Biography (read more)
Franz Ignaz Danzi was born at Schwetzingen on 15 June 1763 and raised in Mannheim, the son of the Italian cellist Innocenz Danzi and brother of the singer Franziska Danzi. He studied with his father and with Georg Joseph Vogler, and joined the Elector Karl Theodor’s celebrated Mannheim orchestra as a teenager in 1778; the first of his woodwind works was published there in 1780. When Karl Theodor moved the court to Munich he stayed behind with the small theatre orchestra left in Mannheim, then followed in 1784 to take his father’s chair as principal cellist. He married the singer and composer Maria Margarethe Marchand in 1790 and toured with an opera troupe to Leipzig, Prague, Venice and Florence. Back in Munich he became assistant Kapellmeister by 1798, left in 1807 for Stuttgart, moved to Karlsruhe in 1812, and died there on 13 April 1826 aged sixty-two.
He is remembered chiefly for his woodwind quintets, and took justified pride in how idiomatically each instrument is written for; he also composed opera, church music, orchestral works and a wide range of chamber music, and was a first-rate cellist and an effective conductor. He knew and revered Mozart in his youth — his father’s playing at the premiere of Idomeneo drew Mozart’s praise — held the mixed feelings about Beethoven common to his generation, and at Stuttgart supported and promoted the young Carl Maria von Weber, whose music he championed. The concert hall at Schwetzingen was renamed for him in 2005.
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