Anton Reicha was born in Prague on 26 February 1770; his father, the city’s town piper, died when he was ten months old, and in 1780, on an impulse, he ran away from a mother who took no interest in his education by jumping onto a passing carriage. He reached his uncle Josef Reicha, a virtuoso cellist and composer at Wallerstein in Bavaria, who adopted him and taught him violin, piano and flute. The family moved to Bonn in 1785, where Reicha played violin and second flute in the Elector’s Hofkapelle under his uncle, and befriended the young Beethoven, who joined it in 1789; both may have been taught by Christian Gottlob Neefe. He studied composition secretly against his uncle’s wishes, conducted his first symphony in 1787, and escaped to Hamburg when the French took Bonn in 1794, vowing never to perform in public again. He went to Paris in 1799 hoping for opera commissions, failed to get any, moved to Vienna in 1801 to study with Salieri and Albrechtsberger, and died in Paris on 28 May 1836.

He made the early wind quintet what it is — the body of work for which he is still played — and taught Liszt, Berlioz and César Franck. His theoretical writings covered composition from several angles, and the most experimental of them proposed polyrhythm, polytonality and microtonal writing, none of which any other nineteenth-century composer took up. He put the same experimental cast into music: the fugues and études for piano and the string quartets test procedures rather than illustrate them. Like Michael Haydn before him he would not have much of his music published, and he fell out of view soon after his death; his life and work remain thinly studied.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Reicha
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q311387