chief conductor. He held this post until 1939. Meanwhile, he conducted the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, which he had founded in 1932, and with which he toured Australia, South America and Asia as well as Europe. He was married to Karin Rosander, a Finnish violinist.
Unlike Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch (or Klemperer, who had fled Germany shortly after Hitler gained power), Benda joined the Nazi Party [1], possibly through fear that the regime would regard his Czech lineage as insufficiently Aryan. That his party card brought a certain amount of foreign obloquy on his head is indicated by the fact that (according to John L. Holmes' Conductors on Record) a pre-war recording Benda conducted of music by Gluck was issued in America without his name on the label. After World War II, Benda gave evidence during Furtwängler's denazification proceedings, avowing that Furtwängler had protected Jews from official persecution.[2] Having worked in Spain from 1948 to 1952, Benda was subsequently employed at Radio Free Berlin (1954–1958).
Benda had a long recording career, lasting from the 1930s until 1968. Composers in his large discography include Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Mozart père and fils, Schubert, Dvořák, Respighi, C. P. E. Bach, Frederick the Great, Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Joachim Quantz, Carl Heinrich Graun, and his own collateral ancestor Georg Benda. His conducting on disc tended towards a hefty, straightforward style wholly at odds with Furtwängler's and Knappertsbusch's improvisational unpredictability.

Max von Schillings (April 19, 1868 – July 24, 1933) was a German conductor, composer and theatre director. He was chief conductor at the Berlin State Opera from 1919 to 1925.
Schillings' opera Mona Lisa (1915) was internationally successful and was performed at the Metropolitan Opera. The composer married Barbara Kemp, the soprano who sang the title role. Before Mona Lisa, Schillings had already written three operas: Ingwelde (1894), Der Pfeifertag (1899) and Der Moloch (1906).