Musicians from Strasbourg

Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (1 November 1901 – 15 August 1988) was a German composer, musicologist, and historian and critic of music.

Edward George Dannreuther (4 November 1844, in Strasbourg – 12 February 1905, in Hastings) was a pianist and writer on music, resident from 1863 in England. His father had crossed the Atlantic, moving to Cincinnati, and there established a piano manufacturing business. Young Edward, under pressure from his father to enter banking as a career, a prospect he found uncongenial, escaped to Leipzig in 1859.
He trained as a musician at the Leipzig Conservatoire, where he was a pupil of Ignaz Moscheles. A youthful champion of Wagner, he founded the London Wagner Society in 1872. In 1863 he had been recruited by Henry Chorley to play the piano in London at the Crystal Palace Concerts. His performances of Chopin and Beethoven were well received; after his marriage in 1871 he decided to settle permanently in England. His two-volume work Musical Ornamentation was for many years the standard text, and an important influence on the evolving trend of performance practice.
Dannreuther became a professor of piano at the Royal College of Music in 1895, a position he held until his death. An enthusiast for new music, he was an important influence on the composer Hubert Parry, who was his pupil. A memorial plaque on his former home at 12 Orme Square, Westminster, London was unveiled on 26 July 2005.His son Hubert Edward Dannreuther (1880–1977) was a British admiral and one of six survivors of the sinking of HMS Invincible. Another son Tristan Dannreuther (1872–1963) also served as an officer in the Royal Navy, and was an Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence after World War I.

Hugo Becker (born Jean Otto Eric Hugo Becker, 13 February 1863, died 30 July 1941) was a prominent German cellist, cello teacher, and composer. He studied at a young age with Alfredo Piatti, and later Friedrich Grützmacher in Dresden.

Ernest Bour (20 April 1913 - 20 June 2001) was a noted conductor. Born in Thionville, Moselle (in north-eastern Lorraine, then part of Germany), Bour studied at both the University and the Conservatoire of Strasbourg. His conducting teachers included Fritz Münch and Hermann Scherchen.
Perhaps his most heard recording is of Ligeti's Atmospheres with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra aka Sinfonieorchester des Südwestfunks Baden-Baden heard on the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After serving as chorus master for the radio choruses of Geneva and Strasbourg, he was appointed conductor of the Orchestre de Mulhouse in 1941. In 1950, he became conductor of the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1955 of the Strasbourg Opera House, where he had conducted the premiere of Delannoy's Puck in 1949. He was principal conductor of the SWF Symphony Orchestra in Baden-Baden from 1964 to 1979. He conducted the European premiere of Berio's Sinfonia during the 1969 Donaueschingen Festival by the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. From 1976 until 1987, he was permanent guest conductor of The Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra located in the VARA radio headquarters in Hilversum.Bour's repertoire was marked by a concentration on contemporary music. World premières he presided over included works by Bussotti, Ferneyhough, Górecki, Ligeti, Rihm, Stockhausen and Xenakis, and he gave the French premières of Hindemith's Symphony Mathis der Maler and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and the European premiere of Susman's Trailing Vortices. His recordings ranged from music of François Couperin to André Jolivet.Bour died in Strasbourg, aged 88.

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.