Otto Nicolai

Otto Nicolai (1810–1849) was born in Königsberg in Prussia and received his first musical training from his father. He studied in Berlin with Carl Friedrich Zelter and then went to Rome as a musician at the Prussian embassy, where he turned to opera and scored a series of successes with Italian operas. In the early 1840s he became a leading figure in the musical life of Vienna, and in 1842 he founded the Philharmonic Concerts that gave birth to the Vienna Philharmonic, which still honours him as its founder. Disappointed when the Court Opera declined his new German opera, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), he left Vienna in 1847 for Berlin. The opera had its premiere there in March 1849, and two months later, shortly after his appointment as music director of the Berlin court opera, he died of a stroke at the age of thirty-eight.