Johann Friedrich Reichardt was born in Königsberg on 25 November 1752, the son of the lutenist and town musician Johann Reichardt, and trained as a child on violin, keyboard and lute; his father was a pupil of Timofey Belogradsky, who had studied with Sylvius Leopold Weiss. At ten he toured East Prussia with the Wunderknaben choir he sang in. Encouraged by Immanuel Kant, he read law and philosophy at Königsberg and Leipzig from 1769 to 1771, then escaped civil service by touring as a virtuoso, returning in 1774 as chamber secretary at Ragnit. He sent his opera Le feste galanti to Frederick II as a sample and was appointed Royal Prussian Court Kapellmeister, the post Carl Heinrich Graun had held; two years later he stepped back and married the singer, pianist and composer Juliane Benda, daughter of František Benda. Their daughter Louise Reichardt became a noted composer and singer. He died on 27 June 1814.

On the way back from his first Italian journey in 1783 he stopped in Vienna and met Joseph II, Mozart and Gluck; from 1786 he was close to Goethe, Herder, Schiller and Hamann, and his song settings of their poetry are the part of his output that lasted. Trips to France and England brought less than he hoped. After his Vertraute Briefe appeared in 1792 he was dismissed without pay from the court Kapellmeister post in 1794 for sympathising with the French Revolution; he lived in Hamburg, publishing the journal Frankreich, then at Giebichenstein near Halle, and was pardoned in 1796 and made director of the Halle salt works, travelling often to Berlin to conduct his own premieres. A further visit to Paris in 1802 turned him against Napoleon, and when French troops plundered his estate in 1806 he fled to Danzig.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_Reichardt
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q213742