1824–1874 · Romantic
Peter Cornelius (1824–1874) was a German composer and music critic from Mainz, the author of operas, choral works and songs. He lived in Berlin, Weimar, Vienna and Munich and was a friend of Richard Wagner. Among his sheet music on the site are songs for voice and piano.
Carl August Peter Cornelius was born on 24 December 1824 in Mainz. His father Carl Joseph Gerhard and his mother Friederike were both actors, active in Mainz and Wiesbaden. Already as a young man he played the violin and wrote music, romances among other things, many of them to his own verses.
In 1841 he began to study composition with Heinrich Esser.
Between 1844 and 1852 Cornelius made his home in Berlin with his uncle, the painter Peter von Cornelius, and contributed as a music journalist to a number of Berlin publications. In those years he came to know Felix Mendelssohn, Friedrich Rückert, the Grimm brothers and Alexander von Humboldt.
Among Cornelius's early works are church and chamber pieces, secular songs and a Stabat Mater of 1849 for soloists, choir and orchestra. During his last years in Berlin he reviewed music for several leading Berlin journals and his friends included Hans von Bülow, Paul Heyse and Joseph von Eichendorff.
Cornelius was more than a composer: he wrote about music, wrote poetry and worked as a translator.
In 1852 Cornelius moved to Weimar. There he wrote his first mature works, among them the comic opera Der Barbier von Bagdad (The Barber of Baghdad), completed in 1858. The Weimar period was brief and lasted until 1858.
From 1859 to 1864 Cornelius lived in Vienna. There he finished his second opera, Der Cid, in 1863 and got to know Richard Wagner closely. He defended and promoted Wagner's work in his articles.
He had long-standing ties with Wagner and with Franz Liszt, who on occasion asked Cornelius for advice on orchestration. His dealings with the group known as the New German School, however, were at times uneasy. For instance, he stayed away from the first night of Tristan und Isolde and pointed to the first night of his own Der Cid.
In 1864, at Wagner's invitation, Cornelius settled in Munich. There he married and had four children. In Munich he worked on his third opera, Gunlöd, based on the Norse Edda. He did not manage to finish it.
Cornelius died on 26 October 1874 in his native Mainz, leaving Gunlöd unfinished. The cause of death was diabetes. He lies in the Hauptfriedhof, the main cemetery of Mainz, where the grave survives.
In 1936 the conservatory in Mainz took Cornelius's name. Since 1951 the state of Rhineland-Palatinate has given a prize in his name for musical achievement. Hugo Lederer made a bust of him in 1930, which stands in the Drususwall park in Mainz.
Streets and squares bear his name in Mainz (Peter-Cornelius-Platz) and in other German cities, namely Weimar, Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin; abroad they are found in Salzburg, Vienna and Waalwijk in the Netherlands. The city library of Mainz looks after a large Cornelius archive of personal belongings, documents and music. It contains roughly 50 original manuscripts, 58 notebooks of diaries, sketches and poems, more than 2,600 letters and death masks, and researchers may use it.
Cornelius wrote operas and songs. He also left choral pieces, some to words by Heine and Rückert, string quartets and a few sonatas. Of his early works, chamber and church music, secular songs and the Stabat Mater of 1849 are known.
Of the operas, Der Barbier von Bagdad (1858) and Der Cid (1863) were completed, while the third, Gunlöd, remained unfinished. Karl Hoffbauer finished it for the edition of 1879. Its first staging took place on 6 May 1891 at the Weimar court theatre, with fresh orchestration by Eduard Lassen, and another finished version was premiered at the Cologne Opera on 15 December 1906. His list of works also includes a Requiem of 1872 on a poem by Hebbel ("Seele, vergiß sie nicht"), and a Mass in D minor for two soloists, choir, organ and strings.
The work for which Cornelius is still best known in Britain is Die Könige (The Three Kings), a piece for solo voice and piano taken from the 1856 cycle Weihnachtslieder. Underneath the melody runs the chorale Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, composed by Philipp Nicolai in 1597.
The site has six Cornelius songs for voice and piano. Three are at the Intermediate+ level: Ein Ton, Ode and Zum Ossa sprach der Pelion (Unerhört). Three more are at the Advanced level: Auf ein schlummerndes Kind, Auftrag and Auf eine Unbekannte. It is best to begin with the Intermediate+ songs and move on to the advanced ones afterwards.