Felix Draeseke

Felix August Bernhard Draeseke (7 October 1835 – 26 February 1913) was a composer of the "New German School" admiring Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner.

A few years at the Leipzig Conservatory did not seem to benefit his development, but after one of the early performances of Wagner's Lohengrin he was won to the camp of the New German School centered on Franz Liszt at Weimar, where he stayed from 1856 (arriving just after Joachim Raff's departure) to 1861.

[1] During his career Draeseke divided his efforts almost equally among compositional genres and composed in most of them, including symphonies, concertos, opera, chamber music, and works for solo piano.

[3] His operas Herrat (1879, originally Dietrich von Bern) and Gudrun (1884, after the medieval epic of the same name) met with some success, but were subsequently neglected.

[2] A heavily contrapuntal composer, Draeseke reveled in writing choral music, achieving major success with his B minor Requiem of 1877–1880.

Mysterium in a Prelude and Three Oratorios, which requires three days for a complete performance, a work which occupied him between the years 1894–1899 but whose conception reaches back to the 1860s.

His compositions were performed frequently in Germany by the leading artists of the day, including Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Fritz Reiner, and Karl Böhm.